Sydney Roosters

Yeh he's still in Sydney, Jake Friend ended up flying with First Grade. Believe he's got a fitness test at 3pm today.

 

Yeh our head of recruitment reckons he's the best kid he's ever signed which is a huge rap given how long he's been in the game and players he's signed. Just a matter of whether he can make the jump up to 20's and then First Grade. He's still only 17 so a long way off.

Did you ever play against his brother Shaq? Dropped from 140kgs to 120 in the off-season and has apparently been tearing it up in the 20's this year.

 

Loved Robos interview on 360 tonight.

"We're the Roosters, we'll be right"

 

He's always had that natural work ethic. In the 20's it was common for him to come up with 30 carries.

I'm just not convinced it's the best thing for him. If you can cut out 5-10 of those carries and share that workload between the 3/4's all of a sudden he's less fatigued and he can start benefiting the team where we need him most. Affecting the scoreboard.

I thought it was telling last night when Evans made a 60m break and no one was there to support him. That's the type of opportunity your fullback needs to be taking.

Unfortunately for Sheck whilst Macdonald has been strong in his carreis and SKD has been great he's not getting much help from Jenko & Toops so that workload is pretty much a must.

Definitely something the coaching staff need to look at. We needed him fresh at the end of that game because it was there for the taking but he was quite visibly buggered.

 

The forwards are carrying their weight in workload, no issues with that. They're generally back for play 3 carries which is all you can ask. It's a strange criticism. It's Toops that just isn't offering us anything in yardage at the moment that's killing us coming out of our own end.

Agree with Toolman though we've struggled to really get a roll on this year, I think there's a lack of balance between the bench and our starting pack in terms of power runners but that's largely just because Moa has been off his game this season. We're fine when our bench comes on as seen in the Broncos game, we started to roll them with ease it's just when our starting pack is on that we can't seem to get any dominance in the ruck. I'd promote Napa & Taukeiaho to the starting side this week, both have been awesome off the bench for us all year and give us some more power in attack and defence.

A bench of Liu, Moa & Evans is still incredibly good, arguably better given the balance of players.