I mean the referee was poor (more so the touchies with missed forward passes), but was hardly the reason we lost. A lot of key players were off their game, notably Nathan who on two occasions put in two sad grubbers behind the line for no effect (I don’t think anybody knew it was on).
I would be happy to chalk it up to disruptions for Nathans 200th, but we know we will know for sure next week.
A big concern for me was how much success the Bulldogs found when isolating Talagi in defence. Both he and McLean was massively exposed in defence last night, and it looked quite troubling. Ivan is going to have to review the tape and work out how to sure up the defensive line, because I’m sure the Dolphins will test it out next week too.
It was almost destined to happen I guess - the most incredible 5 games to start the season led to an overall pretty poor performance. My memory is that we have a terrible record in personal milestone games, so that was one concern.
Were we just overconfident or was there some fatigue from the 100% effort pre-season and first 5 games? It takes a lot of physical and mental energy to completely dominate the games as we did. I am sure that an early season goal was to start well in the first 5 games, by any measure a pretty hard draw, and perhaps there was some sort of letdown in intensity for the dogs game. Managing fatigue, within each game, and week to week, will be an important issue for IC to deal with & we will need to use all 20 players thru the season.
The dogs were missing a main attacking weapon in Critter, and without him, their back 5 offer little danger in attack. Clearly they have a hard working middle, but no scary players there, so their main weapons were their backrowers running at our edges, which worked well for them. We must have known that was their go, but we seemed unable to respond, leading to a few easy tries.
The dogs have worked out a workaround on the new disruptor rule, where they stack players just in front of the receiver, without challenging, and rely of the catcher struggling to retain the ball when they come down against the scrum of players.
Interestingly we seemingly chose to just let Tracey, not a noted highball catcher, just catch the ball without challenge, and then tackle him???
We made lots of errors and some of the passing was terrible. To me it looked as if we just expected to make breaks as in Games 1-5, without earning them and then just ran out of ideas. NC’s 2 aimless midfield grubbers illustrated it well.
Oh well, time for redemption against the dolphins in Darwin of all places??
I’ve thought more about the game, and after seeing that during the week Nathan had his 200 game jersey presentation, and the whole team had this huge Westfield visit - maybe there were simply too many distractions during the week.
Seeing how emotional Nat got in that presentation, no wonder he didn’t seem 100%. It was across the board too, even our leaders were making dumb errors.
I have become a cynic of the NRL - They want new eyes on the game and that can only be increased by attracting new fans to big scorelines, this weekend showed exactly what i mean. Almost every team gets to a big lead of 16 or more, the momentum shifts (refs directly impact this) and we go to 1/2 time almost level - rinse and repeat 2nd half.
On Saturday Night, Paul Gallen was in commentary with Nathan Cleary, he was blowing up about how they have worked out how to stop Penrith, with the penalties and 6 agains, it was likened to a 35 penalty game and that is unacceptable. Nath was just smiling, that finally someone is telling the truth.
Yep, our advantage against most (not all) sides comes from free flowing passages where the grind works.
A few other teams will get in the trenches with us and it’s hard.
But there’s been a few games lately where the second half has devolved into a stop-start mess and our free flowing point scoring ceases.
We need a counter to the rush on Cleary, that doesn’t involve Cleary or protecting him. Something that uses Cleary as the bait and sits with Talagi, Edwards, Yeo and Cogger
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