It was an improved effort from the Knights, don't you worry about that. They came out strong, kept the mistakes to a minimum and hit the Sharks from dummy half. In the end, the mistakes began to show in the second half, the missed tackles blew out and the Sharks proved too good.
Make no mistake, the Sharks are the real deal. They didn't let our momentum catch them off-guard. Usually if a team is getting constant metres from dummy half, you bust the defence right up the middle with some players withdrawing from the ball-carrier because they've been called off-side, or else a handful of players just unable to keep up with the quick play-the-balls. It's interesting, then, that we didn't score any of our tries from line-breaks in the middle of the field... yet the Sharks did.
The positives:
- Johns is looking pretty sharp, and the kicking game is improving.
- Quinn hasn't let his contract signing distract him from finishing this season well, producing probably his best game in the red and blue.
- The metres from dummy-half are good, albeit not quite as effective as
- We're getting several runners involved in hit-ups... there is one option either side of the dummy-half, and on several occasions there were more. I lost count of the times we had two blokes running in the centre of the field, with the rear bloke receiving the ball. Or we would have those two blokes, but the ball would cut them all out, before being flicked inside to a support runner. It works... I hope they plan to continue that because it looks impressive and is something we have missed.
- We were probably unlucky not to win. I think we were the better team in a very close game. It's a credit to the Sharks that they held on and didn't let so many close tries dent their confidence (or leave them out of breath).
Negatives:
- Four disallowed tries... one of which was clearly a no-try (Lowrie), another shouldn't have been a try but shouldn't have been a 20-tap either (Perry) and two which should have been awarded. Quinn's third try looked pretty convincing to me, and the decision to Carney's no try because of an apparent Johns forward pass looked pretty awful to tell you the truth. Had one of these decisions gone our way, we would have won.
- Still sloppy tackling, and too many dropped balls etc. They need to keep working on discipline and try and replicate the first 30 minutes of last night's game where we only had one mistake.
- We desperately need another playmaker to take pressure of Johns. Lowrie is not a 5/8th, but even considering Kurtley's early departure, we need someone else capable of playing there. None of our backs are playmakers, unlike other teams (Berrigan at Broncos, Gasnier and Hornby at Dragons etc). I'm not saying we need to play playmakers in the centres or at fullback, but we do need to cover our options with better alternatives than Lowrie and Simpson moving into the backline.
All in all a good effort, reasonably good performance and tremendous spectcle. The Sharks played well -- all credit to them. Three of the four no-tries could have easily been given (what ever happened to benefit of the doubt to the attacking team), which would have changed the course of the match completely.
