Campos Corner - Round 19 The Raiders are back at home this weekend to commence the two biggest weeks of the competition to date, as we face front runners the Melbourne Storm and St George-Illawarra back to back at home to save our season.
Unfortunately we couldn’t keep our winning run up last weekend against the Cronulla Sharks away from home, with dropped ball and silly errors creeping back into our game and costing us any good field position on the night.
We know that if we’re going to have any chance in the next two weeks we have to make sure we limit our error count, as the top sides in the competition will make you pay on the scoreboard if you allow them any more time with the ball.
There’s no doubting that the Storm are once again setting the benchmark for the rest of the competition and after a year playing for no points it’s good for the NRL to have them back playing for the top prize and being competitive.
There’s a couple of former Raiders team mates playing for the Storm in Ryan Hinchcliffe and Troy Thompson, while we have Brett White who will be keen to go up against his old club for the second time this season.
Whitey has been one of our best players over the past few weeks and has had to take his game to a new level following injury to David Shillington and Tom Learoyd-Lahrs and along with Dane Tilse has been setting a solid platform early in games.
This will be a very important factor for us this weekend as we need to get to the end of our sets and get the ball down the Storm end, as they possess some talented attacking players like Billy Slater, Cameron Smith and Cooper Cronk, who will sniff out any chance if they can.
For us we have a couple of changes this week and welcome back both Josh Dugan and Daniel Vidot to training this week and I know both of these guys are really excited about the chance of coming back into the team.
Duges said publicly this week that he wants to get back to his best and help the Raiders make the eight, while Vidot gets another chance after a frustrating period with an ankle injury. If these guys can fire on Sundya I’m sure we’ll see plenty of points and I know the rest of the guys are buzzing to have them back in the squad.
As I mentioned earlier its going to be a huge two week period for us and it will determine where we’re at in terms of finals chances, so hopefully there’s a big crowd at the ground on Sunday afternoon to help make it two from two against the Storm this year.
Source: raiders.com.au
Topic: Campos Corner - Round 19
