Which Roosters will turn up tonight?

[fletch]

well the day has finally arrived seems to have been an eternity since we played the Cowboys last saturday night.

will we see the inept/bumbling Roosters side that were disgraceful in the first half against Manly and pretty much the entire match against the Cowboys or we see the confident attacking brilliance like we saw against the Eels, for the first 50 minutes against the Broncos and the second half against Manly.

make no mistake this match is pretty much sudden death for us as it wouldn't surprise to see the Raiders beat a banged up Panthers straight after us tonight.

[Guest]

i am cheering on for panthers to beat the raiders tonight... coz if the dropsie flopsie roosters turn up and we get beat... our season is over.. so we will know our fate tonight.

we win.. we advance
we lose and raiders win we say adious 2010

GO EASTS! GO GET'EM!

[Guest]

i am cheering on for panthers to beat the raiders tonight... coz if the dropsie flopsie roosters turn up and we get beat... our season is over.. so we will know our fate tonight.

we win.. we advance
we lose and raiders win we say adious 2010

GO EASTS! GO GET'EM!

if that's the team that turns up to a finals game we don't deserve to be there in the second week.

CRUSH!!! KILL!!! DESTROY!!! all else is unacceptable.

[Tom Verlaine's Ghost]

As I wrote in another thread last week, all year our form has risen and dipped depending on the quality of the opposition. We seem to be one of those teams that play better against the better quality opposition, only to drop our intensity and execution against the, er, lesser teams. I don't think it's a coincidence that our best streak this year was when we played Souths, Canterbury, Brisbane, Parramatta and St George in successive weeks. We then had a shocker against an also-ran in Cronulla, before bouncing back when the stakes were again high v Manly. Last weeks meek effort against North Qld continued the trend.

With that in mind, we should be up for tonight's game. Big crowd. Big TV audience. Quality opposition.

I'll be surprised if we don't come out firing.

There's a lot of Brad Fittler in this team - remember how for the bulk of his career he would pull out the big games against the contenders, only to go missing in the "easy" games?

[Guest]

Really, we shouldn't have dropped those games against the Warriors (Rd 16) and Sharks (Rd 23) in our late form run, and we should have smashed Cowboys (Rd 26) by a lot more than we did. Dragons (Rd 22) and Titans (Rd 24) were both too good on their day.

Both Warriors and Sharks games were there to be one, but a critical turning point cost us the game (Warriors = the last 5 minutes + not safely covering Locke, Sharks = Carney's double movement on first tackle at 12-12, the ensuing penalty led to the Sharks matchwinning try).

[elo]

When we've really needed to win, we have.

I'm crossing every appendage in hope of that continuing tonight.

[TheLoneRooster]

I hope to heaven the Roosters have been cruising over the last month and not putting their absolute best foot forward because if they play tonight like they've played recently, well, it is all over for 2010. TVG's post above makes a lot of sense to me so I'm hoping he's right.