Bit of a ramble incoming...
2023 was Seibold figuring out what was wrong with this team. He clearly read Silvertails, because he immediately changed our style in 2023 to be more direct, and moved Jake to prop. This didn't work. We simply were not competitive against the teams that were better at grinding out wins than us, those teams that could afford better middles. It's fairly obvious that Jake's contract is the handbrake on this team in the middle, and prevents us from adopting a more direct style. If Jake was on 400-500k, this would not be a problem, as he would have foil.
The end result of this, was Seibold effectively figuring out that Hasler's band-aid solution of going wide, whilst relying upon a strong work ethic from the players, is our most competitive strategy, at least with our current roster. By the 2024 pre-season the motto was "we're just going back to how we attacked in 2021", because we literally cannot do anything more competitive than that. That was the story of last year. It's a high risk strategy that rewarded us against top teams, and punished us against worse teams.
Against weaker opposition, we should be playing a more dominant/direct style, and I think that's what this 2025 season was supposed to be about. That "consistency" and "defence" they spoke about. For example, we executed a fantastic dominant style against the Cowboys and particularly the Raiders, kicking them to death. Brilliant. However, changing styles from week to week makes everything less refined (see Warriors + Dragons games), and goes against a key limitation of the "going wide" strategy.
The issue with this style, is that it requires a buy in from all the players on effort and fitness, because it's an exhausting strategy. Hence Schuster had to go. It also requires refined skill levels. When things start going into the player's heads like "the captain doesn't want to be here", "there's drama", etc, the buy in stops, and execution begins to fail.
I believe that part of the reason we are so uncompetitive on short turnarounds, in particular, is also due to this style. Throwing the ball around with a low error rate requires many training sessions to perfect. As Seibold said, they had a single 30 minute training session before Thursday's game. There's no coincidence balls were going to ground. Same sort of thing occured against the Warriors, and against the Sharks, to a lesser extent. All the while, you have this degrading media narrative building around the team.
I think Saturday is a true litmus test for where we are at. Is DCE clocked out? Should Jake be moved from lock? Is our execution just not there? Was it just the short turnarounds? We have a nine day turnaround, we're up against a great team, we have someone else at lock for the first time in a long time, and Turbo may be back. This game will be telling.
If we get floored, there is still time to change our style, go back to playing direct, and be flat track bullies. It may not look pretty, and may not be competitive, but we could eek into the Top 8, like we nearly did in 2023. If we're competitive, we need to work on shutting out the outside noise, run out the old excuse of 'we didn't have Jake', and come back stronger after the bye. If we win, we will know that the past three weeks were a once-off for this season. Unfortunately, the last three weeks have been very consistent by our standards across the last five years.
Either this is a turning point, and we find ourselves back on our positive trajectory, or this season becomes another 2015, 2018, or 2022... Just another year under Scott Penn's Sea Eagles.
In other words, this is the MIGOTY. Last year, we came back from three losses in a row, to beat Melbourne. Can we do it against the Panthers?
2023 was Seibold figuring out what was wrong with this team. He clearly read Silvertails, because he immediately changed our style in 2023 to be more direct, and moved Jake to prop. This didn't work. We simply were not competitive against the teams that were better at grinding out wins than us, those teams that could afford better middles. It's fairly obvious that Jake's contract is the handbrake on this team in the middle, and prevents us from adopting a more direct style. If Jake was on 400-500k, this would not be a problem, as he would have foil.
The end result of this, was Seibold effectively figuring out that Hasler's band-aid solution of going wide, whilst relying upon a strong work ethic from the players, is our most competitive strategy, at least with our current roster. By the 2024 pre-season the motto was "we're just going back to how we attacked in 2021", because we literally cannot do anything more competitive than that. That was the story of last year. It's a high risk strategy that rewarded us against top teams, and punished us against worse teams.
Against weaker opposition, we should be playing a more dominant/direct style, and I think that's what this 2025 season was supposed to be about. That "consistency" and "defence" they spoke about. For example, we executed a fantastic dominant style against the Cowboys and particularly the Raiders, kicking them to death. Brilliant. However, changing styles from week to week makes everything less refined (see Warriors + Dragons games), and goes against a key limitation of the "going wide" strategy.
The issue with this style, is that it requires a buy in from all the players on effort and fitness, because it's an exhausting strategy. Hence Schuster had to go. It also requires refined skill levels. When things start going into the player's heads like "the captain doesn't want to be here", "there's drama", etc, the buy in stops, and execution begins to fail.
I believe that part of the reason we are so uncompetitive on short turnarounds, in particular, is also due to this style. Throwing the ball around with a low error rate requires many training sessions to perfect. As Seibold said, they had a single 30 minute training session before Thursday's game. There's no coincidence balls were going to ground. Same sort of thing occured against the Warriors, and against the Sharks, to a lesser extent. All the while, you have this degrading media narrative building around the team.
I think Saturday is a true litmus test for where we are at. Is DCE clocked out? Should Jake be moved from lock? Is our execution just not there? Was it just the short turnarounds? We have a nine day turnaround, we're up against a great team, we have someone else at lock for the first time in a long time, and Turbo may be back. This game will be telling.
If we get floored, there is still time to change our style, go back to playing direct, and be flat track bullies. It may not look pretty, and may not be competitive, but we could eek into the Top 8, like we nearly did in 2023. If we're competitive, we need to work on shutting out the outside noise, run out the old excuse of 'we didn't have Jake', and come back stronger after the bye. If we win, we will know that the past three weeks were a once-off for this season. Unfortunately, the last three weeks have been very consistent by our standards across the last five years.
Either this is a turning point, and we find ourselves back on our positive trajectory, or this season becomes another 2015, 2018, or 2022... Just another year under Scott Penn's Sea Eagles.
In other words, this is the MIGOTY. Last year, we came back from three losses in a row, to beat Melbourne. Can we do it against the Panthers?
