Just on our players at the club and in the league generally. The more I watch the more I am coming to the opinion and I know that this has been brought up many times before, that we as a club in particular, have to many Islanders in our squad.
I know that this statement won't be popular with a lot of insecure politically corrects out there, but if you're one of these, please try to understand what I am saying here.
I'm talking about football savvy here, nothing else. I believe that many of these guys, due to their obvious power and size advantage while growing up, stunts them of the finer points of the game, like in particular, awareness and even simple things like running good lines.
Sure many of them show Harlem globe trotter skills at times, but generally that is against weak defense or they try it all the time in the most inappropriate times. I feel, again this is partly due to their nature, but also and probably mainly due to their power advantage while growing up which allowed them to get away with it growing up and has now become second nature.
But simple things like line running is beyond so many of them, which I suppose is fair enough when all your life growing up, who needed to develop that skill(and believe me it is a skill) when all you have to do is run over people all the time. A glaring example of this is players like Loko v Morgan.
Loko just has no idea about anything other than running hard and smashing his way through and that is fine to a point of course, but a player like Morgan needed to learn skills that would allow him to beat his opposition without the collision.
So now who is the better FOOTBALLER???
My point is, have we got to many islanders in our team, with their penchant to clock off easily when the game is tight and their high mistake rate?
I for one have come around to the realization that we have and on a greater scale the NRL itself is also suffering due to this, with so many terrible and dumb decisions out on the field over the last couple of years by so many footballers who are just not footballers, but powerfully bulldozers.
So many out there really don't have a clue, I mean they can't even draw and pass to an unmarked player and look at the amount of times backline movements have gone awry due to players passing way too deep and out to touch because their outside men had no idea how to simply set themselves up to capitalize by running onto the ball. Timing, line running, drawing, passing, catching, running to the weaker shoulder of a defender, instead of just running without thought, catching bombs, all these little things in our team, in particular, are woefully.
Sure I know all players no matter what their descent make errors, that is not the point, I am referring to the lack of football nous and fundamental skill level appropriate to the position a player takes in the team and at the moment I think we have gone over the tipping point of having way to many robots and not enough footballers in our team, which is also being reflected in the NRL.
What are others thoughts on this matter?
