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Round 4 of the NRL season brought with it a little bit of everything.
Inconsistency continues to be a running theme and while the ladder is starting to take shape, there is plenty to talk about after a month of the season, including a couple of hard hitting questions to be asked of a veteran hooker and coach.
Robbie Farah wouldn’t look out of place in a North Sydney Bears jersey
Let’s just put it like this – if I was a South Sydney Rabbitohs fan, my remote would have ended up through the TV on Thursday night.
When you have Damien Cook on the bench for the first half as Robbie Farah overplays his hand, makes poor decisions, errors and everything else that’s bad about Rugby League you just have to wonder why he is in the side at all.
The idea of Cook being explosive through the middle stanza of the game has some merit, but not if the Rabbitohs are already trailing and have no momentum because Farah is providing terrible service from dummy half and not allowing Adam Reynolds or Cody Walker to get involved in the game.
Whether Cook can play 80 minutes or not is still up for debate, but something the Bunnies must explore regardless. Wehn Farah is on the park they look dysfunctional at best.
With the Rabbitohs’ season already looking ordinary, and Michael Maguire’s coaching career shaky, it’s time for the Redfern-based club to take a risk on the explosive youngster.
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Penrith not perfect, but nearly so
The Panthers dominated the Knights on Friday night. There aren’t too many others way to put it really.
A 40-0 victory looks fantastic on the scoreboard, but the scary part is Penrith still have improvement in them. Given the amount of ball and opportunities they had, the score could have easily read 60 or 70.
Their defence also showed a little bit of weakness at times as the Knights rolled up field with relative ease for much of the match during the rare occasions they were able to complete a set.
The Panthers have the potential to be premiership contenders, but they can’t simply rely on natural ability. Execution and defensive awareness will be the factors that decide how far the Panthers go in 2017.
Nonetheless, their Round 4 effort was impressive to say the least.
Still plenty of work to do for Wayne’s Broncos
The Broncos are still a work in progress, but they made some steps in the right direction with their tough victory over the Canberra Raiders on Friday.
Brisbane won, so there’s that, but it wasn’t pretty. The Raiders were gritty and determined, but they dropped a lot of ball and made a lot of errors, so it would be fair to say the Broncos really should have been further ahead.
They struggled to make the most of their opportunities and get through the Raiders defence, with the side looking lost at times.
Then came the part where they let the Raiders back into it. That should never have happened in the final 15 minutes of the game, but it did. Wayne Bennett, even with the win, I suspect wouldn’t have been the happiest of coaches after the game, and if there’s one thing clear it’s that Brisbane still have a lot to work on.
Des Hasler continues down the greasy coaching pole?
While the Knights got thrashed, Saturday’s action kicked off with a similarly big smashing as the Sea Eagles ran riot on a hapless Canterbury Bulldogs outfit.
Every club has a bad game, but the Bulldogs really don’t look like beating any of the top teams at the moment. Some will call that a rash statement, given they came within six points of the Melbourne Storm in Round 1 and four of the Roosters in Round 2.
The Bulldogs went on to defeat the Warriors in a scrappy affair last week, but their loss to Manly yesterday probably gives more of an indication of where the club is.
I’m not saying the Bulldogs are going to finish right down the table, nor alleviating blame from the players who appear lost in attack at times, but Hasler was under pressure last year after a top eight finish.
One could only imagine the heat he is getting from the board right now.
What to make of the Eels?
Jeez it’s tough to work out what sort of team the Eels are going to be this season.
It’s not exactly a case of rocks or diamonds though, given they have only played a single game without Corey Norman, who adds so much to their offence.
The Eels did start the season with a pair of wins, but against the Manly Sea Eagles and a terrible St George Illawarra Dragons outfit, it was hard to make a judgement on where they were.
Then, without Norman they got beaten by the brave Gold Coast Titans who were coming off a loss to the Knights, before going down this weekend to the Sharks.
The problem – Norman was back on the park this week and there should have been no excuses for the Eels to play poorly.
They were at full strength, playing their first game of the season on a new home ground at Homebush and coming off a crushing loss which they needed to turnaround from.
Yet, they didn’t.
What made it worse for Parramatta was the way they lost. Their ball handling was dreadful, they looked lost in attack, and their defence wasn’t much better. While the Sharks do have a tendency to strangle sides out of the game, they themselves weren’t that good and the Eels cost themselves any chance at victory in a sloppy game.
If Parrmatta can’t get back to full flight next weekend in Canberra – by no means an easy assignment – it will be time to start asking questions of the Eels goals for 2017.
The Titans won’t win the premiership, but they will cause headaches in September
Well, it’s official. The Titans are better without Jarryd Hayne. After a slow start to the season, Hayne was injured and they have suddenly beaten the Eels and almost overcame the Cowboys with all the odds stacked against them.
Every Aussie loves an underdog, and the Titans are the NRL’s ultimate version of that.
At one point in their clash against the Cowboys, they had completed one out of four sets against the Cowboys 12 out of 12, who also had 80 per cent possession.
The Titans, no matter how brave, had no right to be in the game. But they did. They came back from ten-nil down, to then take the lead before making a couple of errors and eventually going down 32-26.
Ashley Taylor and Kane Elgey combined superbly, Tyrone Roberts was wonderful at the back and their forwards held their own.
This Titans side may not – almost certainly won’t – win the premiership, but if they can keep this level of intensity when Hayne comes back, it’s hard to see them not causing headaches at the back end of the season and into the first weeks of September.
Josh Addo-Carr has replaced Marika Koroibete and then some
It would be just about reasonable to call Marika Koroibete the most dangerous winger in the 2016 competition. With the Fijian flier moving on to Rugby Union though, the Storm needed a replacement who was going to bring the same level of destruction.
Enter Josh Addo-Carr.
Another try and 200 plus metres on Sunday against his old club the Wests Tigers, and it makes you wonder how he wasn’t already on a multi-year contract at Balmain.
Addo-Carr has locked down the wing spot in Melbourne and is on fire week in and out week.
He has all the talent and skill to replace Koroibete and if it’s possible, be stronger than him in the dynamite Melbourne side, who by the way were incredibly strong in a second-half comeback win.
Stopping Carr is going to be imperative for any side to gain any sense of dominance over Melbourne this season.
Johnathan Thurston is still the best
What we did establish in the same game though, as we do almost on a weekly basis is that Johnathan Thurston is still the best.
We know him for his attack, and he really gave the Titans back three a working over throughout the game, but he just has a knack of popping up in all the right spots and adapting to the game in front of him. His try after just four minutes was testament to that.
The really impressive thing for Thurston during the contest though was his ability to pop up everywhere in defence. He must have stopped a barnstorming Kevin Proctor at the line three or four times, and that’s no easy feat.
Seven-tackle sets have the power to change games
Not once, but twice we have seen it this weekend. Teams being dominated, before a seven-tackle set on the back of a poor kick changed the course of a game.
It happened first to the Cowboys on Saturday, and again to the Dragons on Sunday.
The Cowboys, as we have already talked about in this piece, were absolutely motoring away before Michael Morgan put a kick dead. In reply, it was a repeat set and a try for the Gold Coast. The Titans didn’t win, but it was one play that changed the momentum.
Things were similar on Sunday. The Dragons, up 20-2 put up a kick that was caught ingoal by David Fusitu’a and it allowed the Warriors to get some running, some monentum, and get back into the contest.
I was originally going to write about how awful the Warriors were – giving up penalties and dropping the ball – but instead, they got themselves into the contest on the back of an extra tackle.
Like the Titans, they failed to pick up the two competition points, but they got back into a game and almost put the Dragons to the sword.
There you have it Roarers. Our Round 4 talking points. What did you make of the weekend?