John Sutton has his place within the team. The reason why he isn't good at five-eight is because he is too technically too limited. In saying that, what he is good at is playing direct, straightening the play up, drawing in defenders on that left hand side and creating over laps. When he comes back, he will make his presence felt.
In saying that, I think we need to look closely at the games we have lost and be very careful not to generalise. There seems to be this view in footy, not just with Souths but in general, that if you lose your halfback it is the automatically attributed to any loss of form. Yes I do feel that we are missing Adam Reynolds' kicking game and last tackle options but that IS NOT the reason why we have been in poor form. Over the last three games, there are three common denominators behind each of the losses. The first of these is our edge of the ruck defence, which has been absolutely atrocious; I don't know where this has come from, as it certainly hasn't been a problem before in Madge's tenure, but for whatever reason is has become a problem. Markers are going the wrong way, caught out of position, careless when it comes to making tackles etc. It needs to improve! As a flow on from this is our discipline. People will say that we are not conceding horrendous amounts of penalties but that is irrelevant in my view. The key is when and where you give the penalties away. Basically, we are giving penalties away in the wrong areas of the field and bad times during the game. Also, some of the penalties we have given away are blatantly stupid ones! Ben Lowe is a serial offender and even Issac Luke at times can be a bit petulant. Consequently, this has restricted our ability to apply pressure on our opposition. The final major problem that is costing us in games is our completion rate. It is horrendous! I've had a look at the statistics and we have only completed 80%+ of our sets twice this season. That needs to improve! We cannot and will not win football games if we turn over as much ball as we did against the raiders! Part of improving this comes down to simplifying things. We did that against the raiders in the first half - one or two passes out from the ruck and just bulldoze your way forward. Whats wrong with that? It seems to me that we are trying to play too elaborately with these sweeping set moves and have gone away from what has worked for us in the past - isolating small players in the line and having our big forwards run at them; its almost as if someone has told the players that Alex Johnston is the only player who is allowed to score tries.
So I guess what I am trying to say is that all this talk about halves combinations, who should play five-eight, who should play half-back, whose got the better kicking game, where should Greg Inglis play etc. etc. is only semi-relevant and is not indicative of the bigger picture. The first and most important thing to do when your struggling for form and/or missing key players is to make yourself hard to beat and we haven't done that; we're far too easy to play against. We need to look at the Dragons and take a leaf out of their book. They probably have the least talented playing roster in the NRL but what Paul McGregor has done is made his team hard to play against by being defensively sound in particular but also by respecting possession, keeping things simple and not making the sorts of mistakes that I have mentioned - that is why they have been winning games.
is always spot on, is AJ's injury the same leg as the one he injured first up, back when he first left juniors and Souths signed Sandow, or is a totally different injury.
