Maybe I’m being over positive but Ive seen more in our attack this year then last year already. Souths were defensively strong on their line yesterday but we kept plugging away & eventually got the points. Granted, the last play bomb every set needs to go.
Same with our defence. Our structures are looking much improved, especially with Whare back. We seem a lot more aggressive off our line too. Their two tries yesterday were good football opportunist tries, nothing to do with a misread or defenders on the outside not trusting their inside men etc. Hook switching Yeo to cover Maloney to start the game has worked a treat.
I agree. Cleary is getting well timed ball to players outside of him (particularly Blake). The team has figured out that Blake is much more likely to make a break hitting the line at speed, so he is always standing deeper and is receiving passes when he has already worked up a bit of pace. That happened a few times yesterday.
Maloney and Cleary have both been probing in around the ruck late in sets and have been trying a lot of inside passes to each other or to Edwards and Yeo to try to break through the middle.
When we get close to the line we are getting better timed ball to wide running forwards who have the power to get over the top of smaller outside backs (Kikau is going to presumably keep being used for this, and we also tried it with JFH early in the game yesterday - he got over the line but was stripped before he could get it down). That is a big improvement from the Cleary > pass to CHN to try to hit a hole play that we must have tried 20 times last year (for some success early on until other teams wised up to it).
Mansour, for all the sideways running he has been doing, appears to have been given instructions to try to bring the ball back into the middle when we are flat footed close to the opposition line to see if he can bust through the middle or pick off someone in a 1-1 situation (he scored a few tries from that last season as well, but I think it was ad lib back then).
We are risking offloads close to the line when we were rarely offloading last season.
We are grubbering for the in-goal to try to get repeat sets (Maloney seems to be the one doing this - we would have got a repeat set yesterday early in the game except for the head high call).
Despite it being only 2 games in - so it is difficult to say that any of these things are indicative of a pattern that will continue for the season - it seems to me that a lot of work has been put into our attack during the off season. If the rumours are to be believed that has come from Gould and Brandy.
