27th July 2016
Our worst crowd all year turned up for this critical Monday Night Football game. We allowed Manly to get off to a 18 point lead on the back of another spate of errors. We have now entered the world of remote mathematical chance. This weeks game we come up against a Canberra team who have been rebuilding nicely with the return of Ricky Stuart to the capital. But with only 12 points left in the competition we are very long odds to make the finals with the season all but over for the first grade team.
Good to see another player in Zane Musgrove make it back onto the paddock las t week and back into first grade this week. We have missed him while we have played the year a prop or two short.
Murray made his reserve grade debut last week and continues to impress. Won't be surprised to see him have a run in first grade before the end of the year.
Can you image a team that scored 44 points was desperately hanging on with 1 minute to go for victory. When Manly put on 6 tries in the final 15 minutes, it went from being a comfortable win to one that we desperately were hanging on to win.
What can you say - super slow motion once again makes a mokery of real life. The uproar of the Joe Burgess no try had the NRL clutching for straws in trying to explain a no try. There are some things that need to be watched in normal speed. Such minor seperation on a blurred camera was not suffient evidence to overturn the on field ruling. We need to use common sense and normal motion replays for non line decisions with only a super slow motion replay used to decide line calls.
Round 20 - Stat Attack
Statistically again a relative good game but once again how the team dropped their heads after a error cost us the game. Completion rates improved to 71% from 58% this week. Errors were improved to 13 from 17 last week. We once again gave away 6 penalities this week. Souths Effective 1st tackle improved but still in a poor level of 35.1m from 36.1m last week. Our missed tackles improved to 14 missed tackles from 26 last week. Our best all year. Opposition offloads dropped to 2 from 10 last week. Again our best all year.
Looking at our left side defence -JBurgess-Goodwin/Turner-Keary-Sutton (0-0-1-0) improved to 1 from 5 missed tackles last week. On the right side Johnston-AGray-Reynolds-SBurgess (2-1-1-0) improved to 4 from 7 missed tackles last week.
Our go forward this week dropped to 1384m. Joe Burgess made 10+m per run. Sam Burgess, Sutton, Joe Burgess and Walker making 100+m in the match. Defensively McInnes was our best in the tackling raking up 50 tackles. With McInnes,Sutton, Turner, Clark, Brown, Crichton, Joe Burgess and Goodwin not missing a tackle.