29th April 2015
After a great start to the season we have slumped to 3 losses in a row all corresponding to no Adam Reynolds to provide a controlled kicking game. Madge has his biggest test to keep Souths on track for the finals in the midst of this injury crisis we are in.
Congratulations to our rep weekend representaives. Greg Inglis and debutant Alex Johnston who will play for Australia. And to Issac Luke and Daryl Millard who will play for New Zealand and Fiji. And finally to Jason Clark who makes his representative debut for City Origin.
In all my years of following football I have never seen a match abandoned due to the weather. But when the hail came down at Erskensville Oval with 5 minutes to go all ran for cover. The oval became white like snow as did the streets, with half a meter of hail / water dropping in a short period and flooding the whole area. Crazy weather has never been seen.
Congratulations to our U16's who played valuantly but bowed out in a close match against the Tigers. Our U18's won and live to fight another day.
The last week has a horrible weather period for Sydney and highlghts the importance of getting a all-weather stadium built. Stadium Australia and the SFS should both get roof's so fans and players can continue to play.
Statistically Round 8 stats dropped signficantly this week up in tropics. Completion rates dropped to a very poor 65% this week our worst all year. Errors dropped again to 14 from 11 last week. We gave away 9 penalities this week compared to 7 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle for the dropped to 36.1m from 35.3 last week. But we had our worst 2nd half all season at 50.4m in the second. Our missed tackles jumped significantly to 32 missed tackles from 10 last week. Which is in the poor range, but we only allowed 3 opposition offloads compared to 4 last week.
Looking at our left side defence - Goodwin-AGray-Keary-McQueen (1-3-3-2) increased this week to 9 from 4 missed tackles last week. On the right side Reddy-Walker-Inglis-Stewart (0-3-2-5) increased to 10 from 5 missed tackles last week.
Our go forward was increased this week to 1327m this week. Tom Burgess, Luke, Grevsmuhl, Johnston, McInnes, and Grant lead the way in making 10+m per hitup. With Tom Burgess, George Burgess, Luke and Johnston making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively George Burgess was our best in the tackling raking up 39 tackles. With Reddy and McInnes not missing a tackle.
Signing off for another week - the midweek Cyber View from the Hill