Broncos vs. Dragons review - Oh Dear.

Where to start....well, for those of you who saw, we were trounced by the Dragons at Kogorah. Not an unexpected result in fairness - the fact that in world sport's betting we were pretty much the 2nd biggest long shot from the major sports says it all. It was fairly painful again to watch but there were some positives that can be taken from the game.

Matt Gillett yet again justified his value to our side last night. A few handling errors crept into his game but the hard running rookie again showed why he is getting the wraps that he is. Given he's a Bribie Island junior, if he continues to develop then you might very well see him don a Maroon jersey in a few years.

Our defence in the middle was fairly solid last night. Setu turned up finally and made a few good runs and some damaging tackles. Looks like the Tronc rumours might have brought his head into the game. Locky was better and looked a bit more at ease and Sammy Thaiday showed the guts we know he has in playing on after a heavy run-in with Ben Creagh.

Here is where my praise stops. I've never been so disgusted with our right side defence. Some media outlets are saying that we managed to contain Morris and the real damage was caused by Boyd, Nightingale etc. Wrong. If that's containing Morris, I'll jump off a bridge. The Dragons made both outside defences look infantile. I feel sorry for Rivett to be honest. He's going to cop a fair bit of flak but keep these 2 things in mind - he was defending against arguably the best winger in the game at the moment and he has Beale on his inside. There were 2 breaks down the left for the Dragons and because Beale is seemingly clueless in regards to directing his winger, poor Rivett was left in no man's land. Great Centres (Hodges, Inglis, Folau, Cooper to name a few) work with their winger to shut down the opposing team. Beale was effectively a blind mute out there last night.

I never thought I'd ever say this but it might be time to give Michaels a run. He's average but that's better than the current situation. As a team I felt we took a few steps forward but there's still a marathon to go. I definitely haven't lost faith as it is only round 5 but I don't want to be saying "there's always next year" in a few weeks.