6th April 2016
We entered Brookvale with a house on fire, notched up our 35,000th premiership point and jumping to great 16 nil team after 20 minutes. But then we put in a big defensive effort to hang onto the game. We have the big 3 weekends coming up against last years Minor Premiers, Premiers and Runners Up. This will go along way to defining our season. Still 10 more wins to qualify for the finals.
Sam made his return after injury and it was a strong performance and looks to be ok after the injury a few weeks ago. But we can see him visably tiring earlier in this game.
Another future star got his chance at the next level this week with Talakai stepping up for his reserve grade match debut and scoring a try to boot.
After the success of Cameron Murray stepping up, we see Emre Guler and Alatapi step up for their U20s debut and help guide the team for another good victory.
Our U18s were ruthless in their destruction of the Central Coast recording a great 80 nil victory. This secured their final spot as they home in on a top 4 finish. Marewe Hiroti also became the first Souths player in all grades to notch up 100 points bagging 32 points on the day.
Congratulations to the NSW Country RL for expanding the U16s and U18s tournament into a full round robin style competition. This is a good first step towards a amlagamation between the NSWRL U16 Matthews and U18 SG Ball competitions, so that we can get a true national championship in U16s and U18s. Only places left after this on a national level will be Adelaide and Darwin.
Round 5 - Stat Attack
Statistically in was a rocks and diamonds game. Some stats were very good others very poor. Completion rates dropped to 83% from 74% this week. Errors dropped to 7 from 10 last week. We gave away 8 penalities compared to 4 last week. Souths Effective 1st tackle dropped to a very poor level at 41.3m from 36.5m last week. With a disasterous second half of 51.3m. Our missed tackles dropped to 39 missed tackles from 21 last week. Opposition offloads increased to 11 from 9 last week.
Looking at our left side defence - AGray-Auvaa-CWalker-Grevsmuhl (0-2-6-4) increased to 12 from 6 missed tackles last week. On the right side Oldfield-HHunt-Keary-KTurner (1-1-5-2) dropped to 9 missed tackles from 7 last week.
Our go forward this week dropped to 1231m. George Burgess, Grevsmuhl and Hymel Hunt made 10+m per hitup. With Sam Burgess, Brown, Grevsmuhl and Hymel Hunt making more that 100+m in the match. Defensively McInnes was our best in the tackling raking up 49 tackles. With only Aaron Gray not missing a tackle.