Darren Reeves directs his players

Our biggest challenge is to play four quarters

07.06.19 11:55

As we reach the halfway mark of the season, next week’s bye will allow us to look at areas we have improved, areas that we have let ourselves down in and positives that we can take away.

There are certainly a number of each that come to mind, and we will be spending plenty of time looking at and addressing all of them over the next period.

One thing that I am sure of is that while the win-loss record is not what we want, or our supporters want, there has been some exciting improvement in several areas that are important to continuing the growth of our team and club as a whole.

One of the real positives is the opportunity we have had to expose 20 new players to the team and this level of football in the first nine rounds of the year. A lot of these guys will no doubt have an element of learning and adapting to this standard. With that, there are times where our performance is inconsistent, but overall, we are pleased with how the new players have gone about their work.

We will stay focused on doing that over the second half of the season, looking at providing as much game time as possible to a talented young group mixed with the seasoned, more experienced players endeavouring to improve and progress our club forward. The game time at this level is invaluable and the best possible learning.

Our biggest challenge right now is to play four quarters of football, which has been a constant battle for us so far this season.

More often than not it has been the first quarter that we have let ourselves down in, so we were pleased to start well last weekend against Redland and played our best football for the year in the first half. Unfortunately, 15 minutes at the start of the third quarter was what let us down and, in the end, cost ourselves the chance to win.

What we have taken away from our last two weeks has been that we have won or drawn six of our eight quarters, but it hasn’t translated into a positive result.

We aim to rectify this in our Round 10 contest with Sydney Uni today and get some reward for our players before the mid-season bye.

Go Thunder!