I haven’t commented at all in this thread so far, and wanted to sleep on it before saying anything. But now that the dust has settled, regardless of how disappointing the result was, I’ve got to say that that was probably the best loss I can ever recall us having. I thought we’d be torn to shreds on the edges given how easily we conceded points against the Knights but I thought our goal line defence was genuinely inspiring stuff. It’s not often we’ve seen that sort of commitment from our blokes. That old “turning up for each other” cliche generally pisses me off, but that’s seriously what it looked like last night.
The concern remains our attack, but even then we were significantly hampered by running with a combination of fourth and fifth choice dummy halves all night. Stone is a mad bugger, but his service was pretty ordinary. I thought we had the chance to ice it in one of those late sets camped on Penrith’s line when Moses ultimately got the repeat set with the grubber, but if you look at that play, Mitch lost time because Stone’s pass was too high, so he looked for the repeat rather than what I expected to be a more attacking kick.
Anyway, all said, probably a par year overall. Still a bit disappointing given where we were sitting mid-season, but also disappointment tempered by pride in last night.