Today was such a let down of a performance. What alarms me the most is that the team does not look to have improved at all defensively; if anything we look worse than last year. Surely, it should have been Seibold's number one priority to improve the defence. I've said this so many times on here before that defence is the most important part of footy because it sets the platform for every other aspect of the game to take place. Many people on here are going to point to Adam Reynolds's lackluster performance, Greg Inglis' lack of involvement or Sam Burgess' errors but all of those things are the consequence of poor defence. Its no coincidence that things started to go downhill when we fell a couple of tries behind and that we played our best footy when we weren't chasing the game.
The bottom line is that we've got enough talent in our team; the playing roster is not the problem. Rather, we just need to go back to basics and defend better. Unfortunately this problem is a lot bigger than what I'm making it out to be because there are so many issues that need addressing. Firstly, our line speed is nowhere near good enough; if anything we seem to be moving up slower than what we were last year and this is round 1! Moreover, we are not even halting the momentum of the opposition forwards in the tackle meaning that we are going to tire quicker from constantly having to retreat back the 10 in defence. Our goal line defence is atrocious as well, in particular we seem to have the same communication issues on the edges that we had last year with players flying in and not making a tackle. Finally and most crucially, too many players are making too many bad defensive reads. Adam Reynolds had a shocker but it would be unfair to blame him because there were others.
In summary, based on tonight's performance we could be in a battle for the wooden spoon. What we need to do is to make ourselves hard to beat. We do that by being strong defensively and making teams work hard to crack us open. From there, our attack will flourish.
By the way does anyone know how to access the player stats on the NRL website? Have they gotten rid of them?