23rd March 2011
Fitness
There are worrying signs that our match fitness has fallen behind other NRL teams as we have a squad with a number of players coming back from injury late in the off season. In almost all games this years we have let in a number of points in the last 5-10 min of each half, highlighting that we are not as fit as the opposition.
Tyrrell
Dave Tyrrell had a opportunity with both Ben Lowe and Jason Clark out to grab the lock position. He played a great game and has retained his spot even though Michael Crocker is made a return on the bench.
U16's lead the comp
Congratulations to our U16 team once again this year. At the end of round 5 they re leading the competition and look set to make teh semi finals again this year.
More Sunday Football !
Well this week a stink about the compensation from Monday Night Football has come up. Looks like clubs lose nearly $200K in corporate ticket sales, merchandise and ticket sales when matches are played on Monday Night. But only get $40K compensation. Many fans just cant get to Friday of Monday evening games because of work or school commitments. I believe we should scrap the 2nd Friday and MNF matches and return them to Sunday. I beleive the NRL should not be afraid to have Foxtel and Ch9 broadcast matches in opposition to each other with both showing matches live at 2pm and 4pm and Foxtel showing replays of the Ch9 games at 6pm and 7:30pm.
Rd 2 Stat Attack
Overall we have seen improvement The team made 1374m up from 1074m the week before and handling errors dropped from 16 to 10. both of these were at levels of the top sides Effective 1st tackles improved also this week on the back of the reduced dropped ball down to 35.3m from 51m. But the effective 1st tackles were still poor in the first half at 44.1. This was a result of our kicking game not being as effective with a most of our kicks being either caught on the full or going dead in goal. This going down significantly to 25.4m in the second half when our kicking game improved.
The most alarming stat and the main reason why we lost was the missed tackles. It was a whopping 58 up 45 the week before. This is a statstic that should be reading aroun 25-30 an is clearing something that needs to improve. Key contributers to this week were - Sandow, Luke, Taylor excessive with Sutton, Inglis and Farrell all too high as well. This shows that the opposition targeted our little men once again in Sandow and Luke Tackle effectiveness is a concern for Inglis making only 50%(6/12) and Sandow only 55%(15/27). For GI and Issac you have to ask are they fit enough to play 80 min after the offseason operations, or would we be better served run a rotation for a period increasing their game time steadily while they return from injury.
On the positive side we had strong running games from Asotasi and McPherson who both made 10+m per run this week. Defensively Stuart, Crocker, Ross, Tyrrell, McPherson played well either missing 0 or only 1 tackle After a strong game the week before I was surprised to see Ross's game time drop last week, I think we may need to revisit the tactic of using 4 forwards on the bench and go with a more balanced bench with someone like Falloon to allow Issac a break defensively. Bringing back Crocker via the bench worked and showed that we maybe tried to bring back too many people from injury in one match last week.
Signing off for another week - the midweek Cyber View from the Hill