That was the most heartbreaking loss I've ever had to endure as a Knights fan, and there's been a lot of them over the years. It's not that the loss itself was so painful but just what a win would have meant to me as a fan in the context of this season. Super disappointing result, but it had a sense of inevitability to it really, at no point did I ever feel we had a safe lead, even when we were 22-0 up. There were several key moments that lost us this game imo.
1. Letting Austin score just before half time. This let the raiders back into the game big time and gave them a shot of confidence, had we kept them to 0 at half time and then started the second half well then they would have been pressured into the same dumb errors that cost them in the first half.
2. Taking the 2 points, this cost us in the game v Parra a few weeks ago, I can't believe they didn't learn from that and keep the foot on the throat this time. The raiders goal line D is terrible so we would have been a fair chance of scoring imo.
3. Hodko's 2 poor kicks close to full time, they were diabolical plays at that point in the game, they were just such low percentage options and it has cost us all year from one of our most experienced players who has played enough big games to know better. To be fair to him he did kick a pressure field goal to get us into golden point but we should have iced the game a lot earlier and it should never have gotten to GP.
4. The unlucky bounce at the end of the game... Whilst he could have shown more urgency I don't know if there was much that Dane could have done there, if he had sprinted full on towards the ball he would have been wrong-footed by that bounce anyway, and of course the bounce went straight to the one raiders player who was there. We are just shit out of luck this year in just about everything that we do.
The positives are:
1. We were right in that game for 85 minutes and probably should have won it with a bit more composure at crucial times in the match. The last time we were in a game like that was probably 5 weeks ago v Parra? And we should have won that one too.
2. Our style of play in the first half was great to watch, we were offloading the ball and running their forwards off the park with quick play the balls and offloading, also it made our attack quite unpredictable and really hard to shut down.
3. Our young brigade were awesome yesterday, Barnett is making the most of his chance, he seems to have a good step and was looking to offload all the time. Sione is a beast! He dealt with the big raiders pack running at him all game and some of his 1:1 tackles were immense! And he is bending the line with every run at the moment, credit to Brown for moving him to second row to get him more involved in the game. Cogger had his best game imo, his defence was much better and he made a few crucial tackles on Papali who was trying to bulldoze him all game. He needs to run the ball a bit more though.
4. Randell was really good (until he went off injured that is) I really liked his kicking game from DH and it seemed like a definite plan they had practiced at training. His hit on Wighton after his chip kick was really impressive too. I can see why Brown sees him as a leader in the team now, he does a lot of the little things well and his enthusiasm around the ruck is good for the team.
Overall it was obviously a very disappointing result but if we play like we did in the first half every week and try and build it into an 80 minute performance we'll definitely be right in the mix to win a few more games this year, which then gives us something to build on heading into 2017 <
