NRL REVIEW ROUND 5

The North Queensland Cowboys were the big winners of Round 5 with a 30-nil thrashing of the Penrith Panthers.

In a round that saw a few unexpected results, tonight's coming from behind victory for the Canberra Raiders over the highly favoured Roosters 24-22 was quite a surprise.

The Round started off on Friday Night with a game that was brilliant if you were an Eagles fan or extremely disappointing if a Bulldog fan.

Regular readers of my blog would know very clearly that I am a proud Bulldogs supporter and this game has many fans asking big questions about what is wrong and what needs changing and of course what needs nurturing.

I have a major gripe that has come from this game but I will be saving it for my Gripe of the Week blog on Thursday so I will stick to the game itself here.

There are definitely problems with the Bulldogs this year as all the major top three teams have beaten them fairly strongly and from what I can see they have all done their homework and have shut the bulldogs out of anything. But there is no hunger or spark in the team and they look unfit. After only 15 minutes on this game on Friday, they were walking slowly and seemingly fatigued as they gathered for a scrum.

The Eagles really should have done better with the display from the Bulldogs and they were kept try-less in the second half, so that was a great effort by the bulldogs to win the second half 6-2 but when you lose a first 18-0 you are giving one hell of a head start.

Barba got injured too and will be out for a month again and so there will be another shake up anyway but if you saw the game you will probably guess that my gripe is going to be about the expensive waste that is Tony Williams. More on that later.

In other games Broncos bounced back in a big way to down the Titans 32-12, the Eels found their heart in the memory of Johnny Mannah to hold out the Sharks 13-6. Whilst I can only imagine how distracting and difficult it must be for the Sharks to be handling the ASADA investigation at the same time as playing, I don't think it should be used as an excuse for losing a game. They have been playing well mostly and they have won games when this would have been a huge distraction before. Again I am sure its not easy but you cant blame it as an excuse on the games you lose.

Today the Dragons continued their impressive turn around with a 19-16 win at WIN :-)
and the Bunnies remained undefeated with a very tight victory over the Warriors 24-22.

The round winds up tomorrow night with the Storm taking on the Tigers and should the Storm win they will also remain undefeated which will make the Round Six clash with the also unbeaten Bunnies a huge blockbuster encounter. It will also mean that one team will win 6 games in a row. But lets see if that happens.

It's a very long year and I know I haven't lost faith in my team so whoever you support, don't you lose faith either.

Look out for my Gripe on Thursday when I question what it will take to put the Ex in Trex.

J G S