Fans tend to mistake a lack of experience or a lack of road miles for a lack of effort on defence.
Their effort was fine, mighty in fact on a lot of occasions.
The problems with the left edge are being created in the middle.
Easts compressed our middles under the posts, our middle forwards didn't get back into position and were clumped like stuck in the mud, the spacing from there hung the women on the left edge out to dry / short of numbers and facing too big of an overlap to slide and cover.
The same was happening on the right, but Brake nee Blyde was fast enough to cover two players, and Tysha and Payten did their work chasing from inside out to allow their line to slide.
Brakes speed allowed for us to play the Chooks attack towards the touch line.
Ole bone Braker had an outstanding game off the ball, probably player of the match for mine even though Maliepo was doing all the sexy stuff with the ball.
The good news is that we did adjust once in that bad defensive scenario, and we stacked the left during a raid which shut them down. The ingredients are there, but you need six games to put that together consistently (Bluey was right about round six-who knew).
At 1:02 have a look at the Warriors under the posts....from there look at how much real estate the much maligned Left edge have to cover.....It is a really good example of where edge defensive problems start in any form of the code.
View: https://youtu.be/yQsdD707R48?si=FL-UHu3PtCDmTz74