27th April 2016
A much better performance than last week but we only played for 50 minutes. Dropped balls and penalties being our biggest issue this week. We spent too much time defending at it showed as we faded in later stages of both halves. But we are now 6 points adrift of the Top 4 and fall out of the Top 8 for the first time this year. Still 10 more wins out of 16 games to qualify for the finals.
After a very good start to our season Hunt tore a pec musle early the Brisbane game and will be out for 5 months. Almost the whole season.
In the end it was a tight contest but Somisini Langi made his Bears debut as a offseason purchase from Wyong on the weekend. While the plan was to ease him back in after a length knee injury, a injury to Levido forced him to come in much sooner and played a staring role, scoring a try and showing that the Tongan international will be a good addition to our squad.
after a great win last week, our U20s must have jet lagged as they put in a poor performance once again this week, just as they had two weeks ago.
Souths SG Ball team put in a great showing in defeating Parramatta to now go into a showdown with the Illawarra Steelers for the a spot in the NSW Grand Final.
This week has seen the farce of a Fijian born and bread player being selected for Australia after playing for Fiji last season on residence grounds after he came to the NRL to play in the best competition. We need to bring in a 2 or 3 year residency waiting period to change nations. But allow players from the Big 3 to play with Tier 2 nations immediately. Also we need to include junior U18 or U20 internationals (including 9s format) to be included as playing for a nation.
Round 8 - Stat Attack
Statistically it was a poor game. Completion rates dropped to 66% from 74% this week. Errors increased to 12 from 11 last week. We gave away 9 penalities compared to 4 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle improved to a very poor level at 47.8m from 40.8m last week. With our worst half performance for 2016 with 53.7m in the first half Our missed tackles improved to 18 missed tackles from 21 last week. Opposition offloads dropped to 5 from 4 last week.
Looking at our left side defence - Neilsen-Goodwin-Keary-Grevsmuhl (1-3-0-1) improved to 5 from 8 missed tackles last week. On the right side AGray-HHunt/Auvaa-Reynolds-Carter (1-2-0-4) dropped to 7 missed tackles from 2 last week.
Our go forward this week dropped to 1077m. Again our worst all year. Inglis, Hunt, and Keary made 10+m per hitup. With Carter, Sam Burgess, Tom Burgess and Inglis making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively Sam Burgess was our best in the tackling raking up 41 tackles. With Tyrrell, McInnes, Clark, Brown, Hunt, Keary and Reynolds not missing a tackle.