Ok now that I’ve calmed down here’s my opinion.
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first. Our handling was terrible and we shot our selves in the foot over and over. We made 18 errors on a dry track on a Sunday afternoon which is ridiculous. If we get that down to 10 or less we win comfortably.
Unfortunately this was just one of those games where a bunch of guys made errors on the same afternoon. It’s totally shit but it happens. Shibs and Tex were the two obvious ones, I actually feel sorry for Shibs because he just looked rattled from early on, ideally he doesn’t play NRL again for a little while and gets some confidence back. He’s got all the physical attributes to play at this level but he just needs to cut the errors and be more reliable. Given our current backline situation we will probably need him again next week, though hopefully not on the wing again.
It’s weird to say this but Hoy has his best and worst game all rolled into one. He made some really fundamental errors, that drop from the kick was terrible and his technique for trying to tackle that front rower who scored was poor. However he also showed a lot more spark and was an actual attacking threat which we’ve all been waiting for him to show for a little while now. He’s definitely not in our best 17 at this stage but he at least showed some positives.
Apart from all that, the positives are there. We are still missing 2 guys from our spine and our backline is a patch up job and we only lost by 2 missed kicks at goal, we hung in there despite playing pretty poorly and were even in a position to win it, so I would rather that than being thrashed by 40.
Our attack actually looked alright in this game, Mann was passing a bit more and Tex was starting to beat some tackles and Watson was excellent when he came on. Brailey from dummy half just adds a new dimension to our side, his vision around the ruck is brilliant, that play to set Barney up was very subtle and when was the last time we had a dummy half who could have a decent crack at a 40/20?
Dan was just immense, he really has become one of the dominant front rowers in the NRL, absolutely outstanding. Our forwards in general were really good tbh.
Dom Young got his opportunity far earlier than we would have expected and personally I thought he wasn’t too bad. There’s definitely some stuff that he will need to work on to become a consistent first grader, his defensive positioning was all over the place but I thought he was physical when he made decent contact. He worked hard though and took some tough runs coming out of trouble. I actually noticed that he runs very upright and given how tall he is it was leading to guys holding him up in place and driving him back in a 3 man tackle. It would be good to see him try to lower his torso a bit and try to get between defenders and find his front a bit more. With a bit of luck he can learn from it and play well in NSW cup for a while before we call on him again.
Overall as seasoned knights fans we all saw this loss coming, the tigers had a point to prove after being terrible for the first two weeks and we had an off game but it still ended up being really close and all things considered I thought we worked really hard and the effort was there despite some repeated glaring errors from the same culprits.
If we can clock up another couple of wins while we’re under strength then it’ll put us in a great position for when Green and Ponga are back.
