It was a bruising defensive display on Monday night. Souths and Cronulla both extended the ruck and obstruction rules to the limit as they arm wrestled for most of the match. It was good hit out against a team that many think could be a Top 4 side in 2013 but the 11 day turnaround left the team like it was coming off the bye. But in the end the score could have much bigger after two disallowed tries, one bombed try and one opposition try coming off a Souths error. And the night's crowd of 14,128 was a crowd record for matches between Souths and the Sharks at Stadium Australia.
Bryson Goodwin became Souths FG player 1093. He was solid in the centers in defence and had a good line break after running over one of the Sharks players. He will be a good fill in player during the year.
Souths U16 Harold Matts team lead the NSWRL Junior competition with 3 rounds remaining and have qualified for the semi finals after recording their 3rd 50+ result this season. All looking good for the future.
The NRL needs to seriously look into the team turnarounds from week to week. Within the space of 3 weeks Souths go from a 11 day turanound to a 5 day turnaround. No team should have less that 6 day turn arounds or more than 8 day turnarounds. Its not that hard.
After a last week this week was a very poor performance by the team. Most telling was the completion rates which dropped from 84% to 66%. Effective 1st tackles dropped by 9m to a poor 35.5m for the match. 14 errors and 37 missed tackles were at unacceptable levels. With a period from 20 min to 60 min where we gave away almost all our penalities and made most of our errors as the Sharks bustled us until we regained compsure.
Looking at our left side defence - Merritt-Goodwin-Sutton-McQueen (0-1-0-2) was a respectable 3 missed tackles. On the right side Everingham-Farrell-Reynolds-Teo (0-2-5-4) increased to 11 from 9 missed tackles.
On the positive side our go forwards was much improved on last years Sharks game at 1566m for the match. Tyrrell lead the way in the forwards was the best making 9.6+m per hitup. With Lima, Te'o, Tyrrell, George Burgess making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively Te'o was our best in the tackling raking up 43 tackles. But all our forwards missed tackles with only Sutton, Merritt and Everingham not missing a tackle.