After the Knights game... The team look emotionally and physically burnt out. To me it looks like the brutal pre-season that had us as the fittest team in the comp early on, has caught up and is costing us.
I love the idea of driving standards -- but I would gladly pass on the army camps next season if everyone is coming back and passing fitness tests. I don't think that stuff is what our team needs anymore. We need to get better at scoring points instead of carrying jerry cans from here to there with 3 hours of sleep. It's not about effort areas anymore, we just need to play better footy.
Sorry mate but I disagree strongly.
Fitness is paramount.
We are not a hard working team at all on the field compared to top teams. The reason we make errors is because we go one out, and the reason we go one out is because the team isn't fit enough to give good running options, go through the line and then get back 15m behind the ball to do it again.
We don't wrestle at all in the ruck after 15-20 minutes because we get tired. We did well at the start of the year when the ruck was super fast but as the ruck has slowed, teams that wrestle with and without the ball have gotten better.
In saying all that, I'm not putting it on the players at all. Jerome, May, Api, Turuva etc have been fit players before coming here.
The performance staff imo are simply under-resourced. You need to spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on a big team of physios, strength and conditioning coaches, guest coaches speakers and then be prepared to spend just as much on recovery equipment.
You need sports psychs to teach them resilience.
I don't think the Club is spending any of that money. This money needs to be spent all the way from JF to NRL and the Club just isn't doing it.
Army camps don't really make you fit. They make you resilient and they improve camaraderie within the group. Our team plays better when they play on emotion but that isn't replicable.
We will simply go out and buy players to plug holes because the Clubs almost entire budget needs to be spent on salary cap so we will never actually develop first graders.
Until we get some more money, we will have to rely on emotions, teamwork, mental resilience to get through each season and hopefully one season we get to the Top 8..