30th March 2011
We Begin our assault
Finally a win after a shaky start. It was good to see the boys regroup at half time and put a great second half effort to take the game.
Ross
Ben Ross was givin the biggest test so far of his comeback from neck injury, when Moi Moi coped with a good old coat hanger. Ben says he has come through and the healing has done the trick.
Bears Open Their Account in style
Our Reserve Grade team the Bears opened their account with a great 50+ win on the weekend. Lets hope this is a sign of many more t ocome.
Judicary Loading
On the weekend Eddy Pettybourne suffered from repeated infringements which caused him to obtain loading on his current offence for minor previous offences. I am not a fan of the loading process when a low level first offence can have double the impact when percentage loaded at a later date against a higher offence. We need to revisit how loading works 50% for similar offence and 20% for different offence while ok when applied to two similar grade offences, becomes a issue when one offence is grade 1 and the second is grade 2 or 3. I beleive that loading should never be applied when grade 1 offences take place.
Round 3 - Stat Attack
A great win on the weekend, can be highlighted by the fact that the forwards made 1256m and errors were down at 12. Handling errors are still a touch high. But the biggest contributing factor this week was the drop in missed tackles from 58 down to 29. Great to see this coming down towards acceptable levels.
But while we won, we had a poor match overall with Effective 1st tackles up at 40.6m with another poor showing in the first half at 43.9m. This highlights that we did not control the ball as well as we should have. So why didn't we lose, mainly beacuse Parramatta error rate was high and a number of no try decisions. We need to improve our start to the game as a early penalty and 2 dropped balls could have had us behind 0-12 in 5 min. A strong final 5 min in the first half and 25 min at the start of the second half won us the game on the back of a Effective 1st tackle of 19.3m for that period.
With missed tackles down, its time to review if there are any trends still occuring. Our left side defence improved significantly this week with Taylor/Sutton/Inglis/Talanoa missing only 7(3-3-1-0) tackles. Right side defence of Tyrrell/Sandow/Farrell/Merritt missed 15(3-6-3-3) tackles, while up the middle our forwards did very well this week. So its no surprise that our next level of improvement will come when we improve our right side defence, and that opposition teams will target this area.
On the positive side we had strong running games from Asotasi, McPherson and Ross all making 8.8m+ per run this week. Defensively Pettybourne was the big improver with Crocker, Asotasi and McPherson played well all not missing a tackle.
Signing off for another week - the midweek Cyber View from the Hill