Cleary used the exact term to describe the Raider’s gameplay. He said there was a lot of ‘spoiling’ in the game. The Raiders set out to rough us up, bash us and niggle us out of our groove. As Ennis said, when we are in our groove we are unstoppable. Wighton and Hodgson were menaces. Working players over in the tackle and slowing play to a crawl. The ref let them get away with murder. That is why they had a faster play the ball than we did.
I think it worked for the first 15 minutes. But it turns out you can’t bash us out of the game. JFH, Yeo, Kikau and Martin are understated tough. You won’t intimidate those guys. JFH is dead set nails hard. Those eyes..he scares the shit out of me and he is on my team! Papali wasn’t able to throw his weight around with JFH on the field.
To win the Premiership you need to able to play all styles, flashy like South’s, grinding like the Storm and tough like the Raiders. As the Raiders’ game showed, grinding and tough we can do in spades. But we haven’t mastered “flashy’ yet. Scoring against teams that defend well like the Storm is still our biggest weakness. Once we get flashy sorted, we can beat all the teams any time, any day.
You can see that our attack is starting to emerge to a new level with Luai, he has the ‘X’ factor that Mitchell, Tedesco and Papenhausen provide the other contenders. But we need Edwards, Staines, Crichton and Momo to make that next step to unleash our attack to the next level. To’o is already at elite level and before his injury Edward’s was showing signs he was stepping up, but the rest of the back line isn’t there yet. Good, but not elite. The other contenders will be praying that our back line doesn’t get any better and Crichton’s second season syndrome lasts all year.
