You know what, Barry, I agree with Panthers.

I’m sick and tired of your reasonable and objective evaluations of situations based on the evidence. The game – and honestly the world -would be better off with more subjective, partisan and emotional opinions.

Jokes aside, huge fan of your contributions here mate.

Yes. The answer is absolutely yes, you definitely would.

Really feel for Reynolds, that could be close to career ending at his age. Apparently he’ll probably be back this year but it’s just a brutal injury and it’s a lot different at 30+ than it is as a young player.

Broncos had a horror run with injuries tonight but I don’t think 40-18 was an unfair representation of the game. Broncos dominated the first ~20 but couldn’t capitalise and then scored two quick tries against the run of play at the start of the second.

The Broncos are absolutely electric with the ball and showed flashes of that tonight, but just couldn’t string it together and the injuries obviously played a big part in that.

For the Roosters, we’ve had a very up and down season but we’re starting to show some of our potential. We have way too much class and strike power all over the field to be a 50% win team. Would love for us to kick on from here and prove that we’re the genuine top-4 team that this squad should be but we’ve been way too inconsistent over the last few years for me to feel overly confident about that. But good signs and even though we have some absolute shockers in us, I still feel that our best is as good as anyone other than the Panthers. Unfortunately we just don’t show that ‘best’ as often as we should.

Commiserations Broncos fans. Even with your injuries I feel like you have way too much class to not make the 8 and from there it’s game on.

Multiple 30+ players who have won everything they could have hoped for at the Roosters are retiring plus two ex-Union players jumping over for money / to fulfil life-long dreams. Not quite as shocking when you actually think about it.

One of my favourite players of all-time. Played massively above his weight and was the perfect player to unlock our team during that dream 2018/2019 run. Hit the line at speed and kept the defence guessing which was exactly what we needed. He was also fearless in defence and, despite his small size, he was never a turnstile and held his own far more often than not.

Keary is completing his MBA and has plenty of great things ahead of him. You obviously can’t discount the concussion issues but I trust the Roosters medical staff on that one as they’ve proven multiple times that they are willing to make the tough decision in these situations and Keary claims that isn’t what has happened here.

It’s certainly not ideal to lose so many core players in a short period, but it feels like this is the right decision. I don’t doubt that he would have loved to stay for another year, but we’re sitting in the “beat anyone on our best day” but “not a consistenly top team” situation right now and that’s unlikely to change in the next 12 months (although I’m still not ruling out a serious finals run if we can just get our s*** together).

Let’s give this season a red-hot crack and give the man the send-off he deserves.

Keary moved to NSW when he was 10 and Inglis moved to QLD when he was 16 after already playing a Senior game with Canberra. Keary also played one game v Inglis as an all time great. Hardly comparable although both technically played for the wrong team under the current rules.

Was out at a dinner with the family before my sister’s wedding tomorrow so wasn’t able to watch it live, but just watched the reply and woooow what a win.

The Crusader’s aren’t any real barometer of success this year and I’m not saying we are a great team by any stretch, but losing 4 games in a row by a combined 13 points definitely makes our record look worse than we probably are.

Just happy with the win and hopefully we can finish the season strong.

Some absurdly weird takes in this article, but I’ll just point a few discussions regarding Lebron / AD v other comparable players as a specific example:

– Lebron is ahead of Curry in pretty much every single standard and advanced stat aside from PPG. AD is arguably even further ahead based on almost all advanced stats. The Lakers are also 3.5 games ahead of the Warriors.

– How do you possibly have Curry as a comfortable 2nd team and Lebron and AD only making it “because they’re established superstars from past seasons and they play for the Lakers”? The All-NBA teams no longer have a positional requirement and both AD and Lebron have objectively been better than Curry in pretty much every single metric.

– You also have “Kevin Garnett” (i.e Kevin Durant) and Devin Booker in the 2nd and 3rd team despite having arguably worse stats (and comfortably worse advanced stats) while only being 2.5 games ahead of the Lakers but somehow they deserve it due to their “output” and “dominating for the Suns” respectively.

I’m an Aussie born in Chicago so I’m a Bulls fan, but this is just terrible content. No one comes to The Roar for NBA content so it’s better to have no articles rather than this nonsense. If you don’t watch the NBA, just say it.

I’m a big fan of your NRL and Cricket content, Paul, and if The Roar wants to do NBA content, I’m all for it. But don’t use ChatGPT or someone that doesn’t watch or follow the NBA to do it, please.

Completely agreed. Walker unsuprisingly got up a bit gingerly as he was absolutely clobbered so I had no issue with the call on the ground as a grade 1. That’s perfectly in line with a larger focus on head trauma and while it might have been a bit frustrating in a closer game, I’m OK with erring on the side caution at the time.

That doesn’t mean that they will always get it right and if he was reassesed, particularly after the video shows it was a hit to the neck and no real head involvement, then that is also fine. We should be OK with both post-game downgrades and upgrades as long as we have proper systems and controls in place.

Honestly the worst thing about the whole issue is that Wighton wasn’t penalised as it could have been very, very bad if that elbow was a little bit higher (or the raised knee came into play).

Latrell put his arm out and held a player back to make sure it wasn’t a line dropout. You can’t do that. Yellow card, end of story. Doesn’t matter if Teddy milked it.

Hilarious mental gymnastics to think that the player chasing the ball who is illegaly held back is the cynical player in that instance.

Well, that’s a wildly cynical take.

I don’t think many Roosters fans are getting ahead of themselves, but Broncos were in the GF last year and Manly is on a hot-streak and may turn out to be a genuinely good team this year. While the game against Manly probably wasn’t as close as the score suggested, we certainly didn’t get “the bounce of the ball” and may well have won if we did. We absolutely dominated the game tonight and were comfortable winners against the Broncos so I’m not really sure what bounces of the ball that you’ve seen so far.

If we don’t have another terrible run of injuries, anything less than top 4 should and would be considered an extremely poor result.

Some pretty wild comments from JD re- the yellow card.

Latrell could have shadowed the ball or kicked it out but chose to illegally obstruct Teddy, while over the try line, to avoid a line-dropout. Like, what else is a yellow card for?

Using Rugby terminology, it’s literally text-book cynical play and should be a yellow card every day of the week. Not many things that League should take from Rugby but this is the sort of thing that should be pretty damn obvious.

Tough day for the Rabbitohs. Every time they looked even slightly dangerous there would be another dropped ball or mistake. Not a lot else to say about it.

As much as the Rabbitohs were poor, the Roosters took their chances and converted almost every time.

With Teddy seemingly back in form and some crazy strike power with Tupou, Young and Sua’ali’i (among others), as long as we get near-parity in the forwards we should be dangerous against every single team in the competition.

Being honest, it was almost a bit of a training run in the end and hopefully this was the run we needed to get the continuity back that we’ve missed recently. If we can avoid some of the disastrous injuries of the last few seasons then we’ll be a handful for any team and should hopefully be around for a decent finals run.

Come on boys, super happy with the win. Let’s kick on from here.

Not sure how literally anything you said is related to my comment, but keep yelling at those clouds man.

As I said, big fan of Swinton’s play but you can only be world-class when you’re actually on the field. If he can sort out his stuff discipline issues then he could genuinely be the hard hitting, hard running, brutal #6 that the Wallabies have been craving for years.
Edit: Not sure if you were being sarcastic or you meant ‘with him’.

Silly comment. Like it or not, NSW is comfortably the biggest state by both population and GDP and historically the largest fan / player base for Rugby. There’s no conspiracy here – regardless of the results from the Tahs, that’s the ‘merit’ they bring. Until that changes then we’re stuck with the Tahs and the terribly run NSWRU.

The Swinton comment was just a joke. I’m actually a big fan of his play (obviously not including the brain-fade penalties) and it says a lot that we have a player of his caliber coming off the bench. If he can keep his cool and not do anything dumb, then a team with Bell, Holloway, Hannigan and Swinton (plus HJH, Gamble etc.) means you have a very solid combination of brute force and skill for 80 minutes a game.

Other than Bell, none of them are world-class players but they are all solid+ Super Rugby players who you can trust to give it absolutely everything they have.

It’s very frustrating we’ve lost 2 in a row by such low margins, but the Tahs have a more than decent core of fairly young players who should all be coming into their primes, particularly in the forwards.

Onwards and upwards boys. I’ve been hurt by hope before and I’m willing to do it again.

Extremely physical game and both teams will be sore tomorrow. There were no egregious calls from the ref, but it certainly felt like he was more than a bit whistle-happy. Having said that, the Blues left 6+ points on the field with some atrocious kicking.

Overall, pleased with the intent and physicality from the Tahs and as much as it’s painful to lose 2 games in a row by 2 points, the core of a very solid team is there. Really need a more creative game plan from the backs as our forward pack seems like they’ll be able to keep up with pretty much any team in the competition right now (until Swinton gets red carded).

Well played Blues. A well deserved win, but an ugly game overall that I don’t think either team will be overly pleased with. Although going home with the points means the Blues will probably be way more pleased than the Tahs are.

I swear sometimes nothing is good enough for some people. We beat the 2 x defending champions after we had a below-par last year. In every objective way, that’s a big deal.

Would you prefer them to feel like beating the Force is the same as beating the Crusaders? Passion is important and so is being realistic.

This is just a very weird and unrealistic way of looking at things.

So happy about that win. I know the Crusaders aren’t the same team as last year, but we were still $8 outsiders. I feel like expectations were too high after a decent season 2 years ago, but have now become too low after a relatively poor season last year.

This team probably has only 1 or two truely World Class players (Bell, of course, and maybe Marky-Mark), but more importantly they have a big chunk of decent – good, young players some of which have the chance to become World Class. And those younger players are now all a year older and wiser compared to last year.

The fact that I feel like the Crusaders had the rub of the green for the ref makes it even sweeter. Nothing wild, but was at least a 60/40 split on calls for the Crusaders and that would usually mean we lose by 30, not win by 13.

Not expecting any major things this year, but my expectation would be a solid year where we cause the occasional major upset (like tonight), give the tier 1 teams a run for their money, generally beat the worst teams and still absolutely s** the bed occasionaly just because that’s what the Tahs do best.

As long as we keep developing our young talent and don’t absolutely fall apart this season, I’m OK with it.

Fair analysis, but gotta disagree on Radley. He had a poor start to the year and his discipline was shocking (even by his standards), but it felt like a lot of it was due to him being forced to play a game that didn’t suit him. Once he went back to his natural game he was instrumental in our run at the end of the season.

I’m definitely a bit more bullish than you overall and would expect us to be a solid top-4 contender with the firepower to beat anyone on our day. If we manage to stay mostly uninjured – which is a big ‘if’ based on the last few years – we have class all across the park and better balance than we’ve had in a while. My only major concern is how we fit 4 into 3 when it comes to outside backs and I think Robbo is just going to have to make a tough decision and drop Suaalii from the starting side.

Nah, that’s an objectively nonsensical opinion given the historical / current context of the many, many ball tampering punishments. The only way this opinion makes any sense is if you also think pretty much every ball tampering situation deserved far harsher punishment which would put the situation in a more reasonable context. Otherwise you’re just biased and it’s not really an opinion worth discussing.
The fact you bring up ‘ethics’ is just a huge red-herring that shows you’re not being sincere in your opinion.

Very well said re- the ban.

We are the only country to go over the top of the ICC in an incident like this and it was absolute overkill largely due to a cricket fan-base that was baying for blood alongside a somewhat toxic ‘competitive mindset’ in the team. While this incident was particularly dumb, there have been dozens of high-profile incidents of ball tampering that have received minimal attention & punishment but CA turned this into a huge problem with their heavy handed response.

I do also understand that the overall impact was intended to change the ‘team environment’ and ‘public perception’ of the team, but any additional ban – maybe 3 months – would have had the same positive impact regarding the attitude of the Australian team & perception of the fans without absolutely throwing the players under the bus and hurting the legacy of 2 of our all time greats.

In their mission to show strength, CA absolutely messed this one up. Anyone who suggests the ban should have been larger just shows a huge lack of knowledge about cricket and / or massive bias.

And this is exactly the type of objectively overly negative opinion the author is talking about. Massively underrating his overall ability, overstating his weakness overseas and hysterical opinion on the sandpaper incident.

Warner is approaching ATG in Australia, is good-decent but inconsistent over his career overseas and the 1 year ban was already massive overkill so asking for a life ban is truely absurd in the context of how world cricket works.

Great article, Ben.

I, like most fans, wasn’t feeling too confident after the first two games (probably magnified by our recent flop at the Rugby World Cup), but underneath it all I just had this vague feeling that we were still in with a good shot.

As each game came and we stumbled and faltered, but we kept finding a way to win through individual moments of brilliance. Even though we weren’t putting in complete performances, someone always stood up when needed.

I guess that says a lot about the self-belief in this team which is what kept me confident. They just felt that no matter how dire the situation, on any given day someone could stand up and drag us over the line. Not quite the team of champions we’ve had in past years, but definitely a champion team. Still buzzing about it days later.