Rupert Pupkin wrote:
But if his intentions are to play a huge pack then going with Westerman to start at 13 is ridiculous, like you point out, it's not his game. I'm a fan of Westerman, think he is a good player but he has to play as a ball handling LF to be effective.
As for the Aussies, one thing you can pretty much be certain on, they won't play that badly again next week.
I think you miss understand me. I don't think it was Maccas intention initially, but we got sucked into it. Hence he took Westy off and went down the middle. If the off load in front of their sticks to Smith had come off we would have been praising a mom performance IMHO. It didn't and we went into our shell which required far too many props and a complete lack of inventiveness. All Smith did was kick. Widdop did very little on attack and Tomkins was in effective all round. All be it Martyn Sadler claimed his try was a brilliant piece of inventive play (see is tweet).
The only true zip and spark we got was from Clark. First touch of the ball creates a try and then went into his shell.
It was negative all round. If we had used the ball out wide the Samoans were there for the taking, but we decided on a forward battle.
That said we could not under estimate the Samoans who have a wealth of NRL experience, but we should have been a lot smarter, starting with our pivots spreading it wide.
