I thought we were the better team, if only by a little bit. Similar to several games this year, we just didnt have the bounce of the ball when it mattered. Their first two tries were very lucky, and Casey's intercept offside call was marginal at best. Then there were several 50/50 calls that could have gone either way. We should have put another try on at some point to seal it, but when you concede a try from a deflected kick and a lucky knock down you just have to accept it wasnt meant to be.
I think our bench really bit us in the end. Theres this idea that having a 14 who only contributes to cover the spine is the safe play, but like everything else its a matter of trade-offs. In this case, we had a back rower go down early and our entire forward rotation was off. In the end, that little bit of extra juice we lost was the difference. People need to remember this moment the next time we hear about needing cover for our spine.
I thought a few of our big players looked gassed, Yeo, Too and Edwards in particular. There was a criminal lack of urgency for the Willison try from both Yeo and Martin. I know Talagi is getting a lot of the blame, but his mistakes were far from the most criminal we saw. We cocked up the final play monumentally too.
Its hard to be too disappointed though. We've had an unbelievable run and made something out of a season that looked like a complete train wreck at one point. In reality, we saw that first two months of the year come back to bite us. We had to play too hard for too long, couldn't refill the tank in the back half of the year and hit our red line just when we needed a bit extra to pull us out of the fire in a game that didnt really go our way. Ivan and the boys deserve huge credit, and 5 premierships in 6 years doesnt ring too badly anyway.
