Like and dislike all your latest Reds assessments BH - 'like' meaning I think they're insightful, accurate and fair, 'dislike' in that they're painfully true and a number of your identified shortcomings in our team are quite obvious, could have been fixed throughout 2013, but, on 2014's performances, appear not to have been.
The 'proven formula' for beating the recent Reds started to emerge in 2013 for teams that could adopt and execute it, the Cru really put it on display in the 2013 QF and the Tahs this year skilfully refined it further, namely:
- (a) have a forward pack that quickly overwhelms the Reds' pack in terms of strength, intensity, accuracy and offensive defence and exposes their often lower capabilities in these key skill areas. Get the Reds' pack highly rattled by 30 or so mins in, then turn up the blow torch another notch and watch the Reds' forwards get worse in broken play and start to yield multiple unforced penalties;
- (b) deriving principally from (a), neutralise a nowadays regressed and wayward Genia and ditto a dynamic Cooper who's clearly suffering from a lack of coherent, consistent attacking support patterns from his key backs especially 12, 11, 15 (resulting in high, unsustainable pressure on Cooper to 'carry the whole attack' all of the time principally with wide and often risky passes);
- (c) undermine the Reds' attack and confidence further by attacking with fast chains of superior offloading and short passes, exposing the Reds' generally poorer standards in both;
- (d) use an 80%+ place kicker as Cooper has replaced Harris' superior kicking skill and sits at mid-70%s at best, typically (btw, see how well the Sharks are place kicking);
- (e) leverage the fact that the current Reds' defence gets fragile and uncertain when, particularly, (a) and (c) are combined;
- (f) punish the current Reds ordinary kick-and-chase game when deployed by having your back three counter attack very aggressively off Reds' messy open field kicks.
Now, if the Reds themselves can find a way to counter the 'latest proven formula' for killing them, either by stunning ingenuity (a la the game plan V Stormers 2011) or by raw, disciplined improvement in their skill levels of a kind that fixes number of the above weaknesses, then they can start to beat the best teams again. This is unlikely to happen quickly though, these weaknesses may take a humbling period of bad losses against the best teams for the required reawakening to occur.
