3rd August 2016
What a disaster our worst ever losing marin against Canberra as we put in two very poor last 20 minutes in each half. In the retro and member appreciation round we put in one of our poor retro performances to leave many fans gutted as the club slumped to its 8th loss in a row.
Another week and another player returns from injury. This time its Gosiewski.
While it was disappointed to be dropped English international Joe Burgess made the most of it scoring 3 tries for the Bears in a great combination with Neilsen and pure speed.
Another U20s game and again our team fell away in the last 10 minutes. Our U18 players are struggling against the bigger U20 players and it shows in the final 10 minutes when a pile of points gets posted.
NRL are very strict about making sure that 3rd party agreements are done at arms length from the clubs. So what happens when they go wrong? At the end of the day a 3rd party agreement is a job. Players are paided to provide a service. Employers quite rightly can refuse to pay if their service has not been provided. Players and their player managers need to work with this third party employer on any disputes Rather than the player trying to hold the club directly responsible. Clubs cannot guarantee 3rd party payments as they need to be independant of the club, else they will be included in the clubs salary cap. This week we had stories of Luke Keary wanting to pull out of the match in protest. It not doubt effected his match preperation as he pulled a hamstring 10 minutes into the match.
Round 21 - Stat Attack
Statistically a very poor game where we only played for the first 20 minutes in each half. Completion rates dropped to 69% from 71% this week. Errors were improved to 11 from 13 last week. We gave away 4 penalities compared to 6 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle improved but still in a disastrious level of 52.0m from 35.1m last week. Our 2nd worst all year. Our missed tackles dropped to 28 missed tackles from 14 last week. Opposition offloads increased to 12 from 2 last week.
Looking at our left side defence -Johnston-Turner-Keary/Sutton-Gosiewski (2-6-3-4) dropped to 15 from 1 missed tackles last week. On the right side Oldfield-AGray-Reynolds-Crichton (1-1-2-2) dropped to 6 from 4 missed tackles last week.
Our go forward this week dropped to 974m. Our worst all year. Sutton, Brown, Cook and Oldfield made 10+m per run. Sam Burgess and Walker making 100+m in the match. Defensively Sam Burgess and Crichton was our best in the tackling raking up 37 tackles. With Sam Burgess, McInnes, Musgrove, Brown and Keary not missing a tackle.