Eels 14 defeated by Titans 26

Crowd: 11,612

Well what more can really be said that already hasn’t been uttered, cursed or muttered a 100 times already?

There is no doubt that there are many words or phrases that could describe the performance on Friday night by the Eels – but we are not going to dwell on that. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back to work.

So just what happens to the Eels when they play the Titans??? Why on Earth do the Titans have the wood over the Eels? With 16 games now played between these clubs, the Titans hold a huge 11-5 head-to-head lead . Did we miss Norman that much? Would he have really made a difference? Did our brilliant start get the players thinking ‘This is going to be easy’ which in turn led to the them throwing the game plan out the window?

So many questions can be asked. Still, after the dust settles on the carnage of the Friday night ambush the Eels are sitting 4^th on the ladder and that is a bloody good achievement after three consecutive away games to start the season.

Let’s delve into the stats that matter for Parramatta.

Scoring Stats:

Full Time:

It definitely makes for a different read when compared to last weeks’ game against the Dragons. The Titans just dominated everything against Parramatta and the Eels simply couldn’t respond.

Poor unforced errors really killed any momentum the Eels were trying to start and the constant turnovers proved to be an insurmountable hurdle for a team bereft of its chief shot-caller.

Considerable congratulations must go out to the Titans. They played a terrifc game under incredible adversity as they battled a damaging injury toll.

1^st Half:

The opening 15 mins makes the first half stats look pretty good. Decent completion rates had us in the game at half time. However as you can see with the Time-in-opposition-half numbers, this is where the Titans began to wrest control of the game from the Eels. Our last 20 mins was pretty poor.

2^nd Half:

Not much to say here for the second half. Great completion rate from the Titans but what is really surprising is that we had quality time in the Titans’ half but did absolutely nothing with it. Again, it likely speaks towards both an inconsistent platform from our forwards and a lack of direction from our halves.

Attack:

Rarely does the match-up between Eels and Titans make for easy viewing. Neither team tend to put on an array of fluent attacking movements when we match up and it usually falls into a dour grind. Friday was no different.

Four Eels made the magic 100 metres for this game, with two (French and Ma’u) also falling just short back in the 90’s. For their part, only two Titans ran for over 100 metres.

It was surprising to see that in this game we opted to use our right-edge attack so heavily. In our previous two games the left-edge has been our dominant attacking side – although this is of course should take into account the massive variable that is the presence of Corey Norman. Both our right-edge players both made over 100 metres while the left was not as prominent. On top of two uncharacteristic errors, Semi only ran for 51m while Jennings was slightly busier with 75m. Very quiet production from our left-edge attack.

Defence:

Nine Eels made 20 or more tackles in the game. Our forwards and bench again shared the work load in defence, even with Rory O’Brien not taking to the field. It is truly good to see our forwards sharing the defensive work load.

Both our halves in Gutherson and Robson are included in this group. The Titans clearly had a game plan early on in the piece that targeted runs at our halves, especially Robson. I thought both had outstanding defensive games for halves. Gutherson with 27 tackles no misses, Robson 21 tackles 2 misses. Might fine effort lads.

Eels: 308 tackles – 14 missed tackles.

Titans: 282 tackles – 24 missed tackles.

All in all Round 3 won’t go down as a great round for a lot of clubs to be perfectly frank (the Cowboys and Sharks are also licking their wounds after also suffering similar ambushes). But for the Eels it will be doubly disappointing, especially with how the season started. Mind you, the saying you don’t win premierships in March rings loud and true for a good reason.

Looking forwards, what would be great to see is the Sharks slumping to a 1-3 opening record in their title defence after a thorough beating at the hands of the Eels.

After three long rounds on the road the Eels finally come back to Sydney for the first home game (in their new home away from home). So lets get out to ANZ on Saturday night and have a huge crowd on hand to watch what should be a high quality game.

Corey Norman is back (and Peni Terepo will also be elibilge for selection after serving his internal 3-game suspension) and although will be without Tepai Moeroa due to his suspension for a shoulder charge, there is little doubt that both sides will be ripping in hard after disappointing losses.

STAT ATTACK: PLAYER OF THE WEEK

CLINT GUTHERSON

No matter how a game unfolds, you can be rest assured Clint will give 100%.

Gutho is always there in the mix trying his utmost to get the team across the line. He is in the very early stages of a career in the halves and let us all not forget that most ‘experts’ had already written him off as a 5/8 and were looking at him to be the weakest point if the Eels failed to fire.

Clint’s season has started out brilliantly and I can only see him getting better as he gets more game time.

Get on the ‘Guth Bus’

Champion Data

Stats courtesy of Champion Data. All these stats and more can be viewed on our match centre at http://mc.championdata.com/nrl/ including live game stats.

– Colmac

Champion Data

Follow @championdatanrl

mc.championdata.com/nrl/

If you liked this article, you might consider supporting The Cumberland Throw.