I thought we were great in the halves.
Hingano did a great job of freeing up
Johnson by keeping the passing clean, rallying his forwards....calling runners onto the ball....for a kid with little battle time he looked the most composed local greenhorn since Isaac John.
If he keeps developing in that mould he will be the next Keiran Foran.
Keep kicking sonny....you'll make big bucks.
Good effort in the tackle....I'm excited for our future.
On the other hand our other greenhorns...by in large....looked over pumped,....trying too hard....and nervous in defence.
Out of that over pumped mindset, comes the push and shove, the dropped balls, the miss timed tackling.
Kearney got them pretty fired up over the off season.
His senior players were fired up, especially Mannering,
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck,
Shaun Johnson,, Luke, and Hoffman.
All those blokes came to life in that game like it was Origin time.
Unlike the greenhorns....those veterans knew how to channel the desperation for a round one win at home.
The loss of Mannering and Luke were crucial in Newcastle's resurgence.
Enter Cpt
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Ex Cpt Hoffman, who engineered the win.
That must have put a smile on
SK's dial.
That action by the Captains is the kind of Pride in the Jersey shit we have bemoaned for five years.
Watching our D line get out played by Newey in the battle of the ruck poses lots of questions around our go forward, versus opposition teams relative ease at running a standard set of six over half way.
Why do we get rolled back ? Why is it that scramblers like Mannering and Luck are our only chance at surviving the opposition runners ?
It is not just about Big boppers going through our middle....Mobile smaller packs like St George Illawarra, actually have the best record of beating us in the ruck.
The problem goes back to how we play league here...Vs how they play league there.
In NZ our forwards are used to one out runners coming at them down the middle.
Big hits on boyz.
The Knights on the other hand (and any Aussie side you care to name) have more than one runner in motion....and they pass the ball....yeah beating NZ defence is as simple as passing at the ruck/second man plays, going wide of where our D line is prepared to engage.....
Often when Aussie teams do this, they put a hard runner one on one versus a lazy Warrior....like Mateo....or an inexperienced Warrior, like so many of our ISP/U20 boys.
That weak spot, on the edge of the meat of our defence is where Clearly tried to populate it with Luck/Mannering/
Taylor/Henry/Brown/and is why we now have Mannering/Hoffman/Thompson.
So....our defence is reliant on reactive scramblers...tacklebots is unkind...but none the less, because our defensive lack of smarts ...lack of ability...lack of commitment in some positions....we have always been papering over cracks.
Stephen
Kearney solved that problem at international level.
His defensive systems proved as good, and at times better than Aussie.
He found a way to hold the best attacking players/structures in the world, to twelve points or less.
That was no fluke.
The other side of the coin is how we behave when we have the ball.
Due to a reliance on winning the ruck through our backs (the Manu clause) and the recruitment of
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, we are locked into big or super freak outside backs to lay our platform and win some ruck speed, for lack of Salary cap spent on the like of Wiki and Price...out and out Star prop.
Let's all pray
SK can introduce the Kiwi do or die goal line defence.
That would win us the GF back to back....if teams can't get more than 12 against this club, they are fucked.
Let's hope we see a Sipley run like Tapau after Manu/Ken hit the ball up....that combination is bad ass enough to see the Warriors over the half way line with two hit ups....it may well be a very Warrior way of approaching the game....but who cares when you have
Shaun Johnson, Foran,
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, and Luke to finish that type of bowling pin Polynesian, unorthodox game breaking.
Lastly, to those criticising Ken for running sideways ....he hits the line at the same weak point Newly hits ours...after a couple of passes/a team of forward runners....Let's hope Foran can put him there with a pass rather than lose a millisecond here and there by running wide of their D lines strong point.