good afternoon's entertainment.
rising, on paper at least, should have won much more easily, but turned over a lot of possession in attack (a la rebels !).
my impressions, rising very strong at scrum time, line out improved as game wore on. attacking structure looked pretty good, two or three tries from set piece. defence pretty reasonable, the rays attack and hole running were pretty good imo. the rising need to work on keeping possession in contact, a few soft turnovers and a couple of miracle passes that didn't need to be thrown. clean out needs more accuracy.
the good, naivalu, sexton, veaninu, debreczeni all played well.
jones and inman weren't as dominant as i thought they might be. timani not so sold on him as yet, possibly a "boarding house cup of tea", big and weak !
refereeing was OK and importantly didn't have a significant effect on the game. not certain the ref has learnt the 30 sec scrum law yet !
for the rays, peterson. porecki and wells in the forwards and tom mathews at centre impressed me. thought there halves combined well also.
bring on the stars
edit: oh and the other poor thing was the Risings inability to control the kick off reception after scoring on 3 or 4 occasions.
see amended comment about Timani below