Seems everyone is distracted by the disappointing prospect of another couple of years with Sheens - and fair enough... but I thought I'd drop in here for a bit more of a chat about our failed season...
I was talking with a mate about this the other day. He keeps shaking his head and saying "how did we come so close to knocking over the minor premiers just a few weeks ago? Was it just a matter of Robbie being out?"
It got me to thinking - we actually weren't that far off the mark for most of the season. Without going back and looking at the match-results, my recollection is that we lost a few that we shouldn't have, we lost a few that were pretty close, but over all we were a mostly competitive side that just couldn't get it to click. At least, we didn't get consistently blown off the park.
Thing is, the team always seemed surprised to lose. I don't know if it's a 'self-belief' thing that the coach has got them working on (which might explain why Benji loves him so much...) or what but it just seems like the attitude is "we are good enough, we work hard, we deserve it, we'll be right".
Then a couple of weeks out from the finals and the wheels really started to fall off. We came within a point of the premiers in a game where the refs gifted them a try and probably cost us one too. From there we just capitulated completely. The team just gave up. The self-belief was shown to be false-belief, and the boys had no tools in the kit to help dig themselves out of that hole. They just had no fight in them.
I thought about this, and I was reminded of the game against Souths where we conceded something like 12 points in 2 minutes to lose a game that we had every right to have won. We thought we'd had it in the bag. We switched off. The game changed in an instant and we didn't have what was needed to regroup and close it out.
I thought about this some more... I thought about our final game in 2011, where pretty much that exact same thing happened. I remembered our boys telling us that this was their motivation for 2012 - the pain of losing that game, in that way, would drive them to go one or two better this year.
Well, it didn't. All we got was more of the same. More dropped opportunities. More capitulation when it mattered.
There is a problem with attitude that cannot simply be attributed to the players themselves. I think we all know and understand this but I felt the need to put it into words.
We've got a great team. It's a team full of winners. But it's not a team who is prepared to fight for it when it's all on the line. They just don't seem to know how.
