Souths went down in a tight game on Monday night. But we struggled from the outset against the Sharks. Letting in a early try. Too many penalties and dropped ball were the culprit. A uncharacteristic error by Merritt in the 56th minute stiffled our momentum in what was a arm wrestle all night.

Contratulations to Chris McQueen who will make his SOO debut after being called up onto the bench. GI was once again selected and Te'o was also called up.

John Sutton is almost into teh NSW SOO squad with a late call up into a 18 man squad. Fingers crossed he can make teh starting 17.

Captain Cameron McInness continues to impress at U20's level bagging a double in our good win over teh Sharks. The win keeps us in teh race for the Top 8.

State of Origin is onec again upon us. Wouldn't it be great if SOO was played on teh weekend, which would allow other representative matches to be held. Rather than playing NRL matches with half of their teams missing.

Statistically it was a significant drop from the week before. But the most telling was our penalty count and completion rates. Completion rates were poor this week dropping to 69% and errors back up to 10 in the wet. Souths Effective 1st tackle for the match was poor at 38.4m. We made 32 missed tackles which too many but with only 3 opposition offloads meant we closed down a lot of second phase play.

Looking at our left side defence - Goodwin-Walker-Sutton-McQueen (1-2-3-2) dropped to 8 from 3 missed tackles last week. On the right side Merritt-Champion-Reynolds-Teo (0-3-1-1) improved to 5 from 6 missed tackles last week.

Our go forward was dropped this week to 1312m as we struggled against the big Sharks pack. Luke and Peats lead the way in the forwards was the best making 10+m per hitup. With George Burgess, Sam Burgess and Lowe making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively Sam Burgess was our best in the tackling raking up 39 tackles. With only Merritt not missing a tackle.