Very disappointed in the loss today, but hard to fault the effort in the team.
They defended so well for such a long period of the game, but the problem was they just had to do too damn much of it. Some of it through their own mistakes, but also through some of the worst refereeing I’ve seen against our team in a while.
That was an absolutely disgraceful performance from Sutton. I’m not saying that we didn’t deserve to get pinged for our indiscretions, but when the Dogs are allowed to do the exact same things (and sometimes worse) without penalty it’s unbelievably frustrating.
We had to have a lot go our way in this one to come out with a win, and unfortunately not much did. Once again the team we are opposing is somehow able to complete their sets at an incredibly high rate while we make error after error. We must not be putting enough pressure on in defence because teams seem to have completion rates of <80% against us consistently.
Having basically no forward pack cost us dearly in this. I thought Junior did great and Williams was pretty good, but apart from them our forwards were non-existent in attack. We had barely any field position (pretty much none in the second half) and didn’t really look like moving up the field without a penalty, which rarely came. Not sure how much of a difference Matterson could have made, but I believe it was an error from Ryles leaving him out of this team, especially after losing Luca earlier in the week.
We have gotten better since the beginning of this season. Earlier this year if we played a team completing at 90% and we kept giving the ball back so easily as we did today, we would have been pumped by 50+. We still have a long way to go though. We’ve held our own against some of the top sides now, having nothing to show for it. If we can continue this improvement and hopefully get some wins against some of the lower teams that would be nice.