How did the change from Averillo to Wakeham work out, pretty terrible is my assessment. Burton had by far his worst game of the 3 due to the service he was getting, passing to him multiple times on the 4th tackle for example, stranded, and leaving him out of play for the 5th. Jackson was forced to take the ball up because there was no back line structure for him to link into. I saw none of the fluid play that was present in rounds 1 and 2. Can’t blame the rain, it was no better or worse than previous and the heat/humidity wasn’t anywhere near as stifling as it was up in Toonsville.
Did dropping Okunbor and swapping the RHS centre/winger help the defence, maybe, maybe not, either way it still wasn’t great. I did notice on the Fox coverage at half time that Furner had Burns and Schouppe in the bottom RHS corner of the screen hammering the whiteboard. Second half defence was better, but just another example of why shuffling the backline was not a good idea. The spacing in attack was often horrid, uneven, with mid field bunching and unforgivably compressed to the sideline, how the fark does that happen.
Ours is not an established team, we can’t just slot a player into a well drilled, long developed structure and expect them to fit and not leave us with clunky offense. As I have posted several times, we have a structure that we have worked on for 5 months and it was far too early to make a change in the 1/2. Particularly 2 that play very different styles, styles that don’t lend themselves to the way the rest of the team has trained and practised.
Where to now, do we swap back, that’s not good on so many fronts, especially after 1 game. Wakeham surely has to be given another week to train in the position and another game to prove that his promotion was justified. Against Melbourne in Melbourne, FMD, what a deep end to get thrown into, followed by Penrith the next round. Not really the right time to be changing what has taken all of preseason to develop.
Always a Bulldog
