Souths took on 2nd placed Manly in what turned to be more than just a match of football. It ended up being a ANZAC weekend battleground at Brookvale Oval. From head high tackles, spear tackles to a good old fashioned brawl. Manly threw everything at Souths including the kitchen sink and Souths came out on top and in clear 2nd place on the ladder. While Souths battled out a great victory there were a few signs that improvement is still needed.
Bryson Goodwin had a great battle with Australian center Jamie Lyon out wide. Jamie threw every trick he knew at Goodwin and Goodwin was able to contain him on every occassion. This was his best game thus far in Rabbitoh colours.
It was a great win by our Reserve Grade team. Tom Burgess scored a great try and starred in seting a platform. The backs then dominated lead by Luke Keary with some great attacking set plays.
Congratulations to our U16 boys who qualified for our first Grand Final since 2010. Lets bring it home and win our first premiership in any grade since 1998.
We need to revisit how a second on report charge in the same match is handled. At the moment there are a number of issues. A player can continue to perform foul play without immediate penalty and teh penalty for the second offence is not treated in the same manner as the first. The NRL need to look at a forced replacement if the same player is put on report for a second occurance if he is not sent off. That means one of 10 interchanges is used and that player cannot return to the field. Also teh second on report offence needs to be 20% or 50% loaded where the first offence is taken into account rather than ignored. The Fa'aoso situation for the second offence should have been 70%(20+50%) loaded rather than only 20% loaded. The NRL MRC inidicated they would treat them as seperate offences but they continue to ignore that two occured in the one match.
It was battle ground but statistically it was a poor game by Souths with worrying signs across the park. Souths gifted field position on the back of 12 penalties and 12 errors. But to Souths credit their goal line defence was great. Completion rates was good at 83% Effective 1st tackle for the match was the worst of teh season at 46.6m on the back of a horrid 51.2m in the second half. 30 missed tackles and 16 opposition offloads indicated teh game could have easily gone the other way.
Looking at our left side defence - Merritt-Goodwin-Sutton-McQueen (3-2-1-1) was dropped to 7 from to 3 missed tackles. On the right side Everingham-Champion-Reynolds-Teo (0-0-2-3) improved to 5 from 8 missed tackles. But we missed a lot of tackles up the middle with Sam Burgess missing 6 and Ben Lowe missing 4 tackles.
Our go forward was great this week was poor at 1161m for the match with Tyrrell, McQueen, and Lowe did not providing enough go forward. Ben Teo lead the way in the forwards was the best making 8.8m per hitup. With only Teo and Sam Burgess making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively Sam Burgess was our best in the tackling raking up 32 tackles. With Luke, Asotasi, Clark, Champion and Everingham not missing a tackle.