Hardly, tonight we played with EVERYTHING coming off Wal. Hardly an indication of next season. Crowley's prediction pretty much spot on.
Yeah, Allan Langer being your second half but not being able to touch the ball turned out to be too much of an obstacle in the end.
Yep. I've been thinking it for a long, long time, too. Hunt and Norman both just don't seem to have the class needed. I wish Locky would have jsut gone one more year. He's played the best footy of the last 5 yrs, this season, imo. Next year the rest of the side is going to be old enough and good enough. They'll have the best pack in the comp by a country mile. 8. Hannant 9. McCullough 10. Civoniceva 11. Glenn 12. Thaiday 13. Parker 14. McGuire 15. Gillett That is fucking class right there.
Stop the shit bias. Wallace is a solid first grader. Nothing more, nothing less. With a quality half like Lockyer, he's a good foil. As the lead, his team is no chance of winning a comp.
I have faith in Hunt and Norman. Hunt reminds me of Cronk, and he's even even coming into first grade like Cronk did, as a back-up hooker off the bench. It's up to him if he can become an orsm halfback like Cronk has over time. And Norman, he clearly has a lot of talent, and half of his games in first grade have been outstanding. Unfortunately, the other half have been poor. If he could find consistency, he could be very good too. He also needs to work on his defence, he's dead set worse than Lockyer with one eye.
Rapt with the result of course but was worried for a while in the 2nd half. Don't believe Matai has any dramas but Williams might miss next week. I think a similar performance against the Warriors would be good enough to win but we'll need to improve if it's Melbourne.
So we clearly need another half. Anyone who knows/can confirm the contract status of the following players? Cooper Cronk - 2013? Quade Cooper - 2013? Cam Smith - ????? Kurtley Beale -????? Sam Tomkins - ????? Danny McGuire - ?????
How on earth is Tony Williams playing first grade second row? All I heard last night was how much of a brute he is. He made 80m and 13 tackles with 5 misses. I mean if you place a premium on tackles breaks, fine, but they didn't translate into offloads nor into big metres. Fuck he's overrated. Hodges made 4 infringements and tackled at 66%. Anyway congrats to Manly.
Those early 15 or so minutes where Manly got a fuckton of penalties was what killed us IMO. Still, it was a bad performance, but they didn't let the score be a blowout, so there's at least something to be proud of.
I'll be very surprised if Brisbane make the 8 next year. Biggest test in the clubs history, even more so than when Lewis was sacked as we still had half the QLD team.
Were you surprised when Johns retired and Newcastle finished second last? I know we're better equipped to deal with Lockyer's loss than Newcastle were for Johns's but I still think we're going to be a shadow of our former selves for a while.
I disagree, we will be better next year in every way bar our number 6 (who will probably be better then last night) and we put up a fairly decent showing against one of the two best teams in the league. We will drop off a bit, but not to the extent you seem to predict.
