29th July 2015
What a magic first half half against the Knights, when everything just worked perfectly. It ended up being a 10 try romp with Souths winning by a record margin eclipsing last years record margin win. It was payback time. Still another 2 wins to qualify for the finals and 4 wins out of 8 for a Top 4 finish. Again the importance of the next 2 weeks are vital for us to set ourselves up for the seasons end.
Its been a while, 45 years in fact, but we saw two hat tricks as Dylan Walker and Greg Inglis both bagged 3 tries each. Looking good as we head towards the business end of the season.
Cody Walker had another great game on the weekend. He scored two tries and his short kicking game was great in how he setup tries for his men out sie of him. One of his spiral bombs was all class.
Our U20s team staged a good fightback to win the last 50 min 22-6 but we gave Newcstle a 18 point head start, and has been the case too often this year we lost by less than 6 points once again.
This week the grumbles from the clubs over how the ARLC are managing the funs is getting louder. Currently a few clubs are concerne that they are not being compensated enough from the big TV rights deal. While the NRL is now slipping in clauses for clubs to sign that stagger their NRL licence renewal dates to remove the barganing power of the clubs collectively. In all of this lets not forget the damage done to reserve grade, country and International RL last time something like this occurred.
Statistically Round 20 stats showed a strong performance this week. Completion rates improved to 95% this week, our best all year Errors dropped to 3 from 5 last week. We gave away 9 penalities this week compared to1 5 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle improved to a outstanding level at 16.3m from 26.4m last week. This was out best all year. Our missed tackles were improved to 13 missed tackles from 16 last week. Opposition offloads increased to 9 this week from 7 last week.
Looking at our left side defence - Reddy-Goodwin-Keary-Sutton (0-0-1-1) decreased this week to 2 from 5 missed tackles last week. On the right side Johnston-DWalker-Reynolds-Stewart (0-3-1-1) were increased to 5 missed tackles from 4 last week.
Our go forward increased this week to 1562m this week. Johnston lead the way in making 10+m per hitup. With Tom Burgess, George Burgess, Grant, Luke, McQueen, Sutton, Inglis and Goodwin making more that 100+m in the match. Only one forward making 100+m is a concern however. Defensively Stewart was our best in the tackling raking up 29 tackles. With Luke, Grant, Lowe, Tyrrell, Reddy and Goodwin not missing a tackle.
Signing off for another week - the midweek Cyber View from the Hill