Round 14 vs Warriors
Edwards 8
Mansour 7
May 6
Crichton 7
Naden 7
Luai 6
Cleary 6
Tamou 8
Koroisau 8
Fisher-Harris 8
Kikau 7
Martin 7
Yeo 8
Leota 8
Tetevano 7
Leniu 7
The expectations of the 2020 Panthers are now so high that now when they win, they still get criticised. That is a good thing. Mediocrity is the enemy of good. That said, I thought the performance of the team in this win was meh.They looked flat and tired and did enough to win and that was it. A couple of points:
- The forwards just did what they do every week and dominated the opposition pack. Other than Harris and Tevaga, the Warrior's forwards were owned. We are talking metres in the 60 to 70m range per player. By way of context, James Tamou belted out 195m on his own. The Panther's had 50% more running metres than the Warriors. 50%! That is why there are no excuses for the lacklustre display from the halves. They were given the perfect platform to build on;
- The halves really didn't play well and made that game much harder than it needed to be. It was like Barrett never actually coached the attack and we looked like the Panther's of old, unable to score inside the red zone in spite of repeat sets. I put that down to two reasons:
- Cleary was playing well with himself and other than the nice pass for the Naden try, he just cruised. Only 7 tackles and no tackles breaks, smacks of a player running on empty. He just lacked his usual energy and zest. He also hogged the ball and reverted to "turn it inside to player x" in attack so often you could be forgiven for thinking we were still in 2019. To his credit, his kicking was still good and he created repeat sets and helped build pressure. It's just that when he had the ball, he did very little with it;
- The Warriors had incredible line speed. By the time the first receiver had the ball, the Warriors were already up on the gain laine. It shut May's ball playing down and he had a quiet game as a result. It is a credit to our forwards that in spite of that we still trundled down the field to gain a dominant field position. This is where you need your halves to reorganise the attack better, put more kicks behind the rushing line, set the backline even deeper. We continued to be flat and repeatedly turned the ball inside as if expecting it to eventually work. The fast line speed is exactly what we will get off the Roosters, Eels and Storm, so we better have a look at this performance and work out a plan B and C, because plan A will not work;
- Considering the conditions and the fact we were playing badly, you still have to commend the effort of the team. It will be our ability to adapt to a fast moving defence line that will be the deciding factor in whether we can go all the way this year, not a lack of effort or committment.
