2024 Rabbitohs - Cyber View from the Hill

2024 - The Cyber View from the Hill

31st Jan 2024

Its been a long off season

Off season, which started early after playing finals football for the 5 previous seasons. It has been a low key off season, with the team battening down the hatches and with the focus of the team and administrators to address team performance issues. Training returned to Redfern during November and December, while Heffron was undergoing off season maintenance. It is almost time to let a new year begin.

Welcome Wrighton and Keppie

2024 will see us start the season with two new buys. Jack Wrighton from Canberra, who has a strong friendship with Latrell Mitchell. I am excited to see how he will fit it and start pushing team mates around him to a new level. Only downside is that he was suspended at the end of the year with Canberra and will miss Charity Shield and Round 1 through suspension. He then got the dreaded calf injury and will miss a further 2 games to Round 3. Keppie is another player we will need. With a few props moving on, he comes in to fill the available prop rotation position.

Burns returns

A familiar face popped up at training in the off season, with the return of Braidon Burns on a Reserve Grade contract. We needed some centre coverage with Wrighton and Graham recovering from injury and wingers having to fill in centre in reserve grade for most of last years reserve grade season.

Las Vegas experiment

Vegas has been the talk all off season, when the Round 1 fixture was announced to be played a week before the regular season kickoff. The NRL is committed to doing this for the next 5 years. Two games will be played on the NFL stadium, with Campbell Graham currently in the US doing promotional work. It will be another launch into the USA for rugby league, after the idea was first mooted way back in 1937. There have been a number of prior attempts over the last 90 years. This time the focus is on the betting market, as the NRL attempts to open a new revenue stream. But we are seeing benefits for the local game already as they sorted out their national administration issues and have arranged a Test match to co-incide with the weekend.