Some good points and I will just comment on two.
@southerntiger said:
3 - Mullaney is not a loss.
Completely agree. Mullaney did some good things, but he is just a smaller version of Moltzen. Moltzen has the edge due to his ability to play in the halves. However, both a well behind the preferred fullback option in Tedesco. What is the difference? Size and ability.
@southerntiger said:
5 - there is something scarily wrong with our defence at times.
I am going to swim a little against the tide here and actually state our defence, whilst not the best, was a big improvement on the Souths match. Couple of things:
1\. Parra is playing great football. They were coming off scoring 40 odd points against the Broncos. They have basically thrown out the coaching handbook and are playing good attacking football. Some of the lines their players were running, in particular Fui and Tautai were exceptional.
2\. The improvement in the defence was the one-on-one efforts. Against Souths, we fell off Taylor and Sutton like flies. Last night, the line breaks were through some great lines run by Parra players and some poor reads. After each break, you see the offending players look at each other as if to say, 'I thought you had him." That says one thing - poor communication.
Poor communication comes from a lack of familiarity with the player on your outside and inside. Essentially this stems from a lack of stability in the starting line up, however this is why the defence improved and the number of Parra line breaks dropped off in the second half (I also thought our kicking game was intelligent).
Apparently there were 39 missed tackles. An ugly number, but you need to scratch the surface. There was not many one-on-one misses in the front line. Majority of the missed tackles occurred whilst trying to scramble after the big line breaks (Eg: there is about 6 on Roberts when he makes the break from dummy half).
Moral to this post…....Sheens needs to name an unchanged line up. The last 50 minutes showed he had found a combination that works. Combinations will continue to grow in both attack and defence and whether this team can do anything for the rest of the season remains to be seen. But you have to start somewhere.
