NRL Round 3 - Knights Vs Warriors - 3:00pm Saturday, 21st March - McDonald Jones Stadium

On the way back home. So I will only leave a short comment here.

Manly and Cows gave us a false sense of how much we had improved. The last 2 weeks showed us that we aren't getting the spoon again. But this week demonstrated that we have plenty of work to do to match it with the best teams. You can point out our 3 outs but the fact is the forwards lost us this game, not the backs. KP, Brown or Sharpe don't make a difference when your pack is getting humped as bad as we did tonight.

The thing is, when you lose the ruck as decisively as we did, the natural defence mechanism is to slow the ruck by risking six-agains and penalties which is what happened to us tonight and what happened to Canberra and the Chooks the 2 weeks prior against these guys. You can blame the refs all you like, he wasn't the reason we lost control of the ruck. That won't change until we improve our forward stock imo.
Yep and that will take time.

I will say that I think with Kalyn and Dylan we score 1-2 more, we still had strike out wide today but when you don’t have Kalyn or Dylan ball playing there is a huge difference in terms of the amount of pressure is then on your centres to create.

I don’t know about “false sense of how much we’ve improved”. I think more “and this is what a top defence comes at you with”. A lot of guys out there would have never experienced it before.
 
Stats say Manuleleua was on the field for 11 minutes and made 9 tackles.
I didn't see him.
 
Francis was struggling to keep up with the pace of the game almost immediately. I think he got hooked sad to say.
 
Disappointing result but I,m relatively happy with the effort.

Defense was poor on the fringes of the ruck, and discipline was poor, but some set restarts hard to explain.

I felt Mooneys sin binning was purely accidental, no intent, knee on thigh. He should be sweet. Gags also probably a fine

Definitely missed the 3 wounded spine members, but we have to adapt to no Ponga for a while. It’s nothing new, we should be used to it by now.

Does anyone know why the top tier of the the AJ stand was empty?
 
With Manuleleua I do think there's a real phenomenon of players on debut just being knackered as soon as they run off the bench. The adrenaline combined with the shock of the speed of the game just overwhelms people. Would expect him to be better for the run.
Hope so because yeah he was struggling immediately. Struggling big time.
 
Disappointing game, and I think we’ll be missing either Gags or Mooney next week.
Anyway, Sharpe back next week. We’re getting the dogs at a good time, they’re certainly not settled yet and aren’t looking good in attack. Onwards and upwards
The dogs defence will smother us like the Wahs did . We made Tanah bloody Boyd look like Andrew John's . Gags just looks so slow now .
 
I felt Mooneys sin binning was purely accidental, no intent, knee on thigh. He should be sweet. Gags also probably a fine
Gags got pushed as well from the back. Maybe should have tried to avoid it but again Warriors guys staying down, holding heads etc when there was nothing in it
 
The dogs defence will smother us like the Wahs did . We made Tanah bloody Boyd look like Andrew John's . Gags just looks so slow now .
Yeah attacking wise we will need to take a big step forward. I was saying the bulldogs attack hasn’t really stepped up yet. They’re yet to crack 16 points…
Harsh on Tanah Boyd, he is the form player in the comp.
 
Yeah attacking wise we will need to take a big step forward. I was saying the bulldogs attack hasn’t really stepped up yet. They’re yet to crack 16 points…
Harsh on Tanah Boyd, he is the form player in the comp.

They will fire next week against us and rack up a score.....AOB will be primed this week, can guarantee you that
 
Not sure what his issue was today, but head wasn't in the game at all
He tends to have one of these games in him every season. I don’t know if it’s from trying too hard to make things happen but I hope he’s got it out of his system for the year
 
On the way back home. So I will only leave a short comment here.

Manly and Cows gave us a false sense of how much we had improved. The last 2 weeks showed us that we aren't getting the spoon again. But this week demonstrated that we have plenty of work to do to match it with the best teams. You can point out our 3 outs but the fact is the forwards lost us this game, not the backs. KP, Brown or Sharpe don't make a difference when your pack is getting humped as bad as we did tonight.

The thing is, when you lose the ruck as decisively as we did, the natural defence mechanism is to slow the ruck by risking six-agains and penalties which is what happened to us tonight and what happened to Canberra and the Chooks the 2 weeks prior against these guys. You can blame the refs all you like, he wasn't the reason we lost control of the ruck. That won't change until we improve our forward stock imo.
I would argue our poor ball security and pass selection cost us the game which meant our forwards were always on the back foot once fatigue came into it. We weren’t great with our discipline. Not sure it was worth 11-4 but we could have still been better.
 
Yep and that will take time.

I will say that I think with Kalyn and Dylan we score 1-2 more, we still had strike out wide today but when you don’t have Kalyn or Dylan ball playing there is a huge difference in terms of the amount of pressure is then on your centres to create.

I don’t know about “false sense of how much we’ve improved”. I think more “and this is what a top defence comes at you with”. A lot of guys out there would have never experienced it before.
I think we are making significant strides under Justin. So I do not think this game should be seen as a bad reflection on that progress. The Wahs are currently on form team no 2 behind Penrith imo. No shame in the loss here: we will beat many teams at home this year. Tigers fans who are also high on their own supply right now are probably going to have an even tougher time in NZ next week. Onto the Dogs next week. At least they can't score pts.
 
Think it was mentioned here on Tooheys News it was getting redeveloped and some work done
Yep out of action for the whole year . We got move to lower section of the AJ stand . Close to the action certainly gives you a different perspective . Revert to our usual seats next year
 
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