South Sydney are facing a battle to avoid handing Wayne Bennett his first wooden spoon, after falling to last spot with a gutsy 14-12 loss to Cronulla.<\/p>\n
Hours after Gold Coast upset the Warriors to move off the bottom of the NRL ladder, the Rabbitohs were gallant but ultimately left beaten by the Sharks on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
Cronulla spent most of the game camped on the Rabbitohs line, but trailed 6-2 at the break and scored only twice despite dominating field position.<\/p>\n
The win ensured the Sharks will finish the round in the top eight, where Craig Fitzgibbon’s men look likely to stay with the easiest run home of all teams around them.<\/p>\n
With more than 70 per cent of the game played in the Sharks’ attacking half, Cronulla bumbled several opportunities to score with forward passes and errors.<\/p>\n
Blayke Brailey celebrates a try for the Sharks.\u00a0Photo by Scott Gardiner\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
But ultimately Will Kennedy’s bat-on for Ronaldo Mulitalo and a Blayke Brailey try proved enough for the Sharks’ third straight win.<\/p>\n
There were questions over Brailey’s crucial try to go up 14-6 in the 61st minute, with the bunker watching multiple replays before ruling the hooker got the ball down cleanly.<\/p>\n
Souths, meanwhile, are battling to avoid having their wretched year end with Bennett’s first wooden spoon in 38 years of coaching in the premiership.<\/p>\n
It is also the first time in Bennett’s esteemed career that he has lost eight consecutive matches.<\/p>\n
The Rabbitohs’ already overflowing casualty ward grew larger on Saturday night, with prop Tevita Tatola hurting his left shoulder scoring a last-minute try to narrow the margin.<\/p>\n
The Rabbitohs are also facing a nervous wait on Jack Wighton, who was sin-binned after a head clash that concussed Toby Rudolf was ruled a shoulder charge,<\/p>\n
Now last behind the Titans on for-and-against, Souths at least have a bye in hand in the penultimate round of the season.<\/p>\n
The Rabbitohs also have matches against Gold Coast and Parramatta in rounds 23 and 24 that could well determine the fate of the spoon.<\/p>\n
Souths didn’t lack spirit on Saturday, scoring with their only good set of the first half when Jye Gray stepped across field and put Tyrone Munro over on the siren.<\/p>\n
But otherwise the lack of good ball meant halfback Lewis Dodd had little chance to create anything in attack, before he was taken off with 12 minutes to go.<\/p>\n
The centre of attention when he arrived in Gosford as Souths’ first-choice half five months ago for a pre-season trial, Dodd had only started one NRL match since.<\/p>\n
The big-money Englishman did produce one of the key moments of the opening 40 minutes in defence, when he held up Nicho Hynes after the Sharks halfback split the Souths defence.<\/p>\n
Bennett also blooded playmaker Ashton Ward on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
But he would be expected to lose the No.7 jersey when Jamie Humphreys returns next week from a concussion, unless Wighton is also unavailable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Sydney are facing a battle to avoid handing Wayne Bennett his first wooden spoon, after falling to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-24071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}