The Tip Sheet is also available on Spotify and iTunes!
The NRL News and Preview podcasts fuse together this week as Sixties, Forty20 and Clint analyse the biggest stories coming out of the game before looking at a huge weekend of action against the Newcastle Knights.
Reagan Campbell-Gillard has avoided a season ending injury but the news isn’t exactly great still. RCG will miss 8-10 weeks with a groin tear and his absence will be felt by orders of magnitude. The boys look at the options at the club to replace the big man before the discussion swings back to Parramatta’s bizarre Top 30 situation.
Everyone else is talking about Jack Wighton and the Rabbitohs so The Tip Sheet might as well throw in their two bob. Ricky Stuart was clearly upset about the process that led to his marquee playmaker taking significantly less to play for a rival. Is notional or market value still a thing? Is the system flawed? The boys chat about the biggest move of the year thus far.
Round 9 sees the Eels looking to bounce back from a tough loss in Darwin. The Newcastle Knights have been one of the bigger surprises in 2023 and will make for a fierce opponent on Friday. Kalyn Ponga has a game under his belt and they sport a rather imposing backline headed by Dom Young and Greg Marzhew. Parramatta will need to lift significantly if they want to fend off the Novocastrians.
Great podcast.
Haas – they didn’t want to take Broncos to 11 players and them lose the game = Human error?? Lol given it was at least 2 people involved in the lenghthy decision it’s more like biased decision making.
Recruitment – why can’t we recruit players? Is there a stench at the club? If we look at Tapau, Klemmer…we couldn’t get a deal done and yet have 3 vacancies…Any decent off contract player never comes to Parra…
How can we go into a season without a strategic plan on Recruitment? What successful team cannot attract players?
Recruitment, fitness and Defence are our biggest failures.
Las Vegas – the sports betting and in game betting in the casinos and bars is huge. We are talking Multi billion$$ per game. If NRL gets interest at a fraction of that it would be huge. It’s all about gambling revenue and if a fraction of that $$ can come back to the NRL.
Back 5 poor work ethic last few years. Junior has been average lately. It’s only Moses’s boot that’s making ground.
Defence missed tackles and errors are killing us are all fatigue related.
If we can jag 5 wins out of first 10 games we’ll be doing OK. But with many many many areas for improvement. But the season is starting to get away if we don’t start winning.
To win we need Junior and Gutho 20+ runs and +200m. Moses to kick 700m. 85% completions.
Go Eels!!
Pete,I’ve been trying to pick up on the question of whether we lack fitness, fatigue occurs and we make errors OR we make errors, our fitness and energy is sapped, we fade in games.. I’m hopeless at long posts and this needs one. We made few errors v Penrith, we play our best game and outlast them. We are on the wrong side of error counts in most of our games. Both Robinson and Bellamy said publicly that poor form comes from defending too many errors. Their context was they had good rosters but a bad game is usually linked to errors, recall Storm and Roosters put in some ordinary games early on. Some games we make dumb errors in clumps and you can see momentum change, it even happened v Bulldogs. Also, I,m not 100% with our roster balance and skills, we sometimes are gassed plus have not so great defenders on the park together. Enough, I’m gassed.
BDon, can’t disagree.
just watching teams march through our middle and when we have to make 2 tackles in a row we keep missing the tackles and just grabbing and pushed off too easily. It looks like a fitness issue when players stop looking and are looking away or down. But I agree defending errors is back breaking work. Teams now if they win the middle our edges are porous. Except against Panther this year..we somehow find the right gear..+90% completions from memory.
Anyway we live in hope..
Pete and John, I’m not sure if the victory over the Knights helped with this debate because our completions weren’t great and the Knights defence was very passive which made for huge run metres. What I do put it down to is poor completions against quality teams and not getting those metres from outside backs in those matches to take pressure off the middles.
what I will say is that the Knights have players who can break the line and the Eels defence didn’t let that happen.
I am firmly of the opinion our problems stem from early errors and poor defence.
I don’t see fitness as an issue. We have finished a lot of games very strong at the back end including last week.
I’m hovering around your opinion JE. Error counts are real,and so are our slower play the ball stats. If we are constantly on the back foot trying to recover from errors and opponents are playing faster through the ruck, our middle is going to get the staggers. You’ll need 6 Ray Prices to cope. If we play a stick to the rules style, then higher completions/lower errors become necessary.
We really try to play that disciplined/minimise six agains style and the quick roll on from the opposition can be a consequence. And look at the calls from the ref last night when we were fractionally slower against the Knights. Multiple calls in one sequence marched Newcastle downfield for their first try.
And if Fitzgibbon held the ball, a second one almost came off the back of 2 errors.
I’m with you John.
I hope to see discipline and controlled aggression. I’m tired of the lip service given by the players and coach each week. I’m tired of pointing out how poorly constructed this roster is and how poor some of the players we pick each week really are. That article mentioned in the podcast about our ineffective outside backs and porous middle matches the eye test very well. But, nonetheless, I just want to see them lift and find something to play for. I haven’t seen them lift and take a game with attitude in a while and I’d love to see that this week.
It’s fair to say that the Penrith game showed that they can lift. The Knights game showed that the difference in our opposition over the opening rounds (Tigers aside).
Yep Penrith was the last time (6 odd weeks ago) we saw it and how good was it. BA spoke in post match about how he challenged our forwards again for this game. The bench and forwards did step up this game but hard to judge against such feeble opponents. As you mentioned above, we need them to step up when expected against bigger teams. Also this missed tackle rate is really concerning (another 47 or so last night) as we are second worst in comp for missed tackles and top 2 in comp for errors. Anyway, let’s just enjoy this win and come out next week with intensity and discipline through reduced errors (that doesn’t mean we don’t give away 6 agains or penalties where we should to arrest momentum. We seem determined to give other teams a competitive advantage in the ruck even when it’s obvious we are on back foot).
The Knights against Penrith attacked through the ruck and just kept the game simple. As a consequence they played without error and put it to the Panthers up to halftime.
Following the break Knights made many unforced errors and as a result gave the game back to the Panthers in extra time.
They will do the same to us if we let them get in behind the ruck and attack.
It’s amazing that our weakened middle ran riot. Knights looked gun shy.
Running at Ponga had the same effect as running at Reed
Good stuff guys….. I listened to this in blocks over last night / this morning. But there seemed a undertone of defeat for this season when talking about our roster. I’m certainly not brimming with confidence!
I think Clint is right, if Paulo doesn’t have a big game, we don’t win. It does feel a bit like the Dylan / Lane combo is due though. So best on field is somewhere in there I reckon.
Go the eels
The undertone might have been darker had we known about Matto being out. Yet, we perhaps gave too much credit to the Knights and not enough to our team. And both Ogden and Makatoa had much better games than they’ve had in either NRL or NSW Cup. Such is the roller coaster ride of being a supporter.
Darwin is a lucky charm Sixties, we smash Penrith the week after last year and the knights this year.
A bit emotional and reactive last week, we need Darwin for the cash it brings and the community we help.
It does not ruin us for the two weeks after.
Go eels