We always seem to end up behind the ball carrier, which means that either they get a quick play the ball with no set markers and march down the field or we get penalised for lying in the ruck.
How hard is it to spend some time controlling the ruck and getting someone infront of the ball carrier?
Surely the coaching staff should be training this and we should be doing a lot better
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Our first up contact is not good enough (that's an attitude issue), we have no wrestle at all (do we not have a wrestling coach), and Mahoney tackles low and is not yet strong enough to hold his ground in tackles and finally, too slow to get to our feet and into marker.
Yep I reckon there too worried about giving away penalties why our defence is shit. The refs always smash us. Our first up contact is shit though. Easy to have first up contact if your allowed to run up before the player plays the ball. We should go back to what we did in 2017. Not worry about getting penalised and just get up in there faces. We prob don't have the players to do so
It’s a ongoing issue, ridiculous that we are still talking about it being our main issue.
it won’t matter if we are in the finals playing throwing up rubbish defence.
I don’t think manly were that good we were horrible
We lost our wrestling coach at the end of 2017. I don't know who replaced him or even if the position was made redundant. We've gone to shit since then. This can't be overlooked.
BA says it's all about attitude which he's right to say but it's happening way too often. There has to be deeper issues than simply an attitude problem.
I agree - it looks like a bad strategy
We weren’t beaten by Manlys forwards today we were beaten by their backs getting into dummy half and with fast feet finding half holes in our line. This allowed to get on their bellies and get quick play the balls and exploit our lack of markers. Our biggest issue is lack of leadership out there particularly in the forwards. The refs blew very few penalties today and we did not test this. Sometimes you need to give away strategic penalties and slow the tempo of the game down. This is probably Reeds job and something he needs to learn. The dummy half can control the tempo of the match. Can Smith is a master.
It’s pretty simple.
We don’t have enough bigger forwards to make bigger first contact impact. We have a heap of mid sized forwards who just don’t have the size to keep a player from getting a quick play the ball. This is why Moeroa, Ma’u and the like are being let go and we are looking at Arrow, Welch and Burgess. Okay so it’s not great right now, but at least it’s been identified and we are going to fix it.
Tigers do not have a big pack - smaller than ours and they did the same thing to us
ATTITUDE. That is the answer. So many times seeing Eels players left on the ground while the ball is being played. For gods sake boys, GET UP & GET INTO THE DEFENCE LINE.
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