One thing that interested me is when we thought we needed points the attack really opened up, last 20 mins. We did similarly against Penrith and Souths. There was much more ball movement and players coming hard onto the ball; very expansive.
It ended up being reasonably mistake-ridden as well, which is understandable, and particularly last night we'd done that mountain of work and look tired.
I just wonder however if at times we could up our backline aggression / risk by maybe 20% for short periods and be a little less rudimentary.
For example, the commentators kept on going on about how good an attacking record we have in 2020, 3rd-best in comp. This is technically true in terms of total points but it belies a deeper stat that we have been flogging low-placed opposition. The points against middle to upper-placed sides are modest.
It appears to me that we try to control the match momentum and then score points, which isn't necessarily wrong, but it also appears to follow that we aren't chancing our hand until a little too late in some matches.
Contrast to Eels, they broke the match open with some middle-ground offloading and a chip-n-chase.
We perhaps aren't quite a good enough team yet to use wrestle all match to try and control the game, then score points by weight of possession and pressure. Perhaps sometimes we need to attack hard earlier in the game, for example back-end of first half.
We also drop too much ball, still, to hope to apply sustained pressure. We definitely compete for 80 mins at the moment, but we are still coming undone against the best sides by those 1%ers, the RCG try, the Dylan Edwards try.
