Parramatta Eels

Discussion in 'The Cesspit: Rugby League Discussion' started by Spinksy, Sep 20, 2009.

  1. AVA T Delonge

    Gutho :( :( Absolutely devastated.
     
  2. Maroon_Faithful M Faithful

  3. Alec AD Funkotron

    Parramatta warms up for over half an hour in 40 degree heat before the match, gets cooked. Manly players chill in an air conditioned room before the game. Then they smash Parra.

    Absolutely amazing.
     
  4. Sultan Pepper HG Emm

    Total coincidence that Hayne planes at Parra and suddenly the side with agruably the best attitude over the past two seasons has gone to shit?
     
    Harry Sack, Boobidy and Paddy like this.
  5. Sultan Pepper HG Emm

    What does everyone make of Parra? A spoon and 3 pretty miserable finals campaigns over the last 4 years. Watching them through the back half of this year, they look pretty intense but very frustrated. Even watching Gutherson get them in at the end of the game a lot of the group looked pretty switched off. Brad Arthur and Gutherson seem like a pretty intense guys, wondering if the may burn out a bit next year. Looks like it'll be a similar squad going around, pending what happens with Jennings.

    They actually had a few good attacking plays last night in the first half, but everything looked very forced in the second. Just seem like a footy team that's not having much fun.
     
  6. Lukic L Popovic

    This was their year. NRL tried their hardest with the whole Western Sydney/Bankwest narrative but just not to be. Are and always will be the worst organisation in the comp.
     
  7. Magic AJ Parker

    Their three-quarter line is pretty terrible. Ferguson seems to have regressed considerably over the last couple of years & it was just too easy to go around them this year for a top 8 side it was laughable at times.

    Mitchell Moses had a real drop off this year, I don’t think he could play any worse next year and Dylan Brown continues to look a real prospect but really needs to step up his involvement next year. So there’s some real room for improvement there next year.

    I like their starting forward pack, I think they’ve got good options on the edges and their starting middle would be top 4 in the game off the top of my head. But their depth sucks, if they were to lose Brown or Paulo for a prolonged part of the season you just wouldn’t back anyone in their currrent squad to fill in to any kind of respectable level.

    Similarly I don’t see them being able to fix their 3/4 line issues internally so I expect a very similar season to this year. Top 6 but just not real contenders. There’s got to be some real concerns about Parra’s ability to develop and bring players through into the top grade.

    1. Gutherson (Bought)
    2. Sivo
    3. Blake (Bought)
    4. Jennings (Bought)
    5. Ferguson (Bought)
    6. Brown
    7. Moses (Bought)
    8. RCG (Bought)
    9. Mahoney
    10. Paulo
    11. Lane (Bought)
    12. Matterson (Bought)
    13. Brown (Bought)

    Followed by a bunch of very ordinary bench options (Niukore excluded).

    For a club with such a huge and rich junior nursery their competitive advantage over most should be their ability to replenish the top grade squad with juniors and have incredible depth for very little money. Having such a heavy reliance on going into the market will mean you’re always paying a premium on talent.
     
  8. AVA T Delonge

    I actually think them buying up most of a squad really backfired. They persisted way too long with so many average/brain dead players in the back half of the year. Although granted I am unfamiliar with their juniors so not sure what the new talent is like to replace who we had running around.

    Tbf there was also the issue with no second grade League being played due to Covid, and it seemed that the players just got bored/burnt out by the end of the season. Whether that was a Covid issue or an Arthur issue I'm still on the fence about.
     
  9. Cribbage RG Cribb

    Yeah agree with this, I think they need to go with a more genuine split halves system next year. Moses at many stages of the year (particularly, but not exclusively when Dylan Brown was injured) was playing on the ball both sides and I don't think he'll ever really be up to that role. Even on his own side of the field he looked a bit better at second receiver off Nathan Brown than he did at first receiver this year. He needs to be less dominant in the opposition 20; his positioning absolutely gives away which way Parra are going 90% of the time and he's not a good enough first receiver for that trade off to make sense, particularly given D Brown's development.
     
  10. Cribbage RG Cribb

    And they actually did buy Sivo as well. He hadn't debuted but they signed him up from an absolutely dominant reserve grade side and just stuck him straight in first grade. It's obviously a bit different to those other guys but I question whether they really developed him in any meaningful sense; it was a great recruitment but it was a recruitment all the same IMO.
     
  11. Cribbage RG Cribb

    I think this situation was difficult because you started the year so well, so the problems only really surfaced towards the back end when it was probably too much of a risk to make changes given there was no reserve grade and your other squad members were so green. Takairangi should've come in for Blake months ago but I'm not convinced it would have helped that much; Takairangi isn't exactly known for his defence at centre.
     
  12. Sultan Pepper HG Emm

    Positionally I thought Takairangi was dreadful last night
     
  13. Cribbage RG Cribb

    Yeah he was absolutely terrible, however:
    1. He wasn't any worse than Blake has been all season
    2. He's played fuck all for a year and was playing/training as a back rower in the games he did play

    If they'd pulled the pin a couple of months back he might have been better by this point. The longer they left it the riskier it got.
     
    Sultan Pepper likes this.
  14. AVA T Delonge

    Yep I agree 100%. I think Taka with two months of training could have surpassed Blake in the defence department, both by being less impulsive and by forcing Arthur to develop a more passive defensive style which involves less up and in defence.
     
  15. Sultan Pepper HG Emm

    I always wondered if the up and in defence was the actual tactic of NSW teams back in the QLD super dominance, or if it was individuals just shitting themselves. Such a hard thing to get right anywhere, but especially in the outside backs
     
  16. AVA T Delonge

    Yeah I've always kind of assumed it must be a coaching decision because players keep doing it week in week out and surely a coach would be able to beat it out of them. However, watching how badly it worked for the Eels I think it just has to be players shitting the bed and just rushing in, and the coaches just have to put up with it or adapt (or drop them for having shit defence).
     
  17. Cribbage RG Cribb

    I think it was largely because we had Gasnier, Scott and Morris and they all defended like that in clubland as well.
     
  18. Sultan Pepper HG Emm

    I can remember Uate, Merritt, Hayne visibly and deliberately doing it repeatedly, sometimes when their inside man wasn't even beaten.

    I mean NRL is obviously a huge step up from anything I ever played, but I see professionals come up with reads that I would've been filthy on myself for coming up with a decade ago. I swear 80% of the time if the fringe men just stayed behind their inside man, kept their hips facing slightly outwards and just let the slide come they'd be bundling blokes in to touch/teams would be going side to side like a 2015 Soward era panthers attack. So often its the back rower turning in early and not trusting the slide (quite often not off a quick play the ball either).
     
  19. Cribbage RG Cribb

    Yeah I didn't even mention the wingers because I think it's usually more a product of the centres and the wingers just get blamed, but on the sting we regularly picked Hayne, and Grothe and Uate got a run too, and they were particularly bad at rushing in. Hayne's positional play as an Origin winger was pretty despicable in general, even taking into account who he was defending outside.

    I think it's a lot easier for coaches to fix this at club level than in Origin. You can't teach someone how to defend in Origin camp - you just either wear it or you don't pick them.
     
  20. morgieb MC Burridge

    In addition while Paulo did make his debut for Parra he was also at Canberra for a period. OTOH Matterson came through the Parra system before signing with Easts.
     

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