Post Match NRL 2015 - Rnd 21 - Warriors vs Sharks Post Match Discussion

[Warriors4ever]

Chad Townsend is as good as Grant Rovelli was for us

 

[The Batman]

Grant Rovelli- the inspiration behind the foo fighters hit "the pretender". Chad fits the bill here too

 

[ShaunJohnson7]

There's one thing I took away from that game... and keep going back to, trying to figure it out:

I just can't understand that rationale behind the position changes. I keep looking, thinking, but I can't...

Let's look at this rationally - we were without our chief playmaker, our main man in attack and thus it was always going to be the case that our attack was a little disjointed (which, lets be frank, it can be at the best of times anyway)... so given this, would it not make sense to put players in their most familiar positions, to create a sense of cohesion? I just don't get why you would take our left centre - who's played there all year, in a game where his partner in crime on that edge is coming back from injury, thus rekindling that combination - and put him on the other side of the field, where he's not played all year, and with someone coming back into the side from injury and who is playing his 4th(?) game?... Then, you take someone who's been our right centre for the last few years (admittedly, with many interruptions in that time) and put him on the left edge, where I'm not sure he's played in FG at all in his career, or if he was, on very few occasions... Again, pairing them with two players coming back from injury.

I was all for bringing Simon and Ben to the edges, seemed like a great idea to me, but again, I cannot fathom why on earth you would put Mutts, who was nigh on unstoppable on that left edge at times last year, and put him on the right, and take Simon who had by and large been your right edge back rower for the last few years, and put him on the left...

Then, probably the most confounding, you place our left edge playmaker - who has in his entire time at the club, only played left edge - on the right, and put our rookie on the left, again utterly altering the make-up of our combinations...

The heck?

Our entire back line and edge attack was changed for this game. What did you expect to happen? There was NEVER going to be any cohesion in our attack with that many changes, and it was obvious from the get go. Don't kid yourselves, our tries were very flukey - they were absolutely not the result of great attacking structures and smart, enterprising play. Go back and what that first half, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing on attack. At all. Sure, Townsend and Tomkins - bar getting us a few repeat sets - were truly pathetic, but no one had any idea what they were doing out there, where to stand, what lines to run and when to run... We had enough ball, enough territory and enough penalties to win 2 games there, but our attack was so poor in the areas of the field where it really matters, that it made NO difference.

This is on the coach...

Post of the day right here. What Cappy did was mind boggling, completely agree. It made no sense what so ever. This is definitely on the coach.

 

[Brother Faisal]

can someone tell me where Chad Townsend came from? i honestly cant remember how he got into this team when he came here e.t.c. he seemed to be a shadow that infiltrated my team without me really noticing him.

 

[Maraea]

hurrell had a good game, he looked peed off about Manu being out of position a couple of times on defence, one leading to a cronulla try. if he was peed off i wish he would say something he has every right its a team effort. the warriors realy pushed cronulla they had to pull a couple of tries out of their ass to win by two points and cronulla have been on a winning streak, not bad for a bunch of players out of position most with limited first grade experience. the more experienced players were more of a let down fr the warriors. mannering, break the line or draw in defenders before you go for the offload please. welcome back manu, hopefully you're better next week. sending good messages to the players for trying their nads off will do alot for our team, so get on twitter, facebook all that and let em know you appreciate the young guys efforts.

 

[Bluecat again]

For me yesterday was our big chance to show what we can be without Johnson and to stake a claim as a serious footy side and as a top 8 team. We had to fancy our chances at home against the Sharkies and we had 1000 or so tackles in their half in the first half to stamp our authority on the game and the rest of the season and we couldn't put together a set play apart from kick and hope to score a try. Sadly we showed what we can be alright. It was a shame because a win would have given the team so much confidence and belief that they can do it without Shaun Johnson. And apart from a few flashes of brilliance from Johnson they pretty much have played this season with a mediocre number 7 and they have won games. We needed to win yesterday for so many reasons. Confidence, belief, to give Cappy some breathing room, to keep us in the chase for the 8, for some to help in their hope of a regular first grade spot next year, respect, even just to show that they can. One more missed chance
As for the playmaker poll, my pick would be number 4. None of the above

 

[Ever Hopeful]

I really don't get the up and down hate/love for Townsend.

He is and always was a bog standard (slightly below) average player. Fans upset with his performance have obviously built him up to be something that he is not. He will go to the Sharks and take over Robson's roll and do just fine provided Maloney, Barba, Holmes etc provide spark. Yet he will be equally vilified by fans over there because for some reason fans demand that every player has to be marquee level. He is a Rovelli, teams probably won't win a premiership with him as a half, but he is not the reason the Warriors season has gone belly up. He is not meant to be the dominant half.

Neither is Tomkins who is a fabulous player, trying to adjust to a team that does not always understand the basics of footy or how to play to game plans. It is a team that does not have his old team mates in Leuluai or Hoffman nor the playmaker in the team that he has formed an excellent combination with in Shaun Johnson.

Cappy has taken this club forward in a multitude of ways, although he has made some mind-boggling decisions with his use of the bench and Sione 'free-ride' Lousi and Siliva '5 minutes before ejaculation of fatigue' Havili.

RFM couldn't defend at NSW/U20s level; he is an example of the old regime in which we ignore the bad because he is so good with the ball in hand. He has the potential to be excellent, but man o man trying to develop someone's potential in first grade rather than working on what someone is weak at in the off-season or NSW cup has bitten us a lot over the years. When you consider this is an issue with Maumolo, Fusitua, Havili, Lousi, Kata, Lisone, Ikahahifo it is little wonder we sit where we are. Chuck in our ongoing battles with Hurrell, Vatuvei and Fisia'ihi and there is a lot for the rest to try and wallpaper over.

The two that have really stood up for me this year are Vete and Lolohea. Stellar years. Hopefully Lisone will continue to improve too. One I must admit that I never thought was good enough was Gubb. I have to say that he has been excellent and his defence off the bench when momentum is swinging away from us is invaluable moving forward to next season. Stand up and take a bow, Charlie.

One disappointment for me is how massively Mannering is stunting attacking moves atm. As said before his attacking game has gone backwards over the last couple of seasons. He is almost on par with Lillyman in that he needs to be used only for settling hit-ups.

The game against Manly is the loss that hurt and broke our back...this game against the Sharks...meh.

 

[Richie]

The two that have really stood up for me this year are Vete and Lolohea. Stellar years. Hopefully Lisone will continue to improve too. One I must admit that I never thought was good enough was Gubb. I have to say that he has been excellent and his defence off the bench when momentum is swinging away from us is invaluable moving forward to next season. Stand up and take a bow, Charlie.

Already agreed and thought this, but I'm gonna repeat this to myself like a mantra for the rest of this year as therapy.

On the Dragons game, Hoff obviously comes in and I'm in the ST to 7, Tui to 6, Fusitua or Fish to fb camp. Not ideal, but what is. I'd rather see ST show his skills for the last 5 rnds than watch Chad keep delivering crap. I think Tui would get more from playing next to ST as well, and at this stage, giving our young guns whatever advantage we can for next year might be the best we can hope for.

 

[facefacts]

Unfortunately it's starting to become pretty obvious that Kata is being dominated on defense because of his size, which is a real shame. He's showing a whole lot of positives in the position, but at the same time is becoming yet another target to attack on our edges.
He either dedicates himself to becoming a devastating leg tackler even if that means giving away fast play the balls, or he keeps getting pushed around by bigger men.

We seem to be fixated on the bash and crash type of outside back. We saw yesterday that it can start your sets off very well, but when the team needs players with the ability to create, those players are sorely lacking...running hard and straight is brilliant when making meters in our own half or through the middle of the field, but when hard on attack you have to throw a lot more at an NRL defensive line, particularly a good defensive line.

There wouldn't be an NRL player thats not a defensive genius when the opposition run straight at them, and yes that includes Manu Vatuvei...the problems start for defenders when they have speed, footwork and skill thrown at them, and lets face it, Maumalo, Vatuvei and sadly Hurrell are basically run over the opposition or nothing guys, which is fine, but not when your backline is full of the same...and when they're all at varying degrees of defensive ineptitude, things just get harder.

Lolohea is an amazing winger already, and is very good defensively which is a massive bonus. He should be our full time right winger and pair him with a defensively strong center when we find one...that would shut down a lot of teams main attacking edge, and still offer us a very strong attacking edge.

Our left edge really has to include Hurrell going forward. He has the speed, the skill and the footwork, he's just not using it, he has it in his head that he needs to run over his opposite when he also has the ability to run around them...i would love to see a classy coach get their hands on him, i think we'd see a different Konnie.

A left edge with Konrad has to have a defensively strong winger outside him...we cant continue having two bulldozers who are both weak defenders standing next to each other, no matter who those two players are...saying that, i would have no real problem having two big power running outside backs playing beside each other if they were a fantastic defensive unit.

Sadly our edge defenses are as weak as ever and are becoming offensively very predictable, we are overly reliant on a player like Johnsons individual brilliance to create chances and situations where our power backs can get a clear run to the line or a one on one close to the line...we saw versus the Roosters what happened when Johnson was shut down, there was nothing...there was no creativity from anyone else, we just tried to bash our way over the line which is all but impossible versus a quality defense.

We have the makings of a strong side, we just need a couple more imports in the right positions.

 

[Danpatmac]

McFadden and Mannering said in the press conference (to paraphrase) that the energy, intensity was there on attack but what ultimately cost us the game were defensively soft performances by our left edge that let at least one easy try in.

The really frustrating thing is that we all know nothing is going to change there.

 

[Xfactor]

Sigh.... Should have nailed that with all those repeat sets but sadly just proved what everyone was saying. We got nothing in attack without Johnson.

I'll echo what everyone else is saying about Townsend... Not sad he's leaving at all.

How bloody hard is it to have a support runner off Muts. Lost count of the number of times he ran at a small dude out wide and could have easily offloaded, but had nobody in support.

I've been screaming about our absence of support runners for years now! We have/had some of the best offloaders in the game whose talents have been wasted by our almost complete lack of awareness that offloads might occur. How many times have we seen a player unexpectedly receive an offload and go "shit! I've got the ball! whose feet can I throw it at"

 

[jonno]

I thought we could have won that game if we'd kept playing our power game. We made them tackle 80 more in the first half. Just keep going with what's working on the night...

Instead we went second half into a pussy footing strategy, and that never works...

Rumble up field and attack weakness... The sharks would have run out of gas first IMO if we'd just keep on hammering them...

 

[InsideBall]

McFadden and Mannering said in the press conference (to paraphrase) that the energy, intensity was there on attack but what ultimately cost us the game were defensively soft performances by our left edge that let at least one easy try in.

The really frustrating thing is that we all know nothing is going to change there.

Energy and intensity on attack are all well and good, but they are only effective when intelligently directed... When there is laser focus, when everyone knows their roles intimately and when the team acts as one, only then can you ever really be effective in attack - and the reality is, that takes time, practice and familiarity... Things that were totally blown out of the water with so many (unforced) positional changes...

 

[eX | Machina]

I've been screaming about our absence of support runners for years now! We have/had some of the best offloaders in the game whose talents have been wasted by our almost complete lack of awareness that offloads might occur. How many times have we seen a player unexpectedly receive an offload and go "shit! I've got the ball! whose feet can I throw it at"

We haven't had a proper support playing fullback since McKinnon. The Sheck will hopefully fix that problem to some degree next year but to be honest I haven't seen him running much off the forwards either. The best support players in recent times have been Maloney and Johnson.

 

[DavidMcKay1974]

It could have been much much worse. If all those doomsayers merchancts out there that said we are done for the season when we lost Johnson, admittedly I was one of them, but on the back of last night performance I saw something which most people failed to see. They played strong in the first half, and okay fell away a bit in the second half. Had Manu been 5 or 6 years younger he would have scored that try that would have won us the game. But we needed him back and he only had 1 bad error on attack, and that was dropping the ball once.

We had like 5 or 6 errors the whole game, better than the last few weeks.

So what if Sam Tomkins slipped over, yes that's irritating, but he at least gave it a go. What I saw of Tui, he is going to be a star if he is left in that role. Give him the 6 jersey ahead of Leuleuai. What a stepping game. Our next Shaun Johnson. Imagine if both of them go like that next year. He'll get better Tui. Give him time.

The forwards did well in the first half, okay we lost a bit of shape in the second half, and the Sharks scored.

Like I said it could have been worse than it should. We could have been belted off the park 30 to nil. But we stood up without Johnson. The combinations need to start gelling. It looked rusty a bit. So lets give them two more games and then start laying the blame.

We are still in the 8 thanks to Cowboys. If the Knights beat the Dragons we're still there, if not we need to beat out bogey team next week to get back into the 8.'

I for one liked what I saw. Committment for most of the match, and the arrival of Tui.

 

[snake77]

Let's look at this rationally - we were without our chief playmaker, our main man in attack and thus it was always going to be the case that our attack was a little disjointed (which, lets be frank, it can be at the best of times anyway)... so given this, would it not make sense to put players in their most familiar positions, to create a sense of cohesion? I just don't get why you would take our left centre - who's played there all year, in a game where his partner in crime on that edge is coming back from injury, thus rekindling that combination - and put him on the other side of the field, where he's not played all year, and with someone coming back into the side from injury and who is playing his 4th(?) game?... Then, you take someone who's been our right centre for the last few years (admittedly, with many interruptions in that time) and put him on the left edge, where I'm not sure he's played in FG at all in his career, or if he was, on very few occasions... Again, pairing them with two players coming back from injury.

I was all for bringing Simon and Ben to the edges, seemed like a great idea to me, but again, I cannot fathom why on earth you would put Mutts, who was nigh on unstoppable on that left edge at times last year, and put him on the right, and take Simon who had by and large been your right edge back rower for the last few years, and put him on the left...

Then, probably the most confounding, you place our left edge playmaker - who has in his entire time at the club, only played left edge - on the right, and put our rookie on the left, again utterly altering the make-up of our combinations...

The heck?

Great post.

The media once queried Cleary on how he was going to replace one injured player. They asked if the preferred option was to move x payer here and swap y and z. Cleary's response was that was an option but not preferred as it's 3 changes to accommodate 1.

We needed to replace Johnson that's a given. We either put Lolohea straight in there and look to the future, we keep Tomkins at the back and can play the same structures. Or we move Tomkins into the halves to run the side and get Lolohea to fullback where he's played a fair bit already this year. That's the decision for the halves.

I'm not sure on swapping the halves. Townsend played on the right at the Sharks, if we were going to play him on the right it should have been when he first joined the club.

I like the move to the edge for Mannering and Matulino. I was querious on which side they were going to play. We needed to replace Thompson so moving Mannering to the right where we have leaked points would have been less disruptive. We then use Matulino on the left where he was going well last year until Hoffman returns. Matulino then gets to work with Townsend again which was a combination that went well last year on the left.

I'm not sure on the centre swap.

We need to replace a half and a edge back rower. That's two changes or three if we move Mannering to stiffen the right edge. We seemed to go overboard on the changes to fix two.

 

[Danco]

So fucking angry at that performance! Not because we lost, but because every time we had attacking field position, we sent it through our edge backrowers hoping to crash over, so much for not changing the game plan cappy, you minge, didn't once see us try to free our outside backs, and what was the point of changing sides with kata and Konnie? Did nothing except ruin our edge defence... Fucksake

you are right BUT both centres need to learn to read the game better and don't miss tackles, that's only part of it. woke up this morning with another bloody nightmare????

 

[Fazz]

McFadden and Mannering said in the press conference (to paraphrase) that the energy, intensity was there on attack but what ultimately cost us the game were defensively soft performances by our left edge that let at least one easy try in.

The really frustrating thing is that we all know nothing is going to change there.

FFS. Hope they're just being diplomatic. Our attack was fucking diabolical. It was obvious we'd struggle to score points whenever we were close to the tryline. I actually think we looked more dangerous 40m out or off kick returns. It was infuriating that Friend kept passing to Townsend, who kept either fucking up his pass or throw short passes to a second rower. He BARELY went to Kata all game it felt like. It was clear that we looked more dangerous every time we went to Tui/Tomkins. Last night made me glad both Friend and Townsend are leaving. It was ridiculous the amount of attack position those cu**s managed to waste. If Johnson were playing, he would have had a field day with that much possession near the tryline.

Also, what the fuck was Cappy doing switch the backs around at the last minute? Kata and Manu were actually quite sound defensively early in the season, while Hurrell and Manu has never worked. I guess he thought Maumalo could use some help or something? Fuck. I don't know. It didn't work either way. Hurrell's defence is becoming more and more of an issue. It's to the point where he isn't justifying his inclusion.

On the bright side, our power game from the backs seem to work well in getting us some field position. The Sharks defended well too, so it was an improvement on the last two weeks at least, in that we didn't get smashed.

 

[snake77]

Second point. Townsend is a split halves kind of guy who does well with a structured attack on his left edge, and Tomkins offers that structure from the back, but Hurrell and Manu don't give any structure at all...

Third point. Cappy inherited a team that his predecessors tried to turn into Manly and didn't even get half way into recruiting players who could play the Manly style. Not only that but our club is now being pushed into a full ad lib footy club with the new signings coming through. Does Cappy even know how to coach an ad lib footy side?

I think you might be putting too much on Elliott's Manly comment. He was probably more referring to how Manly play smart and always make the defence think and work.

Townsend is a split halves kind of guy? If you listen too Gould or John's etc they are worried no halves nowadays can organise an entire field instead of just one side. Brian Smith wrote in RLW that split halves have been around since Warren Ryan's Bulldogs in the 80's; he listed some sides that have used it and some of his and why he employed it. The article a few weeks back about the option of moving Johnson to 6 and moving away from split halves was interesting as it wasn't the norm about just moving the player to the 6 jersey. Thomas Leuluai has been around for so long he may be one of the few halves that hasn't played just on one side of the field but used to work the whole field.

Can McFadden coach adlib football? That's a question we can ask most coaches; they tend to avoid that as they get less control on what happens on the field. It's risky as their jobs are on the line. Even Bennett changed after Langer retired the Broncos went from exciting football to mistake free football, now he's back at the Broncos coaching more expansive again.

 

[Dropped Balls]

Some really good posts on this game......and the problems were there for all to see. Some good analysis too.
But a great number of the problems were Coaching problems, in the sense of positional changes, and even tactics.

I don't want to get on a young coaches back, but I think he needs more help.
An experienced Senior figure to mentor him would be an asset.

I don't know what the current set-up is, but I would hope there is a specialist 'Defensive' coach, as well as one for 'Attack'.
Because they are both sorely needed. We get ourselves into some great positions relatively easily, and are unable to finish off.

Refs notwithstanding.!!
Add to this the fact that the very last thing that comes with 'young' players is consistency, and it goes some way to explaining our current woes.