I was at the game. We were all over the Raiders for the first 15 minutes, and if we hadn’t made an error in attack around the 15 min mark we looked a good chance of scoring again. Raiders were also using up a lot of gas defending their own line.
The Raiders were also always going to be dangerous close to our line early in the game. They had a noticeable size advantage over us. It looked like the game plan was to run them around as much as possible by throwing the ball around and then take advantage as they tire out. That looked it like was going to work, until we made some key errors in the second half against the run of play which effectively lost us the game.
Our interchange rotation also got stuffed up once Whare was binned. When that happened Cleary took Winterstein off and interchanged him for Luai, who then defended in Winterstein’s place in the second row. The Raiders were attacking that side and having someone quick out there (Luai) helped us to shut things down - if Cleary hadn’t done that then we might conceded more. However it also meant Luai was on the field much earlier than he would otherwise have been and that had negative effect on our attack.
We also noticeably lost fluency and go forward once Egan came on very early in place of Kenny. I am not sure why Cleary made that interchange so early in the game. In other matches Egan hadn’t come on until the last 20 mins. Kenny didn’t look like he picked up an injury so I am not sure why that change we made.
You also take Mansour’s two errors out of the game (the dropped bomb and the terrible attempted tackle on Rapana) and we could have been looking at 18-18 with it going down to the wire.