Round 22: St George Illawarra vs Manly

[RedVHeartbeat]

Or if Sloan involved himself in the action in the first half.

I saw plenty of involvement from him around the ruck and the ball carrier, just that he attacked the line more in the second. Betting he is aching to get into first receiver but with Hunt, Amone, even Jack there he can only step into dummy half occasionally to get his hands on the leather.

 

[RedVHeartbeat]

In this era the fullback is intricate in organising the defensive line, changing structures when required and lastly being able to make more tackles than they miss

Zac Lomax fits that bill. I have seen him quite often talking to the defense. Fullback is a bit too much for Sloan at this point of his development, so Flanagan needs to get him in a position where he can use either his ball skills or his sheer pace and silky footwork.

 

[RedVHeartbeat]

we leak 4 tries a game.

.. and I keep saying that it is our outside backs, Suli, Rava and the worst offender Feagai that are causing these tries to be leeked. Sloan is being left with too much to do to clean up their mess. Three again yesterday and one that was disallowed, saw both Suli and Feagai have to chase their opposition markers to the line because they were hopelessly out of position. Smart play maker DCE in game 300 noted this so mostly directed the Eagles play to our left side and it paid dividends almost every time. If we dont have a defense coach able to remedy this glaring anomaly then get one that will, as it has cost us countless points the past two seasons.

 

[GCRV]

I saw plenty of involvement from him around the ruck and the ball carrier, just that he attacked the line more in the second. Betting he is aching to get into first receiver but with Hunt, Amone, even Jack there he can only step into dummy half occasionally to get his hands on the leather.

In the second half. Looked like he might have gotten (another) baking at halftime.

 

[Morgan]

In this era the fullback is intricate in organising the defensive line, changing structures when required and lastly being able to make more tackles than they miss, so far this season Sloan has played 18 games made 90 tackles but more importantly missed 33, that is not reserve grade standard. So either Rav, Suli, Feigai just don't listen to him or alternatively have no faith in him to actually organise the defence. Either way it cannot continue we have played 19 games and had 533 points put on us, that's an avg of 28 points. Compare that to our 2010 premiers who avg 12.5 points a game, compare that to Penrith who have conceded 12.42 points. DEFENCE wins not only games but premierships your attack will develop from that.

I agree with this 200%. Judging by this, Sloan misses more than 1/3 of tackles. I'd bet it's the worst in the entire competition. Comfortably the worst. It'll be a real shame if he can't fix it due to his attacking skills but he should start learning in the NSW Cup from now.

 

[Eric]

I'm glad the club is challenging the JDB indecent. I think the NRL is only coming down so hard on it in order to save face from the terrible decision to stop play 2 min after the event. Usually the player is informed he is on report and play on.

 

[Ryan]

The good news is that the team is improving. 3 glaring problems remain.
1. Suli, Feagai and Rava keep rushing out of the line and end up taking no one.
2. The outside backs are too slow. To beat our team on the outside was obviously Manly's strategy and yet again it worked.
3. Sloan's tackling.