There was to be no Easter resurrection this time around. After last year’s miracle at CommBank Stadium, the Tigers rose from the dead to almost nick it again, but this time, there was to be no comeback. The Eels held on to take it 28-22.
There were points where it appeared the shock was on. Api Koroisau missed a conversion that could have levelled it with seven minutes to play, which seemed barely believable to anyone who had seen the first half, where Mitchell Moses had destroyed them.
Things will not get any easier for the Tigers, either. Adam Doueihi landed uncomfortably and may have ruptured his ACL, while Brent Naden suffered a suspected broken collarbone.
Tim Sheens confirmed that the injury to Doueihi was on the same knee that he has already had reconstructed twice.
“Ask me tomorrow when I wake up and realise it wasn’t a dream – or a nightmare,” he said. “Those sort of things – we had a young winger (Jordan Hill) do his second one in reserve grade as well. Not a good day for us in that regard.”
There was plenty to be said for the second-half fight from the Tigers, but just like last week in Brisbane and several weeks ago against Canterbury, they gave themselves far too much to do.
“We’ve been coming back in the second halves really well, we’ve only lost one,” said Sheens.
“We’ve been resilient coming back at them, but giving them the start is always the problem. Three tries from kicks, after last week’s kicking efforts from Brisbane, disappoints us because we put a lot of time into it.”
Moses set up three with his boot before the break and then another with his hands. He was ably assisted by Clint Gutherson, who scored the opener and laid on a late clincher.
“He kicked them to death,” said Brad Arthur, who otherwise lamented a poor Eels performance in which they lost every stat other than the scoreboard.
“I haven’t looked at the numbers yet, but I know how much defence we had to do. They had a fair bit of ball on our tryline. It’s a hard one to get a read on and the boys are pretty flat in the sheds after the game.
“The positives are that we got the two points, we’ve got no injuries and we didn’t get anyone suspended.
“We’ve played better this year and got beaten. But at the end of year, that doesn’t matter and the two points does. I just told the boys – we have to take it. We know we can be better.”
If you wanted the purest of examples of where the Wests Tigers went wrong today – and indeed, in several of their losses this season – then it was provided within the first quarter hour.
The Tigers accumulated 15 tackles’ worth of good ball, camping deep in Eels territory, but offered precisely nothing as an offensive threat.
There were crash balls, telegraphed well in advance, and a surfeit of side to side play, before Charlie Staines finally decided that someone should take on the line.
They had a crack and the ball came out. Parra promptly went the length of the field and scored.
The opener really told the tale: it was a combination of all four members of the Eels’ spine, with Josh Hodgson freeing Moses, who kicked for Dylan Brown, who found Gutherson in support.
Tim Sheens has shifted his spine about so much that there’s no way they could possibly know how to play together, and the coach has essentially wasted a month and a half of potential cohesion building by refusing to settle on one combination. It’s absolutely no surprise that they don’t act collectively. How could they?
It didn’t matter that the other Tigers on the ground were able to do their bit in helping the team forward. In the first half, the Tigers made more metres, dominated the ball and played two thirds of the game in Parra’s territory.
Yet beyond an interception, they never looked like scoring. The sight of Junior Tupou being bundled into touch having caught the ball with his feet an inch inside the line told the story: it doesn’t matter how much you spread the ball if the opposition don’t think that someone, at some point, is going to straighten up. They just slide, wait for the winger to catch it, then smash them off the island.
In the second half, they suddenly started going forward. Koroisau and Staines were the architects, forcing the Eels defence to be honest, and so much of the best of the Tigers came off the back of it.
It’s another game without a win, but there is a blueprint there. The worry is that, after the Bulldogs and Broncos experiences, it was another game where the best bits came when the contest was all but over.
Mitch Moses gets the try assists – four of them, if you don’t mind – and he should be shouting a few coffees for the Parra analysts as thanks.
They will likely have spotted two glaring deficiencies in the Tigers’ defence that were ruthlessly prayed upon by the halfback, notably the tendency to play up and in from the edges.
At times, the Tigers wingers were standing 15m in from the touchline in midfield and looking to get in the faces of their opposite numbers.
They’ve done it in plenty of games this season and did it again today, leaving the dink in behind as a permanent option and, when the opportunity arose, the long cutout pass as well.
The analysts know all these things, and the players listen to them: more than once in sheds interviews, both Moses and Brown have identified plays told to them by their video guys which then paid off on the field.
Adam Reynolds picked this apart last week, exploiting the terrible positioning of Doueihi at fullback, and Moses did the same to Staines this time around.
When Maika Sivo scored his try, off a long Moses pass, he was stood on the sideline with Starford To’a on the tramline inside him.
Brad Arthur loves his side to ‘hold their paint’, as he puts it, and maximise the width of the field. Sheens, evidently, hadn’t picked up on this, and the Tigers had their pants pulled down.
For all the doom and gloom, all the lamentations on Luke Brooks and the hand-wringing about the state of the joint venture, there are some green shoots to be found.
The spine has moved constantly, but it has to stick for now with Staines at the back. He was close to the best out there today, and certainly the best in black and amber.
Having a dependable set starter, who catches the bulk of his kicks and returns them with interest, is the sort of consistency that the Tigers have long missed. Nobody is calling Charlie Staines the world’s greatest fullback, but he’s the best they have at the basics.
Tupou, too, falls into that category. Take the ball, run the ball, get up and do it again. The winger made four line breaks, topping 200m in the process, but the best of his stuff was the unfussy carries. Asu Kepaoa, playing in the 2 jumper but inside Tupou as a centre, was in the same boat.
With Doueihi and Naden now looking like they might miss time, these building blocks need to be in place and stay in place, because chopping and changing has been half of the problem this year.
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