Souths celebrated 25 years at the SFS in style in front of a season opener record crowd. What was most pleasing about the night was the power the team displayed up the middle and clinic nature of the set moves out wide. All looking good for this year.
Ben Te'o and Jeff Lima became Souths FG players 1091 and 1092 respectively. Jeff Lima played his first game for the club and showed the power up front that Souths have missed of late. He could be one of the buys of the season.
Souths lower graders Luke Keary and Dylan Walker stole the show in the NSW Cup and NYC matces. Both bagged two tries and played staring roles in their games.
Watching how things are playing out at the moment in the investigation, there are a number of concerns in the process that is now becoming a soap opera in the public eyes. At the moment ASADA and the clubs are making a utter public mess in their investigations. ASADA is obviously under resourced and the clubs are not in a position to manage this situation on their own. Even if the timing of the announcements are policically motivated, the damage being done to the sport of Rugby League is huge. Players, Officials and Clubs are getting tarnished, while we wait for the actual accusations to be laid.
With the threat of 2 year player bans, loss of competition points or stripping of titles, improvements need to put in place. The ARLC need to establish a war room mentality with the ARLC Integrity Unit taking back control of the public face of the investigation from the ASADA team and the clubs. They need to lead all reporting to the media, fans & members on a day by day basis at the moment. With any related announcements to be made at NRL headquarters by the ARLC Integrity Unit ONLY. Which includes players or officials being stood down or suspended.
Next issue that the ARLC and ASADA need to address is the testing process. Its not good enough to have a situation where tests are not providing sufficent evidence. While blood passports is a good initiative but to target only the Top 100 players rather than all 400 contracted NRL players leaves loopholes for the fringe players.
Finally the ARLC management should look to have the Integrity Unit perform the testing process on behalf of ASADA who are under resourced to fullfil such a function for the professional sport that is the NRL.
Round 1 completed and it was a very polished performance by the team. Completion rate was 84%. Effective 1st tackles was a very respectable 26.5m for the match. Errors at the start and end of the match allowed Sydney to score so some work on being focused across 80 min is still required.
Looking at our left side defence - Merritt-Farrell-Sutton-McQueen (1-2-2-0) was a respectable 5 missed tackles. On the right side Everingham-Champion-Reynolds-Teo (1-3-3-2) drifted into high medium realm of 9 missed tackles.
On the positive side our error count were low at 7 and missed tackles were also low at 22. Lima and Asotasi lead the way in the forwards was the best making 9.5+m per hitup. With Sam and George Burgess making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively Lowe was our best in the tackling raking up 31 tackles. With Astoasi, McQueen, Lowe, Peats, Crocker and George Burgess not missing a tackle.