Totally disagree. One practice match and people are making strange assessments. We are rebuilding and have a while to go. We still haven't turned over our list completely yet. Practice matches mean bugger all.
This time next year we will have another 6-10 new kids. Murphy & Simmo will be older, Gibbs may be gone. Our draftees will still be very young and very inexperienced. Our only genuine established A grader will be Cripps. Lots have potential but won't be there yet.
IMO this and next year will see some average performances as kids get experience. It's the only way and what makes it harder is we could have 20-25 kids to try and develop. I am sure the club understands this and realise that both Bolton & SOS need time and it's certainly more than 2-3 years.
I'm not saying I expected a top 8-like performance. My expectations were tempered and realistic. But we were awful on Saturday. Anyone that trots out the line, 'it's only pre-season' is being a bit blinkered.
I fully appreciate we're the club currently sits, but after another pre-season we turned up and looked comfortably like one of the worst structured teams in the league. I don't care if we win or lose at this stage of the season, but I worry that we were so uncompetitive. Sydney don't care about this stuff, we know, but they were still decent.
Having watched most of the other teams run around at least once, I cant think of one that looked as listless and ordinary as we did.
Yes, it's pre season. Yes, it's game one. But no, I expected us to be a little sharper structurally than we were.
Still inacapable of engineering hit-up targets on the lead. Check.
Caught out the back routinely, leading to easy opposition scores. Check.
Terrible mis-matches leading to opposition scores. Check
Inability to engineer league standard transitions and chances. Check.
No space when we took possession. Check.
Too much space when they took possession. Check.
It seems like every goal we get is either a fluke (Lebois) or free kick (Cuningham, Pickett) right now. We work so hard for every score, yet our opponents simply don't. When is it reasonable to expect this to change for the better? By JLT 1 in 2018 at the latest.