I have been reading comments on here the last 2- 3 weeks without responding....thought i may as well say my 2 cents worth. The one thing is we all love the Panthers and everyone is entitled to have an opinion.
I think it was my last post that I said Griffin's stance on dropping those 3 players was the right one and i still think it was, but something is not right. I was at the game last night and really we were not in the game at all despite what our coach said after the game.
Forget the result.... I think the most important statements were made after the game by the 2 coaches.
Griffin said ' We can take something out of our second half for next week'
Bennett said ' Its not hard to put some points on when the game is gone"
To me Bennett nailed it and Griffin is clutching.... he said the same thing after the Parra game and look how we were blown off the park last night. The players have to take a massive amount of the blame but you cant sack 15 players...THE COACH is not getting any response from this playing group and THE COACH will keep picking a 2nd rower at 5/8 for e.g. and wonder why the results are not changing.
Im not a NRL coach, but every footy fan last night that i spoke too ( fans of both teams) were of the opinion that Griffin is not the answer and i have to say I agree. Griffin might be a good bloke but he should be moved on... its not working ,and the way he digs his heels in over team selections (e.g. Moylan not to 6) should have his fate sealed.
Well Cartwright playing at six has only happened twice. Incidentally we have scored more points with him there and he is not the reason we lost, but I take your point. Hiku, Whare, Peachey and Blake is probably a better illustration of a coach just moving players and getting a worse result than the centre pairing we had at the end of last year. If it ain't broke and all that. It must absolutely bug Blake that he was moved considering how well he played at the end of last year. Stuff like that will damage morale.
Further coaching confusion surrounds our playmakers. We are clearly better with Carty at six than TMM at six because he gets out of the way of Moylan. When TMM plays we just went from side to side. Im not blaming TMM, he wants to be a playmaker and I think Moylan and he just got in each others way. I don't understand why he couldn't see that and either drop Moylan (whose form deserved it at the time) or move TMM to the bench as a replacement hooker. Cartwright is just caught in the middle of this indecision and it does him no favours having him at 5/8th after a long injury. We then get to the most talked about point of all. Why haven't we at least tried Moylan at six? Talk about the bleeding obvious.
Also, we desperately need a hard head in the side. A deadset raging mongrel. We are too soft and because we are stacked full of newbies our heads drop when we get a setback. I think the youngsters can get confidence and grow out of that habit, but the team hasn't got time to wait. JFH offers some mongrel but we need more. Somebody who will fire up the forwards, MG style. Yesterday was a perfect example of that. We had the Broncos pinned down. They get a ridiculous penalty, our heads drop and then after 10 minutes of defending they score as soon as they get down our end.
On a positive note, as somebody has mentioned, our juniors keep rolling on with another win. We are so close to building a dynasty, you can smell it. We just have to take that next step. Is Hook the man for that? On the balance of probabilities, no.
