20th July 2016
We are seven weeks out from the final but we are already in sudden death. This weeks game is basically a playoff between Souths and Manly on who continues towards a almost impossible finals dream. Both teams are desperate and both need to win 7 from 7 to make it.
Angus Crichton who only played U20s two weeks ago became the 1126th Souths First Grade player. He had a strong debut and added some much needed go forward.
Another week another player returns from injury with Riley Travers making his long awaited return.
Maia Sands in a beaten team played strongly up the middle and was a able to get two tries and made 44 tackles.
The latest rumours is that U20s will revert back to a NSW state based competition with NRL clubs competeting. This would be a step backwards for the ARLC. The commission really need to stamp their authority over state bodies U20s has been a great success but should not be dismantled to appease Queensland clubs who complain of cost. To address these travel cost concerns we should should introduce a travel concession into the grant structure. We should be adding layers like National Reserve Grade to National U20s and then broading our footprint in NSW Cup to include all of NSW. We are going to double NRL club grants over the next 5 years and revenue in the game also doubles. So Tier 2 clubs on budgets of $500k are already struggling against NRL clubs who invest $1 mil today in resreve grade. This will only get worse in 5 years time when grants have doubled and NRL clubs invest $2 mil into the reserve grade operations.
Round 19 - Stat Attack
Statistically a relaively good game but way too many errors. Completion rates dropped to 58% from 71% this week. Our worst all year. Errors incresed to 17 from 11 last week. Our worst all year. We gave away 6 penalities compared to 10 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle improved to a poor level of 36.1m from 53.4m last week. Our missed tackles improved to 22 missed tackles from 26 last week. Opposition offloads dropped to 10 from 9 last week.
Looking at our left side defence -JBurgess-Murphy-Sutton-Turner (0-3-2-0) improved to 5 from 6 missed tackles last week. On the right side Johnston-AGray-Keary-SBurgess (2-3-1-1) dropped to 7 from 2 missed tackles last week.
Our go forward this week improvedd to 1546m. Sam Burgess and Johnston made 10+m per run. Sam Burgess, Crichton, Walker and Keary making 100+m in the match. Defensively McInnes was our best in the tackling raking up 57 tackles. With Turner, Cook, Clark, Crichton, George Burgess and Joe Burgess not missing a tackle.