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It’s grim times this week for the Thursday Night Forecast as we preview tonight’s game between the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Wests Tigers, two teams who enter the game in desperate, desperate straits.
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Unless you’ve been living on the moon, in a cave, with your fingers in your ears, you are probably aware that things are not going well for either of these teams.
After both starting with exciting and convincing victories in Round 1 and Round 2 both have struggled mightily, with only a solitary win between them in the subsequent six rounds.
The picture only got worse in Round 8 with the Rabbitohs succumbing to the sustained pressure of the Broncos and the Tigers capitulating in disheartening fashion to Canberra.
While the Tigers are on a bigger slide than the Rabbitohs, and clearly had a far more unpleasant experience last week, an argument can be made that the Rabbitohs are in just as deep a hole relative to preseason expectations.
THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTY, LIKE EVERY NRL GAME, IS LIVE ON FOXTEL
In my season preview series I slotted all 16 teams in one of five different tiers: teams I was confident would finish in the top four; teams I felt would certainly make the eight (and may push for the top four); teams that would find themselves on the fringe of the eight, in the traditional battle royale between positions six and ten on the ladder.
Finally, two tiers for the stragglers: the first was a tier of teams that definitely would not make the eight, and the last tier were teams that would anchor the table in the bottom four.
I slotted the Tigers into that very bottom tier of teams that, unable to escape the bottom four, while the Rabbitohs I had making the eight.
Against those expectations it can be argued that Souths’ current 11th place on the ladder (but looking worse than the record would suggest) is just as disappointing, if not more disappointing, that the Tigers’ 14th place. Jason Taylor’s side were supposed to be terrible, but for many pundits, the Rabbitohs were expected to be contenders for the finals and they look a long, long way from that at the moment.
Team sheet
| Rabbitohs | Position | Tigers |
| Greg Inglis | Fullback | James Tedesco |
| Aaron Gray | Left winger | David Nofoaluma |
| Bryson goodwin | Left centre | Tim Simona |
| Kirisome Auva’a | Right centre | Kevin Naiqama |
| Dane Neilsen | Right winger | Jordan Rankin |
| Adam Reynolds | Left half | Luke Brooks |
| Luke Keary | Right half | Mitchell Moses |
| Thomas Burgess | Prop | Ava Seumanufagai |
| Damian Cook | Hooker | Robbie Farah |
| David Tyrell | Prop | Tim Grant |
| Chris Grevsmuhl | Left second row | Chris Lawrence |
| Kyle Turner | Right second row | Curtis Sironen |
| Sam Burgess | Lock | Sauaso Sue |
| Cameron McInnes | Interchange | Josh Aloiai |
| Jason Clark | Interchange | Dene Halatau |
| Nathan Brown | Interchange | Kyle Lovett |
| George Burgess | Interchange | JJ Felise |
There are two changes for the Bunnies team that lost in Brisbane, with George Burgess and Kyle Turner joining the team at the expense of the suspended Paul Carter and the injured Hymel Hunt.
The team is also reshuffled, with Kirisome Auav’a returning to the centres after being selected as a bench forward last week, and George Burgess to presumably take a full front-row stint from the bench.
Burgess, who has been poor by his standards for most of the season, missed last week through injury, and needs to improve or will find himself omitted for form reasons in the near future.
The loss of Carter is a blow. While he has been inconsistent this season, including a horror four-error day on Good Friday, he remains one of the Rabbitohs’ strongest forwards carrying the ball. His 88 metre per game is bettered only by Sam and George Burgess among regular forwards. Carter is also second on the team for offloads and fourth at the club for total tackles, despite missing one game.
While still only 22 years old, Hunt has already played at three clubs, starting at the Titans before two fruitless seasons at the Storm. This season however, Hunt found a niche playing at right centre, and was actually the fourth highest metre-gainer for the club. More than that, he has been something of a playmaking threat, with four try assists and three line break assists.
For the Tigers, there are really only two ways a coach can respond to the sort of performance they turned in on Saturday night. The first is to ring the changes and bring in fresh players to do what the established players couldn’t do. The second is hold the line and give the defeated players an opportunity to make amends.
Taylor has opted for the latter, with only two changes. the first was unavoidable, with Tim Grant (who remains the listed starter) ruled out late on Wednesday afternoon. Grant has been solid for the Tigers so his absence through injury is certainly not a coaching decision.
The second change is left centre Nathan Milone being dropped in favour of the returning Tim Simona. Even that change could be passed off as simply the return of an incumbent, although Joey Leilua made Milone’s position in the team essentially untenable even for a coach willing to give his team a chance at redemption.
What to watch for
After looking at the Rabbitohs in depth last week, and with the knowledge that we will be seeing them again in a few weeks’ time, this week we’ll concentrate on the Wests Tigers and what went wrong at Canberra Stadium.
The first answer is, of course: a lot.
The team missed 33 tackles, made ten errors, allowed 12 offloads and 11 line breaks, and conceded a whopping 1853 metres on the ground.
However, the malaise goes deeper than simply making errors and missing tackles.
It is a common refrain from coaches and players that it’s important to get the ‘one percenters’ right. These are the little things that the best players and teams do regularly. As troubling as those headline numbers would have been for Taylor, the failures at the little things may have been equally disappointing.
In essence, taking care of the one percenters is about discipline, but not in the sense of avoiding giving away penalties (although it can be that as well). Rather, it is the personal discipline to do all the things that an elite NRL player and team do, but that aren’t as obvious as making your tackles and carrying the ball aggressively.
For example, it is players coming in as a fourth, or as in the photo below, a fifth tackler when the man was already going down.
In this image we see both James Tedesco and Nathan Milone joining a tackle on Paul Vaughan, when neither was probably necessary. Five men in the tackle make it challenging for the team to get set for the next play, and a sharp dummy half like Josh Hodgson is always going to recognise that as he did on this occasion, sending Elliot Whitehead barrelling over the try line on the next play.
Another great example of a missed one percenter is the following pair of images of Tigers players being left behind while the play the ball is occurring. A man on the ground behind the ball is a man not in the defensive line.
Rugby league is a brutal, collision sport and sometimes it’s hard to get straight up from a tackle. However, both of these plays led directly to tries and if your team is already struggling to compete, it becomes essential that you find a way to get back in the defensive line.
Failing to keep to defensive structure is another area where little things can kill you. Luke Brooks and Mitchell Moses have struggled in defence, but failures to keep to structure – as we’re about to see in the next image – can hurt just as much as missed or ineffective tackles.
This next image demonstrates a great example where a lack of attention to detail in defence in the opposition half can hurt you.
A Tigers player is coming in to attempt to head off a play before it gets started. It can be a spectacular play, but in the context of the game it is not necessarily a smart play. With Josh Papalii outside of Aidan Sezer, the correct play is probably to stay in the defensive line and not gamble that you can get there before Sezer passes the ball.
Our final example of the Tigers failing to respect the little things shows a poor, and arguably undisciplined choice in attack.
In the image below we see Robbie Farah attempting to dive over to score a try on the last tackle. On the face of it, this is a play worth trying every now and then, however the circumstances suggest this was not a smart play.
For starters, it was a slow play the ball, and thus Papalii had more than enough time to get set – and as we can clearly see, he is poised to swallow Farah as soon as he heads up field.
Secondly, if we cast our eyes wider we can see that Jarrod Croker is already heading infield, leaving Kevin Naiqama and David Nofoaluma only a quick pass or two away from a two-on-one against Edrick Lee.
The dummy half dive-over is a high risk, high reward play, and one can argue the Tigers needed to take some chances to turn games their way. However, in this instance there were clear factors suggesting a pass was the smarter option. Farah’s decision is emblematic of a team making poor choices.
On Saturday evening, the Tigers failed again and again on the one percenters, making poor choices and poor efforts when it came to the little things. You will notice that all of these images are from the first half of the game. This was a deliberate choice, given there were many more examples in the second half. But it is the failure to attend to these little things when the game was still a contest that demonstrates just how far this team has to travel if they want to extricate themselves from the hole they are in.
Time and again on Saturday evening they gave the Raiders opportunities to score or make huge gains through lack of personal discipline and poor decision-making. If they do that tonight, it will be the Rabbitohs who punish them this time.
First try scorer: Luke Keary
It is difficult to make a case for any Tigers player after last weekend, yet the Rabbitohs don’t inspire much confidence either. I’ve taken Luke Keary, as I’m expecting that a game like this, with two desperate teams, will be broken open by either an individual effort or some sort of busted play with ricochets and in-goal errors. Both of those scenarios are the sorts of things a busy player like Luke Keary is often in the right place to capitalise on.
Prediction: Rabbitohs
While the Rabbitohs may be in the bigger hole compared to expectations, the Tigers are a long way from being a competitive NRL side. The team is doing both the big things and the little things poorly, and only some occasional James Tedesco brilliance has papered over the cracks this season.
These are hard times at the Tigers, and it’s unlikely they’ll get easier tonight.
Shoe-in of the week
This feels like a perfect opportunity for a certain broadcaster to trot out a couple of well-worn clichés: “No, no, no, not that one”, and “on tilt”.
At some point in this game, whichever team falls behind is going to be on tilt for sure.
You can read the Thursday Night Forecast here every week, or check it out along with more great rugby league analysis and insight on Lachlan’s website Back the Ten. You can also follow Lachlan on Titter @backtheten
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