There's no sugar coating it we were downright bad. The Cows ran harder, tackled harder and beat us in every area of the game. We never even looked like getting into the game.
The 1 million dollar question... WHY?? What happened.
Sometimes you just have these games where its just not your night and there is no real reason why. Most teams will have at least one game like that a year. However for me i think it was a hangover from the last two weeks.
The boys have had two tight wins and starting to receive some hype and have just gone out there today expecting to win and for things to come easy. The best thing for them now is to go home and look in the mirror and realise they haven't achieved shit, teams still see us a joke and the only way this changes is to put 100% in every week and win games.
For me it's not panic stations yet. But next week against the warriors becomes absolutley huge. Its a winnable game and another performance like tonight and Kevie starts to get very hot under the collar.
Tonight was strike one for this side. We aren't going to win every game but our losses have to be better then that. Had we have lost week 1 and 2 there wouldn't have been mass dissapointment as there was improvement from last year. This game was a big regression from round 1 and 2.
Lets hope today was an anomaly.
Bulldogs beat us in every metric but points and they are the lowest scoring team of the first 3 rounds. The Rabbitohs completed at 66% and it was still a tight game.
Our attack has been the worst of any team so far this season, and we have Adam Reynolds. Our scramble and goal line defence has improved but this is more attitude than skill. On the other hand our general defensive structures are still disjointed and lack urgency or line speed.
We’ve managed a total of 7 tries.
1 was Kelly’s intercept
1 was Herbie’s strip
1 was Herbie’s (questionable)penalty try
1 was from a lucky bounce on an arsey Reynolds kick (Herbie)
That leaves 3 tries from actual attacking plays
- Oates cut out from Capewell
- Herbie from the scrum
- the other Oates try I can’t remember
Including the trials I haven’t seen anything that suggests we have improved in any technical way since last year. The exception being as I said, goal line defence which is attitude not skill. So credit to Kev, he has somewhat improved their resilience, however nothing was really thrown at us the first 2 weeks either and today we faced a team with some actual attack and we looked like wet paper again.
It’s just a really poorly coached team. Aimless in attack, disjointed in defence. Poor game awareness in every facet - getting dragged in goal instead of finding the grass, not pressuring kickers, not protecting your own kicker, not blocking kick chases, throwing the ball around in our own half when up by 7, etc etc.
I won’t place blame, maybe we’ve just stumbled upon a group of uncoachable players, despite a turnover of over 12 players during the off season we’ve lucked out and found more uncoachable players.
