Been going over the replay of last week and just to add context and dispel some of the mythology about our bench.
The truth behind when things started to look bad:
Up until the 15 minute mark the Warriors won on every metric that wins games. At the 15 minute mark the Knights pack swing the momentum.
The Knights are completely dominant in the territory battle (I measure this by the half way line, simple mathematics) the team crossing the halfway line most is the team that is winning the arm wrestle.
The Knights surge lasted for 13 minutes, which is interesting because
Barnett and AFB were our props for the 13 minutes of Knights dominance.
This is where the Myth of our bench use unfairly drags Jazz into the sense that he is part of the bench rotation problem.
Part of the problem is that fans see two bench players come in at that losing point of the battle (Walker and Curran come on) and they blur their sense of what role Jazz is having in the momentum swing away from us (this is fact, not one poster here has gone back and watched the game and pointed out that when our team started losing the battle severely Jazz was not even on the field see below for what I mean by losing severely).
During this period the Knights cross our half way at will, they completely reverse the complexion of the game, they go into our half of the field on all 8 of their possessions.
At the same danger period for the Warriors (13 minutes of losing up front) the Warriors do not cross the halfway mark once in 8 sets.
Jazz enters after this bad spell at around the 27-28 minute mark with the Warriors and for the first time the Knights fail to cross the halfway mark and the Warriors enjoy their first possession in the Knights territory.
The Warriors almost score twice with Jazz on the feild through Egan and CNK. Jazz is the lead hole runner on both those plays and is quietly getting quick play the balls with decent meters.
Newcastle get possession back and for the second time in a row they fail to cross the half way, Jazz makes critical dominant tackles in that phase with line speed.
So the Knights momentum has been stopped and Jazz is the one player change that gets us back into the arm wrestle, the grind.
Incidental stuff but I need to tell the full story here to have legitimacy - Newy get one set in our half off an error. Their next full set they only make it to one meter inside our half.
The Knights get one more good set which puts them five meters in our half, so to recap:
13 minutes with AFB and
Barnett: Knights totally momentum swing and go inside our turf 8 times in a row, we see no ball in their half.
Jazz comes on and we stop the bleeding, the Warriors get back inside their half, and the Knights are kept behind the half way mark for all but two sets where they barely crossed it.
After half time the momentum swings back to the Knights after some rubbish calls by the Reff they get their second and last Try.
Ergo, scoreboard stats one try when Jazz is out, one try when Jazz is in. That was the forward pass no try which should have seen the Miles Davis Jazz on a no try while I am on performance.
The Knights look like they are back in it with interest as they cross our half with ease (giving fans that sinking feeling our bench is just not good enough) but the Warriors hit back through Dylan Walkers Try and the game is now ours to lose.
You know the reason Jazz is always the first to congratulate Walker on every try? Because Jazz is pushing up hard in support play on all those trys and if you know Dylan, Jazz is his wing man, he loves him, Jazz makes Walkers game easier, a happy
Dylan Walker is a winning
Dylan Walker.
After that moment Jazz is subbed out and the Warriors go on a rampage and thrash the Knights on every metric and Jazz is watching from the bench after helping his team win the arm wrestle that the fans are blaming him for and want Bunty to come on and do apparently better than what Jazz did in that final.
Going out on a limb here but to me Tevanga is one of our top forwards and absolutely critical to our chances of winning this competition and one of our most misunderstood players.
