His job as the senior playmaker is to identify weakness in the defensive line and exploit it. He did a few things wrong in that last 15 minutes:
Firstly, he attacked the Warriors right edge. I think he did this because Gildart was put into space on a few occasions throughout the game and had To’a outside him, who was causing them a lot of trouble. It appears a sound theory, except their right edge was fully intact defensively and the left edge was weakened due to the binning. As a result, this became the low percentage play.
Secondly, he let the kids run the plays. If rank amatures like us could all see that Simpkin, Maddern and Laurie weren’t handling the situation, surely our chief playmaker, captain and 9 year veteran of the NRL could also? He either didn’t, which is terrible or he did and chose to do nothing about it, which is worse.
Thirdly, he panicked in attack. He was playing well up until the binning and was creating line breaks and point scoring opportunities, of which we failed to convert through no fault of his own. The smart play was to keep persevering with what he was doing. It was working. Sooner or later someone would have held onto the damned ball and scored the match winner. We needed him to be calm and continue probing their line as he was doing. Instead he withdrew from being the primary attacker and when the ball did come to him, he was frantic, throwing ill timed passes to guys who were already covered on the wrong side of the field.The only time he correctly attacked their left side, it resulted in failure and he just gave up on it.
The Warriors didn’t necessarily defend well with 12 men, we just threw nothing at them and that comes back on Brooks as Cronk correctly identified.
