The Manly players made me proud.... What a gutsy , gritty fighting effort missing key players, suspensions , injuries, constant media attacks & some dodgy calls. Realistically imo the Dogs were far from great & in fact, possibly 20-30 points off Roosters/Souths with that performance. Manly dug deep & had nothing more in the tank, but in comparison to other teams who have zero injuries/suspensions, the obstacles were simply to hard to jump. At full strength Manly would have won that game comfortably & been in the hunt for another premiership, but with the team we had available, honestly think we were just not good enough to compete with the heavyweights....
8 weeks ago I couldn't see anything but a Manly premiership, but as happens to plenty of teams, along comes injuries and suspensions. Yeah, just not good enough when it counted.
I was very proud of our boys last night , key injuries players playing busted to only lose by 1 point . Our future looks good . Bring on 2015
Agreed. All the childishness and backroom Bollocks played a part but it was injuries that did us in. Let's not forget the importance of the hooker in a field goal a thon. Not to discredit Hodges effort at all!
We were a rabble in the second half in terms of organisation BUT cant knock the effort to hang in and nearly do it. Lot of guts. Considering the rubbish going around and some players keener than others to get so close was a mighty effort. Hats off to the boys.....passengers please board the westward trains.....the rest of you rest and recover and turn up for 2015.
To be honest the come back was always going to happen, I always thought and stated previously that staying within 12-14 points at half time we could win it. The Dogs only have 40mins in them very Manly 2009/2010, the comeback was mostly a drop in intensity from the Dogs slowing everything they did down to a level we could handle and match. We should have won that game, the senior players did not take control of the game as much as I would have liked---with Ballin we win. Let's not kid ourselves the first half with the Dogs playing with a decent amount of fresh intensity is the level our performance was at, it only improved when the Dogs predictable fade was evident. If Souths or Roosters don't win it this year it will be one of those years you write in the history books, I guess that happens occasionally. [hr] So many games this year showed we were not up to it and we over achieved big time. I could not believe we were leading the comp and for most part of the year i was thinking to myself "am I seeing this wrong am I missing something we are doing so well that it is hiding all our weaknesses". There was just too obvious a pattern with our losses due to our forwards lack of aggression lack of go forward and the high missed tackle counts all season. The win against the Roosters at Brookie I was not impressed with like others and stated so. When the Roosters upped the intensity and we didn't get back to back penalties we were losing the grind and holes appeared too easily still was a great effort though.
Gutsy performance. Feel gutted. Thought we were going to win that one and with ballin and choc back next week a real chance to beat panthers to get into another GF. Really missed ballin last night both in defence and direction in attack but in saying that you take your teams 3 starting back rowers and hooker out of any other team and I dont think they perform as well as we did. Take isac luke, sam burgees, ben teo, sutton etc from souths or friend, sony bill, Guerra , cordiner from rorters etc and I wonder how well they perform?
