9th May 2018
Souths bounced back well up in Newcastle. In 2018 Newcastle have been a vastly impoved team than in previous years, but new Souths proved just as strong as we racked up our 9th win on the trot against the Knights and recording our highest ever score in Newcastle in a premiership match. There have been worying signings of the team fading later in half and the return of Sam Burgess will help plus that concern. We are in a battle royal for the Top 4 with teams 5th to 10th equal on 10 points and 8 more wins to make the finals.
Inglis 50th match as captain
Congratulations to GI who captained Souths for the 50th occurance on the weekend. He is looking more and more confident on the field and is slowly eturning back to his best.
Bears dramatic draw
A lovely day at Henson park saw the traditional Norths v Newtown clash. And a cracker it turned out to be. With the traditional Frank Hyde call from a card table on the sideline, the bEars led earlythen Newtown came back and then in the dying seconds a desperate late try off a Hawkins bomb drew the game. This left HAwkins to try and win the game with a sideline kick after the siren only to see the ball hit the post.
Flegg having a break
The U20s comp has gone into a period of a few weeks off. This has allowed the boys to focus on some key school commitments but also allowed teh NSWRL to promote the NSWRL junior finals. But also could be a sign for the return of U20s back into a junior structure.
Womens RL rejection NRL Response - why is poaching a criteria item ?
One thing that has become a farce is how the NRL chose their W-NSWRL teams. Souths have gone to NRL HQ and demanded answers on why they were excluded after setting up the best oster and most professionally setupwomens RL operation ever seen in the NRL or NWRL. First we heard its a "geography" criteria, but in this meeting no geographical issue came up. So it came down to two key items, financial guarantee and a relucatnace to poach players as we planned to used to use our W-NSWRL team that the team has developed when setting up womenes junior pathways. Its clear that the NRL has a desire to establish a draft with no development pathway requirement, so the poaching criteria item and cover relocation costs seemed to have a high criteria rating. What ends up being a hypocrosy to the process is that Easts who have no contracted players, done nothing to develop the womens game will just get a feee ride and cherry pick talent, most of which will probably come from the Souths W-NSWRL team.
Round 9 - Stat Attack
Statistically a much better games after a proper 8 day rest. We again fell away late in the half in what was a very fast game. Completion rates were outstanding at 94% from 74% last week. Errors dropped to 5 from 10 last week. We gave away 6 penalties again this week. Souths Effective 1st tackle improved to a very good level of 23.1m from 36.7m last week. Our second best since 2014. Our missed tackles improved to poor level of 30 from 35 missed tackles last week. Opposition offloads increased to 8 from 4 last week.
Looking at our left side defence - Jennings-Inglis-Walker-Sutton (2-2-2-4) was dropped to 10 from 8 missed tackles last week. On the right side Graham-Gagai-Reynolds-Crichton (1-2-1-4) was improved to 8 from 14 missed tackles last week. Ruck defence TBurgess/Nicholls-Cook-GBurgess/Tatola/Clark-Murray/GBurgess (4-2-2-2) was improved to 10 from 11 last week.
Our go forward this week improved to 1824m from 1431m last week. Our second best all year. Tom Burgess, Cook, George Burgess, Nicholls, Clark, Johnston, Jennings and Graham made 10+m per run. Tom Burgess, George Burgess, Murray, Nicholls, Cook, Graham, Inglis, Johnston and Jennings making 100+m in the match. Defensively Cook was our best in the tackling raking up 39 tackles. Tom Burgess, Murray and Tatola didn't miss a tackle.