NRL Round 15 - Knights Vs Roosters - 5:30pm Saturday 14th June - McDonald Jones Stadium

How many opportunities did they toss in the trash with barge over attempts that just weren’t on? I could grab Brailey and Crossland by the back of their necks and bang their heads together.

On a positive note I thought they did well not to get pumped by 40 considering they have 8 first grade players out. Had they not gone back to AOB ball in the second half they might have even won it but 8 points only was never winning them that game.
 
SportsFan said:
Why doesn’t it make sense?
The game is set up to give sides 7 tackle sets as much as possible, so avoid that, have a good chase and keep them within halfway to kick back to us - especially when you have a bunch of kids playing.
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Just from the percentage perspective.

Don't contest when we have a chance to score a try. Contest when we do a line dropout.

I get the idea obviously, wrap them up, lock down kick return, hem them in their end. The issue with that is, we suck at muscling up in D to win the arm wrestle game. Tonight, several times we had them starting a set from 5m from their try line, and the finished those sets up near their half way. Those are the defensive opportunities you need to get up off the line fast and shut down their yardage game from their end, make them kick from their 30 and load up on the attack and win the grit game.

We just don't do that well at all. No matter who is in the team.
 
SportsFan said:
Why doesn’t it make sense?
The game is set up to give sides 7 tackle sets as much as possible, so avoid that, have a good chase and keep them within halfway to kick back to us - especially when you have a bunch of kids playing.
Click to expand...

It’s not an awful strategy for some teams. It would work well for a side like the Titans who miss a lot of tackles and give up a lot of field position on the handover. I feel like our defence is good enough though that we can afford to take some more risks for the chance of something coming from contesting the kick. I think it’s important to give ourselves chances when our halves are so poor.
 
I hate how we are back to where we started, happy with defeat as long as their is effort.

My old coach said to me “Effort is meaningless without the results, you can give your heart every second of every game but at the end of the season they’ll only remember wins and losses”.

Ironically the first coach I played under where we went on to win the local title.
 
The strategy works for a team like Penrith (previous 5 years) that can defend their way to victory by grinding the other team into the dust with their physicality and kicking game that allows them to run over the top of the opposition in the end.

The Knights aren’t grinding any team into anything except perhaps a deep sleep from pure boredom.

They don’t have the players, the physicality, the defence, the competivenes, the iq, the kicking game, nor the discipline for it to be effective enough to actually win them them enough games. Even the Panthers don’t look to have it anymore like they did.

What they do have is Schiller, Young, KPP, Hunt, Sharpe, or KP who are all either giants or good enough in the air that they could successfully contest kicks if encouraged to do so. Yet why would try to utilise the skills your players actually do possess.
 
SportsFan said:
Why doesn’t it make sense?
The game is set up to give sides 7 tackle sets as much as possible, so avoid that, have a good chase and keep them within halfway to kick back to us - especially when you have a bunch of kids playing.
Click to expand...

Ok champ.
What Kurriboy is saying makes perfect sense.
 
SharpeGreatness said:
I hate how we are back to where we started, happy with defeat as long as their is effort.

My old coach said to me “Effort is meaningless without the results, you can give your heart every second of every game but at the end of the season they’ll only remember wins and losses”.

Ironically the first coach I played under where we went on to win the local title.
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There’s a difference between what a coach said to fire you up, and a realistic assessment of the team and players we had available tonight.
 
SharpeGreatness said:
I hate how we are back to where we started, happy with defeat as long as there is effort.
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I usually hate this idea as well, but tonight when we were so severely down on troops I think it’s true. This game genuinely had the potential to be a huge blow out scoreline against us, but that didn’t happen. As sad as it is I think the side we had out there played the best they could within their limitations. With our full strength side effort alone definitely isn’t enough to get a pass mark, but I think we can give the team tonight some slack.
 
Kurriboy said:
Really doesn't make much sense.

We put a kick up down near their try line and are happy to let them catch it and tackle them to shut down kick return.

We put out a line dropout near our line, and are happy to contest it likely more than half the time handing them field position right on our line.

Yo can play 20 minutes just to get one good shot at them down on their line, and when we get the chance to contest something down their end, we should be. Yet line dropouts where you back your D to perform, could be punted 50m off the dropout and make them work their way back.

One thing I'm surprised we don't see more often, is short kickoffs contested to start the game. I'd love to see a team try one as a shock play.
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Agree 100%
 
I’m happy with the effort tonight, given the average age and experience level’s available. We did lack the finesse and discipline to close the game out in the second half, but I give tonight’s team a good pass mark and I reckon only a couple of players didn’t play to their potential.
WAY better than the Parra game, and despite the result probably better than the Manly game too.
 
Newygirl said:
The strategy works for a team like Penrith (previous 5 years) that can defend their way to victory by grinding the other team into the dust with their physicality and kicking game that allows them to run over the top of the opposition in the end.

The Knights aren’t grinding any team into anything except perhaps a deep sleep from pure boredom.

They don’t have the players, the physicality, the defence, the competivenes, the iq, the kicking game, nor the discipline for it to be effective enough to actually win them them enough games. Even the Panthers don’t look to have it anymore like they did.

What they do have is Schiller, Young, KPP, Hunt, Sharpe, or KP who are all either giants or good enough in the air that they could successfully contest kicks if encouraged to do so. Yet why would try to utilise the skills your players actually do possess.
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I agree with the components exhibited by the Panthers that we don’t have.
I would also add fitness to that list.
 
I don’t think our fitness is too much of an issue. We’ve made more tackles this year than any other team because we lose the ball so much. If our fitness was terrible we’d be leaking so many points considering the self-inflicted fatigue.
 
You can say what you like, but we could have, should have, won that game. I'm really over Brailey and if only Hastings had passed the ball on a couple of critical plays. New kids did ok but we lack some serious speed out wide and I'm looking forward to getting Dom back, we really do need him.
 
Kurriboy said:
Really doesn't make much sense.

We put a kick up down near their try line and are happy to let them catch it and tackle them to shut down kick return.

We put out a line dropout near our line, and are happy to contest it likely more than half the time handing them field position right on our line.

Yo can play 20 minutes just to get one good shot at them down on their line, and when we get the chance to contest something down their end, we should be. Yet line dropouts where you back your D to perform, could be punted 50m off the dropout and make them work their way back.

One thing I'm surprised we don't see more often, is short kickoffs contested to start the game. I'd love to see a team try one as a shock play.
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My old man blows up about this all the time. Why the short drop out, why not kick it 50m.
Well, for starters, the first tackle usually ends up around the 30m line anyway. So you only make 15 - 20m more. And defensively, it gasses you to have to sprint (or run sorta fast) 30m, then have to get back the full 10m over thr next few tackles. Makes it harder to defend due to the extra effort. It's much easier to defend closer to the line, regularly not even needing to retreat 10m because of the try line and having the chance to set your D line. It's also easier to attack against a retreating defensive line 20 - 30 out than it is 6m out against a set line (although this option opens up potential for kicks, barge over tries and forwards dragging a smaller player over the lone to score). Basically, short dropouts are easier to defend than long ones....
Totally agree re not contesting kicks at the other end though. When you have a play at the ball, we should at least be making the oppositions job harder by having a crack. Most teams at least have a pretend attempt to put the fullback off.
 
In regards to not contesting attacking kicks there's no point comparing us to other teams because our attack is so much worse than anyone else. I'd expect introducing more randomness into the attacking 20 could only be a good thing, but I've not been involved in 4 GFs.

That said, they did try to get hunt attacking bombs most of the night, so it's not like there's a complete ban on it anymore.
 
sherpa said:
You can say what you like, but we could have, should have, won that game. I'm really over Brailey and if only Hastings had passed the ball on a couple of critical plays. New kids did ok but we lack some serious speed out wide and I'm looking forward to getting Dom back, we really do need him.
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Wonder if he’d have scored that try in the corner that Schiller bounced … that was the match right there.
 
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