Also notable... the Sharks completions were 1/5 playing catch up in the final 7 minutes. At the 73 minute mark they had actually a better completion rate than Souths.
My feeling is that there is something in "sustaining a 65%+ completion percentage in each 10 minute period" or similar, rather than having a good looking completion rate at the final whistle because you went 95% for most of the game but 1 for 8 in a ten minute period. Just based on a small sample size of the last couple of Sharks games though.
Sharks breakdown was 5 errors in 40 minutes, 6 errors in 15 minutes, 0 errors in 18 minutes, 4 errors in 7 minutes.
Yea that last part of the game was essentially a write off because of all the errors and not hanging onto the ball. Not going to achieve much with so many mistakes in a short period of time. I don't think we were very productive after the Wilton try despite earning ourselves some more field position we butchered it.
Even if we just made 1 less mistake in that period we might have clawed back another try or at least kept Souths under a bit more pressure and fatigue instead of just handing momentum and control back to them (although they were making some mistakes as well IIRC). It got rather embarrassing for us actually. I think our players were gassed at this point, alot of blokes were just spilling balls they usually wouldn't.
Sometimes all you need is a good or bad 10 minute period to define a game for you
Then you had teams like the Bulldogs in the Desball days that valued high completion rates over the 80 mins but couldn't score points for **** so still lost pretty much every week.
Coaches like to talk about stats like completions and missed tackles as it puts the onus on the players and paints the issue as one of effort - not competence, structure, creativity or coaching.
This is especially useful in cases when a coach genuinely does not have a ****ing clue how to get his squad functioning and winning footy games.
Even when the dogs got blown off the park by 40 points it was cause of the completions... as if the Dogs having the ball more would have made a difference lol
Our left edge defense was a bigger issue than our last 8 mins of that game when we were chasing points. That left edge is where we lost the game - if it wasn't so leaky we may have been able to overcome our other issues.
To our coaches credit he didn't throw his players under the bus and admitted they as a group need to look at what happened in defense and address it.
