Struggling in the middle of the field defensively play the balls to quick and short passes killed us.
Have to say our boys struggle under pressure. Galvin’s forward pass to Twal and Poles brain snap when Hunt was scoring are typical examples. Benji has to take some responsibility, he encourages ad lib footy and it’s not a recipe for winning games, you have to play solid footy before you can get to ad lib, you’ve got to earn the right to play the ad lib stuff, just like Broncos did tonight. At times when the boys should take a step back and get to playing percentage footy they’re pushing passes, and doing silly stuff (where Api should be standing up but he gets carried away too, and I think we missed Luai tonight for this reason more than anything). Need to think about the footy they’re playing a bit more. I don’t think this loss is a disaster the first half we were ok, the 40/20 in the second minute of the second half along with its conceded try really hurt us. Losing the Latu was a big loss, led to a lot of positional changes and busted our defence a bit.
Don’t know why Benji took Da Silva off, should put Api at halfback. It was hard to tell on tv but it looked like Douehi moved into the halves and Bird went into the centres, would’ve been better leaving Bird on the edge with Douehi and having Api at halfback. Strange choice to me and it appeared that moving Douehi in closer really loosened our middle up, I could be wrong it took me 10 minutes to realise who was where when Latu went off, but this is about the time the middle fell to pieces.
Does anybody still think Hunt was a good buy? 4 runs 45m and 5 tackles ? He has averaged 4 hits ups and 11 tackles per game in 2025. He wasn’t on long but he was a disgrace, there’s was a point where we were under the pump in our own 10m zone a couple tackles in, he should’ve put up his hand and had a go, but he had his hands on his hips and was walking away from the ruck. Hope he is on minimum wage.
