Tweed Seagulls RLFC, proudly backed by the Seagulls Club, are on the road again in Round 18. This time they travel to Kilcoy for Country Round to take on the Brisbane Tigers.
The Seagulls will be desperate to right the wrongs of their 26-24 defeat to the Redcliffe Dolphins in Round 17. Dave Penna’s side did enough to fight back from an early deficit and take a late lead but errors in the wrong part of the field kept the door ajar for the home side as Trai Fuller crashed over late in the piece.
“We played some good footy. Some boys had some good games but we killed ourselves in the end. Errors in the wrong places at the wrong times and not defending kicks. It’s an Achilles heel of ours and we’ve got to get rid of it if we’re to go any further in this competition,” Penna said after the match.
Possession is a key element to winning football and Tweed’s 11 errors translated into just 46% possession. While they looked comfortable enough at times in defence, a quality attacking side like the Dolphins will break through eventually. Nonetheless, there were positives to take from an attacking standpoint as, even while 18-6 behind, it looked as though the Seagulls weren’t far off.
Will Brimson ended up as one of those boys playing a good one. He led the Seagulls with 181 running metres for the match, along with a try assist. He regularly took the line on and asked questions of the defence as Tweed’s left edge looked the most threatening throughout.
Jaron Purcell again performed well through the middle of the field. The workhorse lock made a team-high 39 tackles while running for 100 metres and breaking six tackles with the ball.
Little changes for the Seagulls list this week. Ioane Seiuli drops out with Purcell shifting to the edge and Brent Woolf to lock. Connor Zeibell has earned a spot on the bench early in the week. Should he feature on Saturday, it will be just the second game of his career after making his debut against the Norths Devils in Round 3.
This shapes as a pivotal match for the Seagulls as they hang onto a spot inside the Top 8. Six points separate 6th from 12th with Tweed currently occupying 8th on 20 points, five behind the Tigers at 4th on the Hostplus Cup ladder.
Four tries from George Jennings propelled the Tigers past the Western Clydesdales 34-18 last week. Slow to start across the first 30 minutes of the match, Jennings finished the first half with three tries for the Tigers to take a 12-6 lead into the break before pulling away in the second half.
The Tigers won both regular season meetings in 2022 before the Seagulls won the match that mattered most in Week 1 of the Finals. A Brimson double and 173 running metres ended up as the difference on that occasion.
Brimson is again one to watch in Round 18, but for the Tigers, Jonah Pezet is the focus. The 20-year-old has featured six times for the Melbourne Storm this season and five times for the Tigers. His numbers don’t jump off the page: 1 try, 2 try assists, 2 line break assists and 96 metres per game. Still, he’s a quality player that makes good decisions at speed and won’t be afraid to take the Seagulls line on if given the space. Out wide, the Tigers play with noted try scorers George Jennings (4 tries last week) and Corey Thompson (7 tries in 10 games this season).
It has been a month since the Seagulls last played in Tweed, and with a bye next week before their return to Piggabeen against the Devils, they’ll have this match circled as a big one. With three consecutive games at home to finish the regular season after the bye, they’ll put themselves in a promising position for finals football with a win on Saturday afternoon.
Player To Watch
Kruise Leeming has started to find his feet in this Tweed Seagulls side. In a difficult position coming into a new side with little experience playing with those around him to start, he’s looking more comfortable every week.
His running game has caused havoc around the ruck in recent weeks to average 124 running metres per game in his last two matches. He jumps out and darts in behind the markers, scrambling the defence and opening up space wider for the likes of Will Brimson, Brent Woolf and Tom Weaver to work their magic. Adding a kicking game to the equation last week, Leeming is taking a more hands-on approach the leading the team around the field and features in an intriguing head-to-head battle with Tristan Hope who has impressed for eight tries and six try assists in 14 appearances this year.
Coaches Comments
Tweed are looking to shake off a disappointing result in Round 17 and has put a focus on the little things this week.
“We had a good hard look at ourselves and our effort areas,” said coach Dave Penna.
“That was probably the key to what happened last week. It’s an issue we addressed as a team and is something we’ve been really focused on this week at training.
“Everybody was disappointed but we’ve got to regather and go again.”
While the visit to Cbus Super Stadium is marked as a Seagulls home game, they’ve been away from Piggabeen for a month. Still, Penna isn’t making any excuses.
“We’ve been going ten weeks straight,” Penna said.
“We knew we were going to get into a situation but we can’t make excuses. We put ourselves in the game, we scored enough points to win the game and led with 16 minutes to go and we came up with some poor effort areas within our game, right through our game, and it cost points.
“As a club, there are no excuses for those things.”
It doesn’t get any easier this week as the Seagulls come up against one of the Hostplus Cup’s top sides in the Tigers.
“That’s where we’ve been for six or seven weeks. We know we’d go through this tough period. We’ve played all top six sides in the last five weeks and we’ve got one more to go.
“For us, we know they’re a quality football side. They’ve got talent right across the park. We’ve just got to make sure we focus on working hard, like we’ve done against all of the other teams, and work on those little one-per-cent areas that we need to do well in against the top teams.
”If we do that, we put ourselves in with a chance.”
Written by Rugby League Writers for Tweed Seagulls Media
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