I suppose we would much rather have the shortening up period now than later.
Against the Titans gives it much more effect than against a top rated side.
I’ve had a look at that last Titans try, it was an outstanding play under pressure.
Kelly has nowhere to go, so he deftly kicks it into space on the angle and any one of three Titans may have scored. It was good game awareness and even better when you think he had a few seconds at best to compose the play and then execute it.
By any measure, it was perfectly executed. Perfect speed and trajectory, it created the time necessary for the attack to capitalise. A lot of these kicks often dribble over the dead ball line, they are overcooked, but this was one of the best I’ve seen for ages.
You can see the titans players, they sense the play is on almost immediately and they are at white hot pace coming through.
Probably to defend it, we would have needed some players to have slided over earlier and some of our chasing wasn’t so good.
They shouldn’t have been that close to our try line anyway, many of our players were mia. They are not even in the camera shot.
Old mate went in virtually untouched.
I guess my point is that we should be courageous enough to say that they took the perfect try scoring option at the time, and I am reluctant to flatter ourselves completely by blaming us.
They had the one and only chance to win and ffs they found a way.
We were awful, but their last try was magic from a footy point of view.
So while the loss is very hard and we cruelled it, there was a bit of rare flare from the Titans.