Go figure, Garrick had a good night on the wing scoring a try, kicking 4 goals, passing 1300 FG points and being only 1 metre off of the most run metres for the night (he had 172. Young GrassHoppa had 173). Not a bad centre, but a better winger.
Our back row was rocks and diamonds, on both sides of the field. Burbo actually got tonight's most NRL Fantasy points from Manly with 62 (Terrell May had 75 for the Tigpies). To add to his try he made 36 tackles without missing one or making an ineffective one. But he also made 2 errors and gave away a penalty. Duck missed 4 tackles (TKO was the worst offender with 5) to go along with his try, which I'll give him his dues was a good try.
Jake 2 playing at dummy half, Jazz at lock and Jake 1 at prop works, or would if Jurbo could ever start making run metres on a consistent basis. Only 37 running metres tonight (7 post contact.....) from 6 runs. And we need him to make metres, especially when our front row stocks are dropping like flies in an old Ross Higgins Pea-Beu ad. Not surprisingly though Jurbo again led us with tackles made, making 45 with only 1 miss and 2 ineffective.
I'm not 100% sold on Lehi to fullback and Tom to centre. Young GrassHoppa still has some rookie type errors in his game while Turbo is not a good defensive centre
(Hint: he wasn't a good defensive centre in Origin either. Like Hammer and Latrell in the three-quarters, he mostly got by on being brilliant in attack).
As we know, Saab and Koula with their speed are weapons (especially when Saab actually holds on to the ball

). We just need to learn how to unleash them into open space. That we were only able to really do that once tonight (Saab's try) against a 💩 team like the Tigers doesn't say much for our attack. Saab is easier as he's on the wing, but tonight was an example of wasting Koula's talent. Sure he ran for 127 metres, which is good, but from 13 runs at less than 10 metres per time (9.7) is a waste. Honestly, its why I'd actually have him on the wing.
TBH I'm not sure tonight's win went any way to saving Seibold. It was a putrid game all round really and as someone said in the game day thread, it was like watching the Northern Eagles all over again. The truth is that (especially in the 2nd half) we just played less 💩 than the Tigers did. Most other NRL teams would have carved us up like a Gordon Ramsay roast dinner.
So to end this short story turned into War and Peace ... we can beat Souths next week. But even against them without Latrell we're going to have to play a lot better than we did tonight.