Heartbreaking is the only way to describe the way game ended. Not since back in the early 80's have Souths led by 8 points and then lost the match. The boys and Madge got a big lesson on the need to play for 80 min.
Nathan Merritt continues to be out injured. Reports are that he broke his toe in the All Stars game and may return in Round 3.
Bears got off to a great start in the season on the weekend, with a big win over teh Tigers. Justin Hunt was a standout scoring 3 tries in his return match at five-eight.
Another week and another two games ruined by Golden Point debacles. I cannot see the logic in allowing a team a second chance to win the game in the 80-90 min period when they should have won in the 70-80 min period, as occured for the Dragons. And then at Leichhardt, the Tigers who only managed to snatch a very late draw get a opportunity to win it after the referees don't want to award a offside penalty. Sorry not a fan. If you cannot win the game in 80 min its a draw during the 26 competition rounds. In such a even competition a draw will make a big difference to the shape of the competition table across the course of the season also.
A strong team performance bar the win. The team made 1388m up from 1070m at the Charity Shield and handling errors were high at 12. Effective 1st tackles was a big improvement from the Charity Shield down to 33.0m from 44.2m. But we did drift out of the game for 3 periods 0-10, 20-30 and 60-80 min periods. At these times our effective 1st tackle was 57.0m.
Missed tackles was better than last year but still high at 27 with Sutton / Burgess and Taylor the main contributers. Asotasi has a poor game by his standards dropping 4 balls giving away 1 penalty. Looking at our left side defence - King-Inglis-Sutton-Taylor (0-1-4-3) 8 missed tackles between them. On the right side McQueen-Corrigan-Reynolds-Pettybourne (1-1-2-1) 5 missed tackles between them.
On the positive side we had strong running games from Burgess and Geddes making more than 100+m and 8+m per run Defensively Peats and Burgess our leading tacklers with Asotasi and Geddes not missing a tackle. Bit one of the most pleasing signs was the tackling ability of Reynolds17 and only missing 2 is a great result on debut.