@TheRam I'd love to hear your review of the game.
Bar Lane and RCG we had no great performers. What worries me Ram is we are building a sinking ship. I feel like come end of 2023 it may need a full rebuild and we might be bottom 4 again. Unsure why I am getting this feeling and hope I am wrong but its the feeling I get.
I think sides may work out our style and our troops will get old faster then we want upfront. Gee I hope I am wrong but rarely am Ram.
But I feel like Saints and Dogs are closer to a premiership then we are.
Well most of our players were very good in attack in the first half. But once Russell came off in my opinion JA helped our team lose its way. I don't want to be to critical on a young kid but he is not ready for the NRL just yet and he showed me that again yesterday.
Why do I say this? Well it is his speed. No not how fast he can run but the speed that he does his play making at. It is way to slow and allows the defenders plenty of time to adjust or react. Watch the time he takes to do his thing vs Mosses or even Gutho who are deciding, moving, passing or kicking at speed. This is what gets the defensive structures to react and sometimes makes them react poorly or you sometimes don't even give them time to react due to the speed you are attacking them with. JA telegraphs it home.
So once he came on we were using him as a main organiser distributer and everything slowed down which meant that all those little opportunities and small openings that were available to our attacking weapons like Mahoney, Moses, Brown, Penisini, Lane and Gutho dried up. We started to play without the purpose of the first half. You could literally feel the loss of confidence in the structures that we were playing with just a few minutes earlier. We weren't hunting in numbers and throwing multiple players with footwork at them.
We started to shift sideways to much without the same direct venom and forward momentum that we were doing and the link passing was not being done with players that are hitting the line at speed together, but before the line therefore the defense could make the right decision. All little things but major when looked at as a whole.
Now what happened to D. Brown? This is a major reason as to why we couldn't score another try all second half. He in my opinion was on fire in the first half. I was particularly watching him for the obvious reasons. And he was delivering. he was doing what I have been calling for all along and running onto the ball at pace and then digging deep into the line before passing. In fact all our players were of the same mindset and that is why we had the success we did with the ball in the first half. We as a team did everything with speed and many bodies in motion all pushing up.
But like I said, once we added AJ to the mix, we lost that and started to play disjointed and indecisive or making the wrong decision. Brown in the centres was Brown unsighted. He was literally missing in action. We lost a player that was creating opportunities for the players around him and substituted in a player that told the opposition his game plan before he executed it. Sure I know other players made mistakes and he didn't, but that isn't the point. AJ threw our attack out of sync. Again I hate singling out a young kid that is still learning his craft, but that is the point. He has at least 2 or 3 more years of learning and picking up his tempo before he is really ready for the NRL. I think he should only be used in our NRL team if we are desperate.
Anyway, as for our defense, well it was pretty ordinary as most would also agree. But I am not all that surprised. Whenever we have previously focused and worked on our offensive structures we have lost our way defensively. and yes I know that we apparently have also focussed on our defense all off season to, but Defense as we all know is a mental thing and if the players came out focussed on attack then defense will suffer. Now eventually we one day might be able to play the dynamic and expansive game and defend like demons too. But sadly that has eluded us so far under BA.
As for Simonson, he is a worry. Decent finisher in space, but the more I see of him the less I like him.
For mine the positives and standouts to come out of the game were RCG, Lane, Brown, Penisini and Blake, when we were on.
Special mention for RCG. What a player and right up there as one of the best already establish players Parra have brought to the club. As we all know, we have a tendency to buy lemons when bringing in established star players. But like I said in an earlier post and also why you are worried for our medium to long term future he and Paulo will be old on a couple of years and it will not be easy to replace those sorts of players for like.
This why I have been meaning to post something on this for a couple of weeks now. So in my next post I will make a suggestion of what we need to be aspiring and attempting to do.
