Alan79
Kennel Legend
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2007
- Messages
- 13,374
- Reaction score
- 19,504
Ok so my take on the game is this.
We started poorly with some spilled ball. We needed to get off to a strong start and shot ourselves in the foot with some unforced errors in the opening stages. Nobodies fault but our own there. We defended well throughout the first half though.
At 6-14 we were still in it, but a blatant pass off the ground let them jump ahead (via a G burgess try i think) when the ball should have been called back for a play the ball or turned over to us. After that i thought that a souths player popped a pass up while on his back that went forward and bounced back then one of our players (reynolds i think) was penalized for a high shot (arm down along the centre of chest with elbow gently touching the neck which i thought was nothing to even penalize let alone report). Now the knock on should have meant the tackle wasn't even questioned and a turnover given. Instead we copped a penalty and Souths scored again from it. After that we folded.
Our kick chase through the second half was not always good. That hurt us a lot, especially when Inglis made his big run. Nobody to blame but ourselves for not being there in numbers to stop him. It was a poor kick to have found him on the full anyway. We still need some improvement there for next season.
I counted six occasions in the second half where the footage showed the 10 metre zone and four of those occasions when Souths had a player offside who disrupted the play. I also counted two charge downs that were supposedly not played at. Notably the footage didn't give a replay of these two incidents nor others where i thought the ref should have blown the whistle. I was not unhappy with the refereeing in the first half but the second half gave us some pretty shit marginal calls. The script said Souths had to get a premiership after not having been able to get there for so long and the refereeing followed that script.
The refs are learning to make their biased calls less blatant and where they can't do it without being blatant they will change a rule or two in the offseason so an area with black and white rulings that are not disputable, will have rules that give them a grey area to work with. I've supported league since i was old enough to know what was going on but the refereeing issues are making it hard to justify following this sport. Half the time when i think a call should go one way i am left scratching my head about what obscure ruling they used to justify their action in giving the ball to the offending side. I am not growing stupid, the rules should not be deviating from logic more every season, but we keep seeing new areas of confusion crop up in terms of how the game is refereed.
As far as our halves go, Reynolds looked like he was trying but they kept Hodkinson very quiet. We deviated a long way from the game plan and the result showed.
I'll go to bed sad about the result and a little dirty about them capitulating near the end, but we had a great year to come as far as we did. I may be just another biased supporter, but i half expected that if we lost it would be because Souths were given some questionable decisions from the refs. I don't think this game would have gone the way it did if a few calls were made differently.
Sour grapes out of the way i'll say that I am proud of the effort that got us here and that i think a few poor calls against us really put us on the back foot. Mick Ennis would have made a big difference but sadly his season ended a week too soon. This year was a bit of a rollercoaster for us. I'm just sad that in the end was not the one we wanted. We will be right back in the fight next year though. Hopefully we can overcome the last obstacle if we make the GF next season.
We started poorly with some spilled ball. We needed to get off to a strong start and shot ourselves in the foot with some unforced errors in the opening stages. Nobodies fault but our own there. We defended well throughout the first half though.
At 6-14 we were still in it, but a blatant pass off the ground let them jump ahead (via a G burgess try i think) when the ball should have been called back for a play the ball or turned over to us. After that i thought that a souths player popped a pass up while on his back that went forward and bounced back then one of our players (reynolds i think) was penalized for a high shot (arm down along the centre of chest with elbow gently touching the neck which i thought was nothing to even penalize let alone report). Now the knock on should have meant the tackle wasn't even questioned and a turnover given. Instead we copped a penalty and Souths scored again from it. After that we folded.
Our kick chase through the second half was not always good. That hurt us a lot, especially when Inglis made his big run. Nobody to blame but ourselves for not being there in numbers to stop him. It was a poor kick to have found him on the full anyway. We still need some improvement there for next season.
I counted six occasions in the second half where the footage showed the 10 metre zone and four of those occasions when Souths had a player offside who disrupted the play. I also counted two charge downs that were supposedly not played at. Notably the footage didn't give a replay of these two incidents nor others where i thought the ref should have blown the whistle. I was not unhappy with the refereeing in the first half but the second half gave us some pretty shit marginal calls. The script said Souths had to get a premiership after not having been able to get there for so long and the refereeing followed that script.
The refs are learning to make their biased calls less blatant and where they can't do it without being blatant they will change a rule or two in the offseason so an area with black and white rulings that are not disputable, will have rules that give them a grey area to work with. I've supported league since i was old enough to know what was going on but the refereeing issues are making it hard to justify following this sport. Half the time when i think a call should go one way i am left scratching my head about what obscure ruling they used to justify their action in giving the ball to the offending side. I am not growing stupid, the rules should not be deviating from logic more every season, but we keep seeing new areas of confusion crop up in terms of how the game is refereed.
As far as our halves go, Reynolds looked like he was trying but they kept Hodkinson very quiet. We deviated a long way from the game plan and the result showed.
I'll go to bed sad about the result and a little dirty about them capitulating near the end, but we had a great year to come as far as we did. I may be just another biased supporter, but i half expected that if we lost it would be because Souths were given some questionable decisions from the refs. I don't think this game would have gone the way it did if a few calls were made differently.
Sour grapes out of the way i'll say that I am proud of the effort that got us here and that i think a few poor calls against us really put us on the back foot. Mick Ennis would have made a big difference but sadly his season ended a week too soon. This year was a bit of a rollercoaster for us. I'm just sad that in the end was not the one we wanted. We will be right back in the fight next year though. Hopefully we can overcome the last obstacle if we make the GF next season.
