Stat's wise we are matching them except for missed tackles. 

Penalties are killing us.

Kiraz.. arm carrying ball never touched the ground...

This fuckwit is not giving us s chance to mount any sort if comeback. Between some shit refs calls and the suckfest from the commentators, it's getting unwatchable.

We didn’t get some crucial calls, errors, missed tackles and just a bit of execution.

We are getting close to winning this kind of game.

Hello Kitty probably facing a suspension for colliding with the Panthers halves leg in reserve grade.  Hard to know how good the reserve grade win was.

We got shafted by the whistleblower tonight. But that’s expected at Penrith. Great effort

We took out Cleary and his backup. Well done. Fuck Penrith 

Thought the same. But the ref obviously called held 🙄

Now that I am over the disappointment, here's how I saw it.
Yeah, we were on the wrong side of some calls, but the Dogs were their own worse enemy at times with sloppy play and disrespect for posession which a team like Penrith will make you pay.
It was far from our best effort this season but after the dust settled we had scoed 2 tries and kept the Riff to just two so it was only conversions and penalty goals between us.
What I saw tonight was a team on the rise. The Dogs are going from strength to strength and they provd that the last 6 or seasons are well behind them and they are not looking back. CC has gott the team in a good space and working on our faults. They have got the defensive game pretty much down pat and ifthey can start to improve their attack they are going to trouble the top four later in the season... by the way I still think the refs and bunker are shit and the commentators cocksmokers.

Can we agree the Hutchison experiment is done? He wasn't the only reason we blew it, ref is a fcckwit with his eyes painted on and we had more than 55 missed tackles. You cant do that against Penrith. 

Our stats are very good but we didn't execute any points the mountain of posession we had. This is still an issue.
But, Panfers would've put 50+ on us tonight if the Dogs of last year were out there. With the shit show from the ref, the silly mistakes we made, the terrible 2nd half performance by us and the luck the Panfers created for themselves we are on the rise.  To be only beaten by 6 points at their home ground against a near full strength side that has won 3 GF's in a row is a massive improvement on our behalf.  

I think that we made a few mistakes that we can clear up. 

 Next game Preston should start. I would drop Salmon and play another prop.

Replacing Hutch with Sexton is the other thing that we could try.

Otherwise this is the right side we just need to execute a bit better.

Tackles Reed 64, King 41, Hayward 38.

We made 377 tackles and missed 56.

While we need to improve Panthers have some guys that are hard to tackle.

The Panthers were up for it they  knew Dogs were coming to get them . Our boys got frustrated and the miss tackles and mistakes crept in . This is Tesm that’s been in the last 4 G/F  they ll make you pay ..   Hopefully the team learns from this .. 

First half  was great and it was us for 20 minutes and toe to toe for nearly 30 minutes.
But the grind got to us.
And the second half got sloppy and the 16-10 scoreline probably flattered us.
I can't believe there were some sets of six where Burton didn't get to a kick because play went right. Just one spiral bomb as a result 
Kiraz proved what a gun he is and how resilient he is. His disappointment after scoring a try then realising the game was gone says plenty about the bulldog in this  guy.

Despite CC comments we only really matched them for 30 minutes out of 80. so that might mean we are only 3/8 of the way there

It’s great to agree entirely with you mate. We are the real deal. Two try’s each. Stuck it to them for the whole game. Even after making so many mistakes we were in it until the end. Great effort. And yes. Fuck the refs 

Preston looked terrible. I would keep him on the bench. We need Mann to be getting more minutes. Maybe put Curran on an edge. 

Fox went close to scoring a couple of try's and we should have stopped the first Panthers try.

There was an element of luck in the second Panthers try.

Cleary going off charged the game.

But overall the final score was  a fair reflection of the game. They were the better side but we are much improved. 

Not too unhappy with the result given we didnt play well amd only lost by 6...

But i made a comment earlier in the week that we need more creativity in the halves than Burton+Hutch as they are only good for feeding early ball to outside backs 

If that gets nullified, they dont have any other trick shots. 

Tonight it showed. 

Could have won the game, but not the end of the world given Panthers will be a top 4 side. 

Its the others we must beat.

#BDS...

For reasons unknown I watched both pressers. CC was fairly pleased and so he should be, but in the riff presser the germos "suck poor Nathan's cock" fest was sickening and chin senior couldn't even give the Dogs credit for putting it to them. What an arrogant cagina of a team. I hope other teams start to smack them before the seasons over.

Burton in 6 is the right  choice, the only option is to change the 7.

IMO we are 3 team changes off being the best that we can be.

1. Preston to start, drop Salmon.
2. Patolo to start, King to bench OR add Sutton/Farmer to the bench.
3. Sexton to replace Hutch, or move Hayward to half.

If we promote Sexton try Taaffe at halfback in reserves.

Dropping Hutch and Salmon might weaken the defence, but Salmon misses a few tackles,  makes dumb errors and offers nothing in attack.

We might find that the attack is worse without Hutch, but there is only one way to find out.

The alternative to team changes is learn the lessons from the loss and tidy up tackles, errors and discipline.

If we miss fewer tackles we save some energy, because we don't need to scramble as often.

I would work on these things and change the team - do both.

As i mentioned on the TK....dont pay much attention to the misd-tackle stat. It is useless to look at it on its own.

You can have 5 miss-tackles 1 on 1 near your tryline and leak 5 tries for 30 points, or you can have 55 miss-tackles (supposedly) and only cop 2 tries -like last night.

Penrith players have a habit of poking and probing their runs into the defence looking for an opening. This usually drags 3 or maybe 4 defenders into the tackle. Some of them drop off and it gets counted as a miss. Its a useless stat. 

We did everything right defensively and frustrated them. It was abit of a lapse in concentration on the spilt ball that led to To'os try but you can see in his celebration how much relieved they were to finally crack us. Havent seen Riff rattled like that for a long time.

Game was lost in attack. Not too dissimilar to Souths game and Storm.

We can carry these halves against half the competition and win. But against better opposition who can match us in defence, we need more creativity. 

Ive been a supporter of Hutch, but he was clearly playing to instructions and told not to run the ball. He passed well before the line and attack was easy pickings. Taaffe is a far better FB chiming in on the right than Tracy is. Tracy is better on the left.

Burton, i have no idea what position he played in the second half. I honestly thought he was left centre even though Xerri was still there. He went MIA again. Yes, he scored, but it was a centres try. 

I dont expect any changes. It was a game where our weapon (Kikau) had a fairly poor game and wasnt helped with no other plays in our arsenal. 

As i noted, this team and structure will be beat about half the teams in the comp. This in itself might be enough to keep everyone happy. I know i eould be happy to see us play finals this year -even if we went out in week 1.

But if we want to thibk about going deeper, we need to sort out the lack of creativity in the halves.

Either Hutch has to be told to park the gameplan of early hall and play eyes up footy, or try Sexxy, Taaffe or even BBO if hes available.

Marki, Burton is not a centre and there is lttle to no chance he will ver play in the centres in a blue and white jersey.

As a Dogs supporter, you have to be so proud of the team last night. Sure there was a lot if handling errors in that second half but they defended them and did it well. The only points penriff scored in the second half were 4 points that were gifted to them by the fuckwit with the whistle. Still a little upset we didn't convert our chancs to points though.

BBO isn't even in reserve grade at present.

I think a lot of our missed tackles are due to smaller players and linespeed in the middle, small guys slow a player down.

On the edges Kiks is in the side for his attack, and I think Preston is a better defender than Salmon and Preston offers more in attack. He might need a couple of weeks.

Comparing the halves, Burton is a much bigger threat running the ball and that threat creates opportunities outside of him. Burton is generally a better kicke4. Neither is that gifted passing to put a player into a gap, or even working out what play to do.

Comparing Hutch and Sexton, Hutch seems to be a better defender with a higher workrate who takes the occasional tough carry and get back to clean up a few kicks. We have scored try's off kicks by Hutch.

I would like to see what Sexton can do in this team, because he is a more dangerous ball runner who has some instinct for the opportunity. I am unsure what Sexton offers kicking, but I would like to find out. 

If the club has no plans to use Sexton then we should give Taaffe a run at halfback in reserves.

Generally I agree that the defence is more or less good enough we need to work on improving the attack.

Having watched a replay, the main factor in our attack being clunky was Mann was a bit rusty in the first 20 mins.
Playing a bit slow and hesitant and threw a couple of bad passes.
However, when Mann came back on for his final stint he was much better and threw a couple of really good passes to put players into gaps.
My thoughts the Panthers linespeed at the start or just a lack of recent game time threw Mann off.

I think Hayward played fairly well in attack at lock, there is nothing wrong with our fundamental style.

We lead the linebreaks 6-3 Panthers scrambled well and our wingers couldn't execute a couple of kicks.

A try to Fox was called back for a marginally forward pass, wet conditions / slippery ball was a factor but sometimes those forward passes are missed.

The ref called held on Kiraz way too early, most of the time that play is a try as the ball didn’t touch the ground.

The slippery ball was a factor in drops from most sides, but players on both sides also made dumb unforced errors. 

A big turning point in the game was an exceedingly dumb penalty from Salmon for touching the ball inside the 10 on a line dropout. He tried to get out of the way, but why was he standing there?

Marki wanted to see more square passing from our halves, but in wet conditions that would probably have resulted in more dropped ball.

What to do?

In wet conditions against quality opposition I would start Curran at lock, followed by Hayward and keep Mann fresh for the last 20-30 minutes. If we are leading Mann can just keep the defence tight and run the ball. If we are trailing Mann can try to make something happen via ball playing. Sometimes a team has to earn the right to play square or wait until the opposition speed of line has dropped off.  If we want a guy to play square Mann is the guy to do it.

Watching a replay Hutch wasn't that bad, when a team doesn't score everyone assumes that it is the halfback's fault. I still think that we might get more out of Sexton. 

We made 3 linebreaks in the first 18 mins and didn't convert any, a great tackle from Cleary stopped Kiraz, Fox didn't quite get enough on his kick and Kiraz probably tried the wrong kind of kick.

Over the 80 mns we looked more dangerous in attack than they did. At a critical time the Cleary kicking game set up good attacking opportunities for them.

We were toe to toe with penriff for the entire 80 minutes the only difference was the bloke with the whistle made us feel like we were playing one man down for the whole game.

That held call against Kiraz cost us a try. 

And I am not sure why Burto blew up,  I think Burto thought that he had caught the ball and the guy knocked it out of his hand, we never saw a slow mo. However, if the ref got that wrong is an understandable error. 

There was a lot we got right. What we got wrong was just combinations, execution and occasional lapses of concentration.

I also forgot that Reed was offside on the Kiraz kick,it is little things like that we need to fix up.

Yeah that Mahoney offside from Kiraz break was the result of Edwards shutting down Kiraz early.

Reminded me of the scene in The Hunt for Red October were Ramius turns the submarine into the torpedo and collides with it before it can arm itself.

Mahoney was already in front before Kiraz even before he got the pass from Crighton, Edwards rushed him and forced a kick before Mahoney could check his run or allow Kiraz to pass him