Game Info

Date: Friday, September 18, 2020

Venue: Bankwest Stadium, Parramatta

Kick Off: 7:55PM AEST

Referee: Henry Perenara

Head-to-head: Played 58, Parramatta 24, Brisbane 33, Drawn 1

Odds: Eels $1.07 Broncos $8.50

Broadcast: Nine, Fox League, Kayo

Last Four Encounters:

Eels 34 d Broncos 6, Suncorp Stadium, R3 2020

Eels 58 d Broncos 0, Bankwest Stadium, Finals 2019

Broncos 17 d Eels 16, Suncorp Stadium, R24 2019

Eels 38 d Broncos 10, Bankwest Stadium, R14 2019

Background

Last weekend answered a few questions about the Eels, particularly their defensive resolve, but the rumblings of imminent finals failure are growing louder as Parramatta were worse than ever with the ball in hand. Nothing sums it up more than the horrible sideways run from Mitchell Moses that ended with a pass to Clint Gutherson, who had stopped watching the play because the timing had been blown so badly. It encompasses everything wrong with the Eels at the moment: too much lateral movement, no composure or attention to detail, and botched attacking runs.

There are only two weeks for Parramatta to get its attack into finals shape. They have proven time and again they can defend their way to a finals win, but to the best of my knowledge no team has ever won a game of rugby league without scoring any points. The attack is going the wrong direction, and while I won’t hold last weekend against the Eels too much, half the spine was missing and possession was 2:1 against them playing one of the best defensive teams in the league, but if they can’t get it together in the next two weeks then I’ll be cancelling that order for a signed grand final jersey.

Brisbane and the Tigers are the remaining teams on the Eels’ schedule, and with both playing for next to nothing there are no excuses for Parramatta to not win both games comfortably. Nobody is going to think beating those two will mean they can repeat the job against the Storm, Roosters or Panthers, but if we can’t put these two away, well, you won’t want to be reading the Telegraph, or watching Fox, or listening to Triple M, or going on Twitter, leading up to that first finals match.

What happened last time

That 34-6 win back on the return from the COVID break felt like a breakthrough performance for Parramatta. The Broncos had won their first two, their forwards looked unstoppable, Anthony Milford was in great touch. It turns out we didn’t even put on one of the top five beatings the Broncos would take this season. 

It is easy to forget that it was a grind for much of the early going, before the Eels were rewarded for pressure and middle dominance with a rush of late points. Surely Parramatta can’t be thinking anything will be easy after the last month or two they have had, but that game will be a good reminder that rewards only come to teams that do the hard yards early on.

 

 

Sixties’ Lucre Quest (Quoted markets are NSW TAB)

It been a tough slog on the Parra punt this year.

A combination of close calls, not so close calls when going for special markets, and nowhere near enough wins sums up my year.

So this week I’m handing the reins to Yoko.

She’s been complaining that I never feature on those TAB stories of people winning small fortunes on 37 leg multis, and she’s confident she can tip successfully where I have failed.

Yoko’s tip this week – Brisbane with the 19.5 start is an absolute lock-in. She reckons that Parra’s attack won’t be able to put them 20 or more clear in this match, and she even gives the Broncos a chance for the win.

I’ll make no comment.

Good luck on the punt and gamble responsibly.

 

Teams

Parramatta

1. Clint Gutherson 2. Maika Sivo 3. Michael Jennings 4. Waqa Blake 5. Blake Ferguson 6. Jai Field 7. Mitchell Moses 8. Reagan Campbell-Gillard 9. Reed Mahoney 10. Junior Paulo 11. Shaun Lane 12. Ryan Matterson 13. Nathan Brown. 14. Will Smith 15. Andrew Davey 16. Kane Evans 17. Oregon Kaufusi. 18. Haze Dunster 19. Stefano Utoikamanu. 20. George Jennings 21. Daniel Alvaro

Reed returns after a week off with an AC joint injury, considering the Eels pack had their worst yardage performance of the season against Penrith you could say they missed him. Will Smith retains his place as the bench rake after Ray Stone went down with another hand injury.

Marata Niukore and Dylan Brown are both out until the finals, giving Jai Field another week and his best chance to show that electric speed he possesses. His defence last week was well beyond any expectations I had of him. Andrew Davey retains his place on the bench, where he epitomises the term ‘high effort’. Kane Evans will have Stefano and the returning Daniel Alvaro breathing down his neck after a low IQ effort against Penrith.

Brisbane

1. Darius Boyd 2. Corey Oates 3. Kotoni Staggs 4. Herbie Farnworth 5. Richard Kennar 6. Tyson Gamble 7. Tom Dearden 8. Joe Ofahengaue 9. Issac Luke 10. Ben Te’o 11. David Fifita 12. Alex Glenn 13. Patrick Carrigan. 14. Cory Paix 15. Jamil Hopoate 16. Xavier Coates 17. Ethan Bullemor. 18. Kobe Hetherington 19. Pride Petterson-Robati 20. Sean O’Sullivan 21. Jesse Arthars.

The Broncos have been terrible in 2020, and some of that certainly comes down to the rotten injury toll they have faced. If they hadn’t been the Slytherin of the NRL for the last 30 years you might feel sorry for them. Their entire first choice spine from round one is missing, as is their forward leader in Payne Haas, one of four members of the starting pack in the casualty ward.

Eels fans will be pleased to see that all of these injuries give Jamil Hopoate another shot at first grade, the only thing worse than his discipline is his tackling technique. Ben Te’o has failed to impress in his return from rugby union, and David Fifita has been playing like a man who has signed a multi-million dollar contract and is counting the days he is stuck with this rabble of a side. 

Intangibles

For the first time since round two the Eels are in the “Henry Game™”, the worst or least consequential match of the round where the NRL hides perpetually poor referee Henry Perenara. Channel Nine must be thrilled that their Friday night contest will be soiled by both the Broncos and the worst ref in the game. Strangely enough, it is only the third time Perenara will referee the Broncos in 2020, unsurprisingly they lost both games so far.

There is some chance of showers and a cool change will come in on Friday after a couple of summer-like days out in Sydney’s west. Considering the Broncos this year and the hopes the Eels will have of making noise in the finals, weather, referee and any other intangible shouldn’t be able to impact the result of this game. 

Us

Let’s talk about a few of the more maligned Eels here, because my breakdown of how to beat the Broncos would be “just play hard”. First I wanted to give Blake Ferguson a break. I don’t blame people for judging the quality of a winger by the quantity of tries they score, but there is more to football than putting the ball over the white line and too often I am seeing lazy criticism of Fergo adding in “and he isn’t making metres like he used to” after mentioning his tryscoring drought.

Ferguson is still an elite early tackle runner, and if his numbers are down it is only because the situations the Eels rely on him in are so dire. Maika Sivo has many strengths, but he is a hopeless runner out of our own half because he lacks footwork before the line, doesn’t have great leg drive in the tackle and has the slowest play-the-ball in football. This means Fergo is taking more than his share of first and second tackle runs out of our own 20, and especially within our own 10.

Those runs are brutal. Defenders get fresh legs when they see a chance to bury a runner inside the 10. You see big forwards pushed back towards the line with regularity, and players running out of dummy half are often held up in the tackle and muscled backwards. This just doesn’t happen to Fergo. He is a master of staying low, using his balance and strength in the tackle to avoid being pushed back. He uses footwork at the line to hold defenders in place and stop their momentum. He is doing all these things just as well as he always has, and these are crucial runs that enable the Eels forwards to follow up with their customary charges. 

Ferguson probably doesn’t deserve an Origin jersey (Josh Addo-Carr and Daniel Tupou are my picks) but if you are claiming Ferguson is playing badly you are exposing yourself as not paying enough attention to the little parts of the game. Fergo can’t help it if Waqa never passes to him and Mitch isn’t kicking to him. What he can control is his contributions to our forward momentum, and that has not slacked off at all.

Mitchell Moses also copped plenty of flak for his kicking game against Penrith, particularly for not finding open space. Honestly, I don’t think that finding open space is Mitch’s goal with most kicks, and it probably isn’t coached in the way it used to be. Kicks into open space can become kicks that bounce dead very easily, and when you can put as much under a ball as Moses can those high kicks that a winger or fullbacks takes on the full inside the 20 are the most effective clearing method we have.

Teams will almost always have three defenders back these days to shut down the 40/20 attempt, meaning open space is harder to find than it used to be, but high kicks that give the chase a chance to get down field in a straight line are incredibly valuable. While I’d love to see a bit more variety from inside the attack half than mid-field bombs that the back three catch uncontested 10 out, Moses not finding open space I don’t see as a major problem.

Then we have a couple of players that deserve the criticism they are getting. Maika Sivo might be playing injured, because for half a season he’s only been able to take what defences have given him in way of try scoring. We haven’t seen a bash and barge run in weeks, he hasn’t stolen a fullbacks soul like he attempted against James Tedesco, and without Maika being able to create those opportunities he becomes a lower effort version of Matt Petersen. I loved Sideshow Bob, but I wouldn’t be chanting his name because he finished a textbook backline movement. We need to see beast mode Sivo again, and soon, because there are plenty of players who can just take what the defence gives them, and they would probably have better carries out of their own half than Sivo has, and wouldn’t panic rush out of the defensive line when outnumbered.

Kane Evans, to quote our grades master Mitch, can get in the sea after last weekend. The worst part of his game is that he compounds his mistakes, trying to put in extra efforts to make up for a penalty, dropped ball or a six again that inevitably leads to more penalties, six agains or reckless offloads. He runs hard, is tough to stop close to the line and he can throw a good offload, but all of this means nothing if his response to putting the team under pressure is to put them under more pressure. I never thought I’d miss Peni Terepo, but well done Kane, you’ve managed it.

A final note on the captain’s challenge, which Kane blew last week. First of all, captains shouldn’t challenge anything that they didn’t see for themselves as a blatant wrong call. Don’t trust forwards, especially bench props, who have just made a mistake. Second, don’t use challenges until the game situation is critical. Imagine not having a challenge because Kane dropped a ball when we need to reverse a howler in a try scoring situation down 18-14? Sure, Evans might not have knocked that ball on, but it was close enough, and defending a set starting in your own half is something good teams should be able to do. Save the challenge for crucial times, not just for when a call might be wrong.

Them

While the Eels will need to put about 140 on the Broncos for those mid season comparisons to the 1999 Western Suburbs Magpies to hold, it is astounding that Brisbane were even being compared to a team that finished 16 points shy of averaging 40 points conceded per game and had a points differential (-659) higher than any team even scored that year (the best was the Storm who scored 639 points). Personally I’ve enjoyed every second of this Broncos downfall, and I’m hoping to see yet more misery piled on them Friday night.

Brisbane have been easily beaten most weeks, but in recent times they haven’t been easybeats. They’ll compete for about 60 minutes, but the flaws in defensive technique eventually show through, and their attack certainly looks like a team of players going through the motions with a makeshift spine. 

In saying that, quality opposition have had little trouble grinding the Broncos out and then running up a score. The Roosters, Rabbitohs and Raiders have all done that in the last month or two, and Penrith let them stay in the contest a little longer before pulling the trigger and doing what needed to be done, and not much more. If Parramatta is a finals quality team and not just a team in the finals, they need more than a grinding 20-6 win here.

There are targets all across that backline. Darius Boyd has been better at fullback, but he still plays like he retired three years ago and can’t be relied upon as a last line of defence. Kotoni Staggs shares plenty in common with Eels centre Waqa Blake, an incredible attacking threat that loves to go himself and can’t defend. Kennar is garden variety ordinary, and neither half inspires confidence on either side of the ball.

There is no excuse for Parramatta not winning the battle of the middle. Payne Haas wasn’t terribly effective as a one man army for the Broncos, and now he has left the bubble on compassionate grounds there are no obvious candidates to pick up the slack. Patrick Carrigan is already working overtime, while David Fifita hasn’t been the same player since his return from injury and signing with Gold Coast. Glenn will try hard but is proven to be an uninspiring leader that doesn’t motivate the team, while Joe Ofahengaue is being shopped around and Ben Te’o is playing like a 33 year old who has been on a six year rugby union retirement cruise. 

The bench is even thinner, with only two noted running forwards in Bullemor and Hopoate. Paix is a hooker and last time I checked, Xavier Coates was a winger. You want to see RCG and Junior getting big minutes and match fit for the finals, but if ever there was a time to get some extra minutes in the legs of Oregon Kaufusi and Andrew Davey, this is it. 

There isn’t really any great analysis to be found here; the Broncos are terrible in 2020. Even the Eels of the last two months should comfortably win this one, if an Eels that are kicking into finals gear takes the field the score could be anything.

How it goes

I haven’t even mentioned how bad a matchup the Eels have been for the Broncos in recent times, or the 58-0 thrashing they gave a much better Brisbane team almost a year ago to the day. There has been no fire in this Broncos team, no “dig deep and win one” attitude or threat of coming good like the Titans, Warriors and Dragons have done this year. They are going through the motions and anything less than a convincing Eels win is unacceptable.

Parramatta needs this run. They need to get their attack right, to build some confidence and prove that what they’ve done on the training paddock can work on the field. Nobody is going to mistake putting a beating on the lowly Broncos as the Eels suddenly becoming a danger side in the finals, but if they can’t do it here, what hope can fans have they’ll do it against finals teams? I’ve watched enough 14-12 fingernail killers in the last two months, just give me a big win to end the Bankwest regular season on. Is that too much to ask?

Go you Eels!

Prediction: Parramatta Eels 52 Brisbane Broncos 0

Man of the Match: Clint Gutherson