Astbury was fantastic, he has finally developed the body to match the big guns and was too good for Waite tonight, I'm sure people noticed that Waite snuck his only goal on Grimes when Astbury was having a breather. Why was Astbury even having a rotation? It's not like Waite was taking him on a half marathon richo or roo style. Astbury has come on in leaps and bounds. I would go as far as saying that you include Astbury and Rance as the top 2 kpd and let Grimes and Chaplin fight it out for the 3rd 'tall' defender spot. In reality it will be out of Grimes or Astbury to make way for Rance but it would be criminal to drop Astbury after a game like that.
Chaplin was awful, if as a defender you are having a bad kicking night, then you should either handball it off or run with it, he seems reluctant to do either, and probably hasn't got enough pace to try it anyhow. The other extremely frustrating thing about his game tonight was his ridiculous air dive in the last which left him on our HFF, then, when we stole the ball back and booted it back to the HFF that Chaplin was still on, he refused to lead into the 20 metres of space in front of him to butter up for the pee tackle 'attempt'. An absolute shocker of a game.
Now with Petterd and his air dives. I don't think anyone would have expected him to catch Chris Yarran but what you do expect is a genuine effort to chase because you never know pressure can do funny things to people. But to just dive after 15 metres of the chase, twice, on centre stage, well it just speaks for itself really.
Petterd and Grigg might have chalked up some big stats tonight, but I thought both of them were ordinary. Between them they had 15 inside 50's. IMV these are the last 2 that you want dominating our inside 50 stats with their pathetic up and under lollipop kicks. We need our gun players topping our I50 stats, Dusty only had 3 tonight, same with Lids, we need way better delivery more frequently from our stars.
I just had to get that off my chest before saying I really enjoyed the win, really, I did.