NQ troops back on deck
Game showed we have plenty to improve on as team powers into finals
THE representative and Origin period is now behind us and it was great to welcome Tom Dearden, Tom Gilbert, Val Holmes and Jeremiah Nanai back into the side after their successful Origin decider.
With nearly a full complement of players to chose from we came through the rep period in relatively good shape, having won six of our past seven games.
We are expecting back Reuben Cotter shortly and Jordan Mclean not long after that.
This is going to be great for us moving forward and will definitely create more competition for spots as we head towards the pointy end of the season.
Last weekend’s game saw us take on the Wests Tigers.
We knew that this team were going to be desperate and they have been playing a pretty expansive, carefree style of football.
They move the ball around a lot and also offload at will so it was going to be up to us to do a good job defensively to stop them.
Our preparation was great. We had trained really well all week and we had a number of narrow focuses that our coaches gave us.
A few of those were to watch Fa’amanu Brown close to the line as he will go for a dive-over try from dummy-half, and to watch their offloads in and around the middle part of the field.
To put it bluntly, we didn’t achieve any of the objectives we had set out prior to the game.
After scoring early you may have been tricked into thinking it was going to be one-way traffic.
We did not give ourselves a chance to play our best football after we scored early.
We did not respect the ball and completed at a mere 64 per cent, which is going to make it extremely hard to get into the game. We usually aim for this to be above 80 per cent.
We made 16 errors which in the NRL you just cannot do.
Making a lot of errors in a game forces you to do more defence. When you defend for long periods of time you lose energy as defending requires a lot more output than attacking.
The aim of the game is to hold the ball for long periods of time and to create fatigue in the opposition defensive line.
We created a lot of opportunities in the game and I was happy about that. We hung in there even though a lot of things were going against us.
Our coaches have drilled into us to compete until the 80th minute. We did just that.
It took right up to the 80th minute for us to seal the game.
It was by no means perfect and people are open to have their own opinions about what happened but for us we just tried to do what we’ve been told since we were kids and that’s to play to the whistle.
Moving forward we need to be better and we need to improve our defence if we want continue on an upward trend.