2nd May 2018
The 5 day turn around has once again impacted Souths. From the high of a good win, the team looked jaded after the prior weekend effort, and couldnt get on the front foot. Our right side side defence continues to be a problem in 2018 and will need to be addressed. We are still in the Top 8 with 8 points in the bank and 9 more wins to make the finals.
Its been a new age John Sutton in 2018. He taken his game to a new level under Seibold. He has a dopted the role of the ball playing second rower and doing a mountain in of work in attack. His go forward outwide is taking big pressure off our middle men.
With the injury to Richard Kennar triggered a backline reshuffle with Graham moving to right wing in readiness for his first gradecall up. It triggered a dominant performanceand has moved the Bears back into the Top 8.
Well Souths womens team are undesputed leaders in the W-NSWRL premiership after disposing of co-leaders, Mt Pritchard. It was a tough even battle in the first half, before the girls forward domination layed the platform which allowed the class players to put 16 unanswered points in the second half. The girls now get a well deserved week off.
We really need to revist the format of the W-U18s competition. There have been way too many blow out scores every weekend. 9s is usually played over 2 x 9 minute halves in the mens. But for the U18 girls we are playing 4 x 15 minute halves with 9 players starting and 6 bench players. While I beleive 6 0 minutes is the corect duration for this level of juniors match, we need to revise this format to either 13-a-side format with 4 bench players over 60 minutes or narrow the field from 66m back to 46m. Something needs to change.
Round 8 - Stat Attack
Statistically we fell away in the second half Completion rates dropped to 74% from 85% last week. Errors increased to 10 from 8 last week. We gave away 6 penalties down from 12 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle dropped to a poor level of 36.7m from 32.0m last week. Our missed tackles dropped to a very poor level of 35 from 29 missed tackles last week. Opposition offloads dropped to 4 from 13 last week.
Looking at our left side defence - Jennings-Inglis-Walker-Sutton (0-1-5-2) was dropped to 8 from 4 missed tackles last week. On the right side Kennar/Doueihi-Gagai-Reynolds-Crichton (1-5-5-3) was dropped to 14 from 13 missed tackles last week. Ruck defence TBurgess/Nicholls-Cook-GBurgess/Tatola-Murray/Clark (3-2-4-2) was dropped to 11 from 10 last week.
Our go forward this week dropped to 1431m from 1621m last week. Tatola made 10+m per run. Tom Burgess, Crichton, Cook, Jennings, Gagai and Kennar making 100+m in the match. Defensively Crichton was our best in the tackling raking up 42 tackles. Only Tatola, Doueihi and Jennings didn't miss a tackle.