What has changed since last season to cause this, do you think? Ricki's tactics and most of the players are the same.
Football isn't massively different but Ricki was cut a lot of slack because of the offield stuff. People rightly or wrongly expected to see a challenge for the top 2 spots this year.
Brown's runs in front of the ball and past the forward lines, plus him attacking crosses in the box, created more half chances. He had his flaws but he was pretty effective. Midfielders had to track his runs which also meant a bit more space for other attacking players.
Steyn has not matched greenie's hard running up front. Was never pretty but it worked for us.
Ifill on form creating goals out of nothing. Without him doing that we have no real plan B
Plus we had a couple of away games where we got the breaks for once and ended up with 3 points. I think it was against Gold Coast brown scored a last minuter when they'd been all over us and also, I think against Newcastle as well we ended up with three points when they missed an open goal in the last minute.
All small things, but we're a team that gets it's advantage by scrapping and fighting and I'm not sure we've actually got enough scrappers and fighters this year!!