4th July 2018
What a nail biting finish. Finally Reynolds kicks a field goal after missing a few this year. But that now makes it 8 wins on trot. This is most in a row for 29 years since our 12 match streak in 1989. We again let in 20 points soa lot of work to do before we areday for the finals. We are still 2 points behind St George-Illawarra, only 2 points ahead of 5th but now 10 points clear of 9th. We still need one more wins to make the finals. And in a battle for a Top 4 finish.
Rotten Luck for GI
We have started to see a much improved Greg Inglis who h regained confidence on the field after his knee injury. But such rotten luck saw him break his thumb and will now miss 6 weeks.
Reynolds second highest Goal Scorer
Adam's goal kicking a dropped off its usual high sucecss rates this yea, but 2 goal and that final field goal has moved Adam into clear second position on the South Sydney goal scoring list as he passes Bernie Purcell and is now only behind the great Eric Simms.
A week off and teh Bears on fire
The representative weekend off and a few extra training sessions has done wonders for the Bears ISP team. Wyong didnt know what hit them when they Bears put on move after move after move rattling up 28 points in the first 25 minutes. It was one of the best periods of the year for the team, that was tarnished when they let in 18 points in the final 25 minutes.
Lower Grade re-structure taking shape
Moves are a foot to restructure the South's lower grades. There is strong talk that Souths U20s will come back, and then there is the process to address reserve grade. With the NRL refusing to allow Souths to field a Womens RL team, money has been freed up from 2019 hopefully tio also run a reserve grade operation. I would like to see a lower grade football manager appointed to oversee operations of the team from U16s through to reserve grade. This wll allow Shane Richardson to focus onwhat he does best manage the first grade operation.
Round 16 - Stat Attack
Statistically a average game after a long break and the wet match. Completion rates dropped to 78% from 89% last week. Errors dropped to 10 from 5 last week. We gave away 8 penalties up from 7 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle improved to a average level of 31.7m from 20.6m last week. Our missed tackles dropped to a average level of 30 missed tackles from 19 last week. Opposition offloads dropped to 3 from 7 last week. Best all year.
Looking at our left side defence - Jennings-Inglis-Walker-Sutton (0-0-1-1) was improed to 2 from 5 missed tackles last week. On the right side Graham-Gagai-Reynolds-Crichton (4-6-1-0) was dropped to 11 from 3 missed tackles last week. Ruck defence TBurgess/Tatola-Cook-GBurgess/Clark-SBurgess/Murray (5-4-3-5) was dropped at 17 from 10 missed tackles last week.
Our go forward was slightly down week at 1473m from 1504m last week. Inglis made 10+m per run. Sam Burgess, Sutton, Cook, Crichton, Alex Johnston, Inglis and Graham making 100+m in the match. Defensively Cook was our best in the tackling raking up 55 tackles. Crichton, Inglis, Alex Johnston and Jennings didn't miss a tackle.