As someone said in another thread, even Wayne Bennett would have struggled to get this team to have been any better with the draw and injuries we had.
Just look at his record with St Merge and Newcastle. Yes he won a premiership with St Merge in 2010, but the reality is that the two best teams of the previous 3 years (us and Melbourne) were down and out in 2010. We had injuries to key players (Snake and Wolfman come to mind) plus we had lost Ox. And Melbourne got done for rorting the cap. When both were back in form the next season Wayne's Dragoons were back to being nowhere. Then at Newcastle, after an initial promising season they went backwards and he left them worse than when he got there. Now he's back in Brisbane with their favourable Nein driven draw and all the advantages of being the only team in town and shock horror he looks like a supercoach again.
We all know Tooves got shafted last year by the Penn's. But I honestly don't think Baz is doing too bad considering. After a shaky start we finally started to get the lineup right when injuries began to hit. DCE was out, we lost T-Red, Jake and Skivy to niggling injuries (though they recovered quickly enough) and now we're missing our starting back 3 in Snake, Tommy and Jorge. In 9 rounds we've probably had 1 game (Sharks) where we've had anywhere near close to our best 17 on the park. We've pretty much had a different team on the field in every game we've played. To be 4-5 right now with the draw and injuries we've had, while not the best, is a damn sight better than the predicted 0-9, 1-8 or 2-7 some had us at.
Yes our attack needs a lot of work and our defence could be a lot better, but when injuries force constant changes to the line up week in, week out its hard to get any consistency and hard to get combinations working.
Oh, and for the record I still think the bunker got it right in our so-called lucky win over the Chooks, even if their reasoning was wrong. For mine Tupou was offside so either way it was the correct call.
