If by 'real deal' you mean deserving of premiership favouritism, then we aren't. But if you mean we're a good team then we are, and belting us makes Souths the real deal.
Their entire spine has played Origin and 100+ NRL games ffs. Reynolds is about to hit 200 games. They are mature too. The only youngster among the four is Latrell Mitchell.
Meanwhile our spine has no Origin experience, and includes a couple of kids with less than a hundred games between them. We shouldn't expect this team to have great attack. We need to get into the grind and stay there. Next year we can expect more from Drown and Mahoney. This year we should expect what we're getting.
Moses needs to do more but he just looks off the pace and it seems to be affecting his confidence. That low percentage offload to Nrown last night started the rot. It was a dumb decision and uncharacteristic. It's like they started caring that everyone was writing off our attack. The goal is to win, not score off every half chance. We built no pressure and got our pants pulled down and our tiny penises laughed at.