We didn't deserve to win, end of story. Two things. We were royally raped by Gavin Badger on Rapira's offside and the two strip calls. They were howlers and cost us a lot of points. We can be all PC and diplomatic, but at the end of the day they wee howlers and they hurt us big time. But it's life, it's two days on, and frankly I'm already excited about 2011.
Secondly, I do understand Manu's point. I feel we would still beat most of those sides. What happened on Friday night was we produced perhaps our worst performance since the Tigers demolition. Guys like Matulino who don't miss tackles and don't drop balls were doing it ad nauseum. I think the pressure got to them. I think if we had have lasted into next week we'd have got through to the following week as well.
The other part of it all is there are some teams who have seemingly limped into the finals. Penrith have played like dribblers for the past 2 months once teams figured out if you can keep out their kicking game they're fairly ordinary elsewhere. Wests Tigers only know one way - run to the sidelines. Never was that more evident than against the Roosters in extra time. One team played direct, the other team played like spastics. You can put a red line through those two, they're gooorrrnnee. Manly.. can't believe they somehow got across the line to get into the finals. There are only three teams IMO who can win it - Saints, Roosters and Titans. For mine, Roosters or Saints win. The other 13 teams are merely making up the numbers, and that's why I agree with Manu, that on any given day we could have beaten other teams. We just produced our worst performance since the middle of the year and we are done and dusted.
Overall, I'm bloody ecstatic with our performance this year. We weren't tipped to make the 8. We come 5th. We were tipped as a major contender for the spoon. We were nowhere near it. We were tipped to run down below and a lot of critics said for us to have any chance we needed a good run with injuries. We had one of the worst runs with injuries in club history. So what did that all bring us? A club championship. An U20s squad choc-full of talent. A genuine shot for them to collect a premiership. And probably 30-40 games experience for guys of our future who mightn't have got that game time in key situations except for the injuries. To a man, those blokes stood up. We had blokes like Lewis Brown and Ben Matulino and Russell Packer who became fairly consistent first graders, and they're only going to get better. We had blokes like Jerome Ropati who were on the cusp - their careers could go downhill or get back to good consistent levels, they to a man came back. Who would have thought if we had our first choice halfback, our premier prop, the back up prop, our premier back, let alone our new captain, all missing for big chunks of the season that we'd go as well as we did. 2010... wicked year.
