This is the type of game that worries me.
DCE / Jake out is arguably more important than the Knights losses - Ponga has been out most of the past few months anyway, Best has missed a bit too and Gagai is a better Origin player than clubman. TLT should be interesting!
- It's Hasting's 100th and he has a bit to prove.
- Knights always lift against us
- Knights Fwd pack last week was top-shelf: Saifiti, Frizell, Pearce-Paul, Thompson, Brailey...we'll have a hard time controlling the middle
- Knights have been winning away games this year against teams around them on the ladder
- Seibold is 1 from 5 against the Knights in his coaching career.
- Home game for Manly after a great win with everyone backing us, and against a team that has generally been falling to top-8 sides whilst putting the teams below them away (Same can't be said for Manly) - reminds me of the expectation relating to the Raiders game, where we gave up a 20-0 lead.
Some key performances needed this weekend include:
Aloiai
With Jake gone, Aloiai needs to step up and be our packleader, and just stop the careless errors - his mistake on the first hitup after we scored the first try last week against the Cowboys is the sort of thing that turns a game, and it did - we were killing them early, and that let just enough air out of the tyres for the Cowboys to claw back the ascendency before butchering a certain try or two, and then getting one on hte board shortly after. It was his only handling error sure, but it was just terrible timing. Those sorts of plays can't happen this weekend to give the Knights anything, and Aloiai is all too often in the thick of these types of Keppie-esque lapses.
Brooks
Guy had a promising start to the season but hasn't put a standout performance in for weeks. Attack was on him in the Bunnies game and we came away with a bagel. Not saying he has been poor, but by the same token he just hasn't been impactful in the way you would want from a player who was a marquee man for the last decade. He has played 2nd fiddle to DCE enough to absorb some quality, surely. Put up this week mate - Hastings/Pryce is not exactly a comp-winning halves pairing, Brooks has more than double their games played combined. Oh, and Brooks is going to have to win us ground with his kicking game - and the Knights will know it will be all on him as it was in the Souths game. Last week him and DCE ran a clinic, splitting the duties well. He also needs another good weekend on D - they hit him hard on the weekend and he did pretty good making over 30 tackles and missing < 5.
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Turbo
Last week was a warm-up test-the-waters game I get it, and Turbo didn't sound happy with his game when interviewed on the field (which is good - he should feel it was below par, as it was). Out of our back-5 Turbo had the least impressive stats and through being targeted he was largely invisible - the Knights will do the same if the below stats are the results. With Origin off his radar now, and against the likely makeshist backline the Knights will put up, he should dominate them (on paper). We need a statement outing from him that shows he is improving, remembering how dominant he can be, building momentum for Finals, not fading into a confidence-bereft liability where we are thinking of a rookie Hoppa as a potentially better option.
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*It also suggests to me that having someone like Croker come back in at 6 to play a full 80 after such a long stint out of the side is probably a bad idea - Croker should come back as a 14 when we have the proper team framework around him, to use him at our discretion.
Bullimore
Bully will need to get a lot more minutes this week, and may even start with Sips to keep Brownie's impact on the bench (with Aloiai probs getting the Lock spot). We're up against a pretty mean Fwd pack this weekend, even if their backs may seem underdone. This is an opportunity for him which I hope he takes, as he has had some flashes of the goods this season.
The Rest
If others like Sipley, Haumole, Lawton, Talau and Saab replicate their form of last week - and Garrick shows the same level of effort without the flickpass-brainfades - then we can do this.
As for who we go to in the halves, goodness knows. I don't like the idea of moving Talau around as a utility - he is proving valuable on an edge defensively, he is defusing kicks on that side pretty well too, and some of the effort plays are top-shelf (1-on-1 steal one of the many individual efforts that won us the game).
Lawton will be needed as a 2nd row option with Burbo out, but he also seemed to improve our attack when he went to dummy half - Simpkin can play 80, but had probably his worst game for us in attk. He made a massive 53 tackles with only 3 missed which was a better effort than Blues 9 Robson, and his passing service is good. He made some mistakes tho, and only made 1 ineffective dummy run - around the ruck we got little to nothing from the Refs either which made the metres through the middle a slog.
'Mole better not go into his shell coz of SOO - someone needs to remind him that it was Madge that erred in how he was used as a player off the bench, not anything he did to deserve omission. If all goes well he has a Fk-U Madge game and shows everyone what he has. Its hard to sub Martin/Crichton off when they are murdering the Maroons like that, and Barnett brings a slightly different skillset that works better with two 80min backrowers.
Backing up good wins has been a challenge for us all year. We beat the top-3 teams, and haven't won the following game (although we drew the Warriors, it felt like a loss given we had it won with 2mins to go). Also, winning without DCE this year is like winning without Turbo any other year imo.
Back to Australia with me just in time for this game
🙂 Go well Silvertails!
