NRL Round 7 - Roosters Vs Knights - 2:00pm Sunday, 19th April - Allianz Stadium

This is the healthiest I’ve seen the club in 25 years in terms of juniors and young players. Honestly people we are a season or two away from being a real force in this competition. This is the most upside I’ve seen in our juniors for a very long time. Francis will be huge for us and Hunt hasn’t even reached any where near his potential. If chase butler or one of these guys like hagan can develop into an elite player we will win a comp.
 
Manu really warmed into the match. His defence improved considerably throughout the game. He needs time.

But in all seriousness, why do we utterly fall apart without Frizell and/or Lucas. Wtf is going on? The Broncos finished the game without their two best middles and still competed evenly with the Tigers in the second half.

We have some serious issues that need to be fixed otherwise we'll hardly win another game over the next month. And if JSaf goes down, that's Dragons territory
Xavier Willison is really good and had a blinder, Riki, Piakura, Jensen, Gosiewski, whatever you might think about guys like that are very experienced, their closest thing to a young developing player Talty is 27 now and had a career best game in that one. And Reyno had an amazing game. They also had their whole premiership calibre backline minus Walsh.

Why did the 2024 Broncos absolutely turn it up when things started going wrong? Back when guys like Willison and Piakura were 21 year olds who’d played 15 games, instead of key players in a premiership win? Why didn’t they just do what the current Broncos who’ve learned what it takes to win a premiership can do?

Call it a cop out if you like but you’re talking about squads in very different positions in terms of the experience & reliability of their players.
 
Agree on mixing up the drop outs. Keep the opposition guessing!

They also need to have a defensive pattern ready on the assumption that one of the opposition takes a clean catch. We were all over the place when Mark N caught that one that he juggled in the in-goal area. Most of the players had already run past the ball and showed very little inclination to get back.
 
All our losses have been by 13+ which is a really concern....if we are going to lose it has to be a close game, teams are just doing it easy against us.
 
All our losses have been by 13+ which is a really concern....if we are going to lose it has to be a close game, teams are just doing it easy against us.
This year 13+ is nothing, the number of blow-outs has doubled this year with the rule changes. When you are even a little behind the game, you end up a long way behind on the scoreboard.
 
Agree on mixing up the drop outs. Keep the opposition guessing!

They also need to have a defensive pattern ready on the assumption that one of the opposition takes a clean catch. We were all over the place when Mark N caught that one that he juggled in the in-goal area. Most of the players had already run past the ball and showed very little inclination to get back.
Agree, they need to be better in both attack and defence for high kicks. A lot of it is just awareness which some players have more than others. But yeah it should be planned for better both ways
 
This year 13+ is nothing, the number of blow-outs has doubled this year with the rule changes. When you are even a little behind the game, you end up a long way behind on the scoreboard.

Defence wins premierships, we need to make teams absolutely fight for wins and take it the full 80.
 
Winning is a habit as they say, Newcastle have only recently started learning how to win games and even now we are only just getting that positive culture back in the club, we will get there and i like to think it will happen sooner that we think.
 
They're a young, understrength team coming up against the competition heavyweights. We should be lauding the first half efforts as something to build on, not going off because they couldn't keep that level up for a full 80. They were getting smashed in the first as well. If you look at the tackle counts, they just managed to scramble well to keep them out.

Agree. First half I posted we had no right to be going in with this lead comparing the two team sheets, second half showed why.

People slashing with the razors need to see we are putting up a very inexperienced pack against a very experience one, we were always going to struggle to match them. Missing some very good players to boot.
 
The thing that was weird about us last year was, when other middling teams had players out their defence would fall apart but they could still score. But for us our attack would go from bad to worse, but for a lot of the season we kept the other team from blowing us out a lot of the season.

My read on that eventually became that what was really happening was that our play style enabled teams to beat us 26-6 without really trying or risking getting hurt, so they gratefully accepted the invitation to do just that. Now teams know we can score they play us like they know they need to kill us to win.
 
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