8th June 2016
In the context of the 2016 season that heartbreaking loss in golden point will have a big bearing on on our season. The Gold Coast are a team we are competing with for a final 8 position and they just got a jump on us. A very tough road ahead will still 8 more wins out of 12 games to qualify for the finals.
Siosifa Talakai became our 1122nd First Grade Rabbitoh. And what a debut it was. With his first touch he scored a try off a great Inglis pass.
After half a season of players leaving early it was good to see Paul Carter and Cody Walker choose to remain with the club.
U18 wrecking ball Henry Fuiamono makes his debut off the bench this weekend in U20s.
We continue to see absurb 5 day turn arounds. For Souths this is crazy. We have just had a 17 day period off, then we need to jet back from Perth on a 5 day turn around. This is even worse for our SOO stars who play 3 games in 9 days including multiple plane trips. The RLPA need to stop broadcasters creating these crazy scheduling decisions and start managing player welfare.
Round 13 - Stat Attack
Statistically we got off to a poor start. Completion rates improved to 75% from 69% this week. Errors increased to 15 from 12 last week. We gave away 8 penalities compared to 6 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle dropped to a poor level at 38.7m from 34.2m last week. Our missed tackles increased to 41 missed tackles from 31 last week. Opposition offloads dropped to 7 from 9 last week.
Looking at our left side defence - Nielsen-Goodwin-Inglis/Keary-Turner (0-2-3-3) dropped to 8 from 5 missed tackles last week. On the right side Johnston-Auvaa-Reynolds-Carter (2-2-5-4) was dropped to 13 from 12 missed tackles last week.
Our go forward this week improved to 1858m. Our best all season. Sam Burgess, Tom Burgess, McInnes, Walker, Nielsen, Johnston and Talakai made 10+m per run. With Sam Burgess, Tom Burgess, Sam Burgess, Brown, Carter, Clark, Walker, Nielsen, Johnston and Inglis making more that 100+m in the match. With Sam Burgess and Walker making 200+m. Defensively McInnes was our best in the tackling raking up 54 tackles. With Keary, Nielsen and Talakai not missing a tackle.