15th June 2016
After a long golden point game and a 5 day turn around on top of a long plane flight from Perth, Souths just looked tired. This was very evident in the very poor games from our SOO representative Inglis and Reynolds. Finalberth is now looking very shaky 8 more wins out of 11 games to qualify for the finals.
Congratulations to Greg Inglis and Adam Reynolds on their SOO II selections once again. It was a torrid battle in the first game and will be once again.
Our feeder team the North Sydney Bears put in a great display to beat the competition leaders and move into equal 4th. And we also saw the debuts by Makore-Boyce and Coleman.
Congratulations to Cameron Murray, Emre Guler and Keaon Koloamatangi who have been selected in the NSW u18 SOO team.
In 2016 we have seen the impact on teams with 8-interchanges where 5 or 6 days of recovery is now extermely difficult for players. But what makes it even worse if Golden Point. Last week we saw two teams play 8 minutes extra time - both lost their next match. We seriously need to restrict Golden Point to the finals for the sake of player welfare.
Round 14 - Stat Attack
Statistically it was a very poor match on the back of a 5 day turnaround. Completion rates improved to 77% from 75% this week. Errors dropped to 10 from 15 last week. We gave away 9 penalities compared to 8 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle dropped to a horrid level at 47.1m from 38.7m last week. Our missed tackles dropped to 35 missed tackles from 41 last week. Opposition offloads increased to 17 from 7 last week. The worst all year.
Looking at our left side defence - AGray-Nielsen-Inglis-Goodwin/Turner (2-0-5-1) was steady at 8 missed tackles again this week. On the right side Johnston-Auvaa-Reynolds-Carter (2-4-4-6) was dropped to 16 from 13 missed tackles last week.
Our go forward this week dropped to 1155m. Browm and Walker made 10+m per run. With Brown, Tom Burgess, Walker and Inglis making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively McInnes was our best in the tackling raking up 41 tackles. With Goodwin, Clark, Nielsen and Walker not missing a tackle.