What a crazy game of football in 35 degree summer heat. It became a try-a-thon of touch football as players struggled to cover defend, as most breaks lead to tries. With a good lead at half time Souths started thinking about the up coming 5 day turnaround before the Rd4 clash with the Bulldogs and allowed Penrith back into the game with 16 early points in the 2nd half before refocusing on the game at hand. The match aggregate of 76 was the highest for a Souths v Penrith match. The second highest ever played by Souths and the highest Souths winning aggregate game. But in the wash up Souths are now 3 from 3 with the best start to a season since 2007.

Nathan Merritt collect 3 tries on the weekend the first person to ever do so for Souths in the openning 3 rounds twice. He is a early leader in the NRL Top Try Scorer list for 2013. He became the equal Top Try Scorer with 10 tries with Terry Fahey for matches against Penith. And his final try was the 250th try against the Panthers. He is now only 9 tries away from equaling the Souths try scoring record set 80 years ago by Benny Wearing.

While Bears won on the weekend the news coming out the game was the two long term injuries sustained by Matt King and Greg Waddell. Matt King re-broke his arm in his first game for the 2013 season and is out for 4 months. Greg Waddell ruptured his tricep and is also out for 4 months. These two long term injuries on top of injuries to Champion and Corrigan will test our center stocks over the coming months.

Congratulations to Souths U18 SG Ball team who are in 2nd place in the NSWRL Junior competition with 2 rounds remaining and have qualified for the semi finals after recording their win in Perth on the weekend. It was the first time since 1995 that a Souths team had played a Perth team in Perth.

Andrew Johns brought the issue up a last year that the RL ball is like a cake of soap in hot conditions. On the weekend was another classic example of this occuring. Around 15-20 min into both the U20 and FG games the RL ball collects players sweat and on the modern synthetic balls it acts like a lubricant making the ball very difficult to handle. The number of dropped balls that then occur in a arm or ball contest in the ruck increases. It is evident even more in the U20's matches. The NRL should trial a new ball or ball paint in the U20's games. With global warming this issue will increase rather than decrease over the coming years.

Another poor performance by the team this week. While the game was played at a low pace in the heat completion rates improved but were still poor at 71%. Average effective 1st tackles improved slightly but was still poor at 33.4m for the match. 9 errors and 25 missed tackles was a good improvement. But our cover and scrambling defence was poor this week and in the 2nd half we had a horrendous 40.0m average effective 1st tackle. The match as expected yeild the most line breaks for the season with 9 and 6 try assists. But our kicking game was down to only 12 kicks.

Looking at our left side defence - Merritt-Goodwin-Sutton-McQueen (1-3-1-1) increased to 6 from 3 missed tackles. On the right side Everingham-Farrell-Reynolds-Teo (0-2-2-2) improved to 6 from 11 missed tackles.

Our go forward dropped in the heat as all players struggled to make that extra 1 to 2 meters in each run and was a poor 1107m for the match. Tyrrell lead the way in the forwards was the best making 8.8+m per hitup. With Sam Burgess, George Burgess making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively Sam Burgess was our best in the tackling raking up 25 tackles. But all our starting forwards missed tackles with only Everingham, Peats, George Burgess and Tyrrell not missing a tackle.