I'm afraid to say that this side has very little impact from the bench and unless Jennings and Pritchard have blinders, Souths will win this one, simply because we haven't got enough points in us to win.
Why didn't Blair get a call up?
More importantly why is Adrian Purtell a guaranteed selection?
Matt Elliott stuck with him in the centres for nearly the entire season despite the fact that he was a reserve grade winger for the Raiders (a team worse then ours) before he got here and since he has arrived he has been getting owned week after week. He has been our most consistently poor player by far and should have been dropped well before Joseph Paulo or any other player.
Now after the season is almost over Matt Elliott is finally admitting that the Adrian Purtell experiment was terrible, and has now moved him to the wing. Why the f*ck has he kept his spot at all? He didn't earn it in the first place and certainly doesn't deserve to be moved rather then being dropped.
He might be less of a liability on the wing, but he will still be rushing our of the line and falling off tackles. He's still the slowest bloke in the backline and unless the opposition throw him an intercept he won't be running 50+ metres to score a try - he WILL be run down if we put him through a gap.
Meanwhile we have Ryan Walker who was on the verge of a first grade spot early in the year and seems to have been forgotten about since. It hasn't mattered that Adrian Purtell has been consistently poor and been shown up by reserve grade centres while Ryan Walker has been in sensational form all season and been carving up the competition where Purtell belongs.
