Bigfella,
Ive watched the tape twice.Have a look at the try Kemp scored to level the match up. We were on our line and it was a man against man number up. The ball comes to Locky on the left and Grothe rushes up between Kemp and the centre. Locky fires the ball across Grothe into Kemps hands and he falls over the line for a try.
A great ball from locky ? Yeah it was good but not better than I have seen a hundred times on the touch footy field. When the ball sails across Grothe he knows he stuffs up and held his head.
It was a B grade play from someone who should have known better. If it was a winger who made an honest mistake we would say - Ok lets learn from that but we are talking about an Aust rep player on good money.
Kemp is on about 80K Tops at the Broncos.
There is a time when you just have to say "Eric see you later"
He comes up with that sort of play practically every match and at the NRL level you just cant afford to carry a player like that.
Personally I like Eric but IMHO if his name wasnt Eric Grothe he would have been punted long ago. Thats the reason why he played so much reserves at the roosters.
Its time for the coaching staff to make a stand and reward the other players in the team.
Still haven't watched that again but thanks for your post FH.
I'm not saying he was error free otherwise I would have blown up even more.
However there is no way he is singly responsible for the problems down that side, like some of the people who seem to only come on here in hysterics to blame him for a loss then disappear for 4 weeks or so.
The first half in particular was diabolical and I reckon melbourne would have scored 30 points by isolating Finch and Reddy 3-4 in. Part of it is that we have extra men around Finch, and a long ball immediately provides an overlap. The next problem is that Finch and Reddy are very slow laterally.
Eric may have stuffed up on one or two of those occasions. But there were fair dinkum 20 times when they acquired massive overlaps on that side.
It is more than just his problem. The games where Reddy has played centre this has been far worse. But even when Ben Smith came back there were issues. He seemed to drop back behind the line to try to counter the massive overlap which of course caused problems because of his lack of pace.
The main difference when Ben is there that he knows Eric will come in but even if he does, it generally allows Ben time to finish the man off. ben has that extra size and strength that allows him to finish the man off. Joel missed one the other night in the same situation.
A lot of the times Grothe comes in, it is really his only option. If he stayed back on his opposite every time I reckon they score ten tries on his wing, most of them unopposed.
I am not trying to point the finger at Reddy; he is playing out of position and doing his best. he is not being helped inside either.
Personally I would swap Grothe to the left side outside Hayne and move Reddy to the right wing outside Inu.
