Quote ="CGD"I worry about Parra's offload-happy game'"
You and me both fella. It looks genius when it comes off, and to watch it as a neutral it's extreme entertainment. But as a (kind of, growing) fan of Parra it's scary to watch as it could go oh so wrong, oh so quickly. My concern is it goes wrong twice in succession and then their heads go and they change the way they play. It'd be all over then.
But up to now it's been working, and maybe they're more head strong than I give them credit for if it starts to go wrong.
Melbourne's only real chance in my eyes is to do two things:
1. Make Parra's offload-happy style pay. Get numbers in the tackles but always with one person with an eye on following up the offload, committed to the ball, not the man.
2. Move in quickly after the play-the ball, and get numbers around Hayne when it goes to him. Not on him, but around him in an arc defence. If he can step back and take his time thinking about what he wants to happen, surveying the field and his teammmates wherabouts, then the opposition often comes unstuck. They need to numbers around him instantly and pressure him, so his thinking is on how to excape, not how to work this in to a try - move up on him, stoping his antics. If you watch a lot of the replays of recent games, the defending players don't talk when they move up on him. Melbourne need to. It needs to be a coordinated effort.
Yeah, there's risks to doing the above, in that you could be outnumbered elsewhere on the field, but the risk of not doing something about it is you lose - like everyone else has done recently (except one off-game)
I hated Anderson when he was at St.Helens but man the guy knows how to make a team play with a certain style, and a successful one at that.
