As much as I like to take the piss out of your coach, I don't think Kev can be blamed for anything much that happended in that grand final loss. Look, I love the bloke to death for what he has done for the Bunnies over the years, but the chief bedwetter in the GF loss was no doubt Reyno. He had to take control in that final 20 mins and he didn't.
Reyno is to blame for those idiotic decisions to take the short drop-outs when all he had to do was kick the living daylights out of that ball downfield. I do wonder if there is some lingering, residual resentment from some of the players towards Reyno over the season dating back to the GF. They looked upon him to lead them to victory, and instead, he massively shat the bed. He had to do much better with his experience in the heat of that GF battle.
I think the short drop outs were associated with the massive wind that was behind the panthers... even if he tried to flog it down field it might've gone nowhere anyway due to the wind.
I get that we weren't winning the short drop outs, but the intent is to put it up as a 50/50, hope to draw an error from your opposition or get the ball back yourself ... the whole time he was doing the short drop outs we were up by 10 or 4 pts so panthers were never taking the 2pts on offer if he did make an error.
Our goal line defence was also like top of the league and holding up to immense pressure all game, so it would make sense to conserve energy and keep confidence in the goal line defence, which got you there... but the young guys were tiring and I think losing some of that confidence seeing the deficit reduce. To avoid that Reynolds was trying to take it into his own hands, like driving that one to the 30m on the touchline, but the wind likely got a hold of it and took it too far.
The biggest issue and takeaway to me out of all that is that we spent the whole fucking year with no fucking plan on how to defuse the short drop outs... that's a coaching issue, but it's also the same old failure of this club to just not adapt to changes in modern game. The league was already moving to short drop outs in 2022 and everyone had moved to it in 2023, but here we are being this bullshit stoic dinosaur like "nah it's just a phase everyone will give up on it"... just like wrestling back in the mid-00's. This stupid fucking club keeps living off the 90's and trying to be this holier than thou and "we'll play the game like it's meant to be played" bullshit .... somehow thinking that what we did back then will work again at some point... and then it does for a season here and there 2015 and 2023, but it's not fucking sustainable and they forget that Sydney fucking hates them and will change shit to move away from that... yet they continue to sit on their hands and have no plan on how to evolve and change that.
In regards to Reynolds one of the biggest errors came when we made a break sometime in the second half and it may have been last tackle on panthers 30-40m. He had the ball with momentum and it all came down to what did Reynolds want to do with it, but instead he was caught like a deer in headlights and didn't know what to do.
He obviously had thoughts going through his head like box kick to the corner and force them to come out of their end... but they had no trouble doing that all night and our boys probably need a rest. Maybe a kick to the ingoal with Edwards scrambling, force a drop out and consolidate, except we haven't defused or won a short drop out all fucking year, so that's basically a turnover.
He probably thought about extending the play and get some early ball out to Staggs, which probably was the right call, but maybe he thought we're not getting many more chances in this game and we need to nail this one, so I've got to get it to him into a better position that he can't **** up, because it's our last chance.
Instead what he came up with was a short ball to maybe Piakura??
I can't recall if Piakura dropped it or if he was wrapped up straight away and handover... but there were a million different things that he could've done and that's where the team were looking for Reynolds to guide them.
I can't recall if the run by Piakura crowded him, but it was like Reynolds lost all thought process in that moment and the default was dump it to the short man and setup for the next play... except he'd forgotten we had no next play.
We probably didn't touch the ball again inside panthers half after that.