- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
South Sydney are so tightly scripted in their style of play that it doesn’t take much – one key player injured here, another out of form there – to knock them off-course. They simply don’t handle disruption as well as some other teams.
I don’t buy the suggestion that infighting among the players is the reason behind the Rabbitohs losing three games in a row. That is usually a suggestion made by people who don’t know any better and are trying to suggest that they do.
It wouldn’t be a great mood at the club at the moment, but that would be the result of the losses rather than the cause of them.
Souths rely heavily on the thrust of Greg Inglis coming from fullback, the direction and accurate kicking game of halfback Adam Reynolds, the great running and general decision-making of Issac Luke out of dummy-half and the power of the Burgess brothers close to the opposition line.
It isn’t rocket science, but when things are going well for the Rabbitohs they look like they practice it in their sleep. The problem is that when one of the main parts is not working properly or at all, it can throw the whole operation out of whack.
Inglis and Luke were on deck for the 28-8 win over Sydney Roosters in the first round, and the 14-12 loss to Manly in Round 2. A defeat, sure, but nothing to get too concerned about. The Sea Eagles are high-class opponents.
But then, in the third round against Wests Tigers, Inglis left the field concussed after five minutes and the Tigers won 25-16 in a shock result. Luke was on the field for almost the entire game before hurting his shoulder and going off.
Last weekend, when Canberra caused Souths a second straight shock by beating them 30-18, Inglis played but Luke was missing with the shoulder problem that will keep him off the field for a while yet.
On top of all of this, Reynolds, while he has been playing, hasn’t been playing well. His form went downhill in last year’s finals series and he is struggling to get back to where it was before that.
And the player who was scheduled to be Reynolds’s partner in the halves, Luke Keary, didn’t even make it to the start of the season because of a torn pectoral muscle.
That meant Dylan Walker moving from the centres, where he was a danger man, to five-eighth. That experiment has now been abandoned, at least temporarily, with Walker returning to the centres for Saturday night’s game against St George Illawarra at the SCG.
John Sutton has gone back to five-eighth from the back-row.
The other thing we shouldn’t forget is that Souths lost more players with first-grade experience at the end of last season than they recruited. And one of those players was Nathan Peats, the high-quality back-up hooker to Luke who is now starring with Parramatta.
Their quality of depth was inevitably affected. Souths would have been fine had all of their key players been fit and in form, but they couldn’t afford much to go wrong.
The switches involving Sutton and Walker should help, but they badly need Reynolds to find his old form.
And because a rookie in Apisai Koroisau is deputising for Luke, everyone in the team needs to work a bit harder to produce some spark in the absence of the star dummy-half.
The Rabbitohs are going to have to become a bit more adjustable to enable them to negotiate this difficult period with some competition points.
Say, like Manly.
The Sea Eagles struggled to adjust in Round 1 against Melbourne when star fullback Brett Stewart failed to return after halftime because of injury. They led 20-4 at that stage, but ended up losing 23-22 in golden point extra-time.
But they adjusted pretty well to beat the Rabbitohs without not only Brett Stewart, but his brother Glenn as well.
And they have kept winning with Peter Hiku deputising for Brett, 22-18 over Parramatta and 8-0 over Sydney Roosters. The Sea Eagles had a couple of other players out for that most recent game. The Roosters, who beat Manly 26-18 in last year’s grand final, were minus Sonny Bill Williams.
The Sea Eagles have three wins and one loss. The Rabbitohs have one win and three losses. Manly aren’t winning by much, but they’re winning. Souths have been knocked out of the contest in each of their last two games.
Reckon you can pick the winning team? Build your own dream team with Draftstars daily fantasy and compete on any match. For great odds on the NRL head on over to PlayUp. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.