Here’s your Repeat Set for Round 16:
3 Warriors questions
Bulldogs booting Foran
A round to remember for…Isaac Lumelume
A round to forget for…the Parramatta Eels
Play of the Round: Rabbitohs
Annesley’s Briefing Summary
Warriors Benefiting from disruptions
The New Zealand Warriors picked up another win over the weekend. I had no words for it at the time and still don’t know how to completely capture what this group is doing right now.
But in the aftermath of their 36-6 win over the Newcastle Knights, Ben Watkins from Gain Line Analytics raised some interesting questions. While the players and club are quite rightfully being applauded for all they’re doing this season, have their circumstances actually helped on-field performance?
Despite Buzz Rothfield’s rather silly article highlighting the Penrith Panthers lack of travel this season, he has stumbled on something. Although, he’s picked up the wrong end of the stick and missed the real story this season: No travel is helping the Warriors.
It’s rarely talked about. However, the trans-Tasman travel is something that does greatly impact the Warriors every year. They typically fly more than any other club, deal with changing timezone’s, and effectively lose a day of preparation and recovery either side of a trip across the ditch. As Brien Seeney (@NRLPhysio) said to Rothfield: “The effects of travel definitely influence performance, recovery and injury risk. There have been studies done that show away teams actually suffer more injuries than home teams.”
While the issue this season isn’t the travel itself, rather, travelling on game day, the Warriors flying across the Tasman 10-12 times a year and the issues that can come with it haven’t been a factor this season. Seeney added: “After a game you should be focusing on recovery and sorting out the little niggles. If you’re sitting on a bus or getting to the airport and jumping on a nighttime flight, getting home at two in the morning, it’s far from ideal.”
Basically, yes, it does look like the Warriors are benefitting from the extra days training and in recovery.
It’s further highlighted in their camp-like setup in 2020. The Warriors used to travel back and forth from Australia for every away game. But since 2018, they’ve chosen to stay on across the ditch when playing back-to-back games on the road. The results speak for themselves.
Between 2011 and 2019, the Warriors overall winning rate in Australia is just 35.1%. In the 12 back-to-back games throughout 2018 and 2019 in which the Warriors remained in Australia in a camp-like setup, they won eight and drew one. I went a little more into this for Sport Tech Daily before the season restarted.
So again, yes. It appears as though the Warriors have benefited from the current situation with their defensive cohesion, in particular, looking much-improved.
Despite those quick to scream “it’s clear Kearney was the problem”, we don’t know how the team would have gone had he remained as head coach. Todd Payten has been excellent. He was my first choice for the job before turning it down. But his elevation to head coach isn’t the only reason for the improvements.
What we do know is that Stephen Kearney played a big role in getting the players to agree to move to Australia in the first place. We also know that he coached a good Warriors team to the Top 8 on the back of a club-record eight away wins in 2018 - the season in which the club adopted the trans-Tasman camp on back-to-back games.
The only wrong answer to this question is a definitive one on either side of the argument.
Bulldogs: Backing Away From Foran
Ah, the Bulldogs. They let 15 fan bases down by letting their halftime lead over the Raiders slip. It allows the Broncos to evade 16th on the NRL ladder for another week. Those drafted tweets will need to wait, folks.
As yet another season slips by the wayside, and one that won’t even offer the faint hope for the next year with a late-season winning run, the future doesn’t look much brighter for the Bulldogs.
Unable to come to an agreement with Kieran Foran, the club signed Blake Green.
While the club signed Green before his ACL injury, it wasn’t a good signing then and it certainly isn’t one now. Not when a younger and better-attacking player with the qualities Andrew Hill wants in his halfback (“leadership, game management and mentor our young players”) is already with the club and wants to re-sign.
Right now, the Bulldogs attack is Foran or nothing. They spend the whole game getting to positions on the field that allow him to attack the defensive line. Work up the field, settle on the right post, feed Foran and hope he creates something.
He’s creating fairly often too.
Despite playing on the worst attacking team in the NRL, Foran ranks 9th in try assists this season with 11. Some of the names he’s equal with or above: Dally Cherry-Evans, Kalyn Ponga, Nathan Cleary and Cody Walker.
It’s Foran’s willingness to engage the line that makes him so dangerous. He’s registered 69 line engagements in 13 games this season. Green has just 44 in 15 games.
The partnership between Foran and Raymond Faitala-Mariner is lethal already too. It starts up the field when Foran engages the line to allow Faitala-Mariner to poke his head through a hole and earn a quick play-the-ball.
Up the field, Foran isolates his big man onto smaller halves by putting his body on the line to engage the opposition back-rower and take him out of the play.
Sure, Foran has his injury troubles. But when he’s fit and firing, he’s still one of the better five-eighths in the NRL. We’ve not been able to say that about Green for a little while now. Instead of getting Foran on board for two or three years while developing a replacement, the Bulldogs will be in the same position in their search for a half this time next year.
A round to remember for…
Isaac Lumelume didn’t score on debut, but he played a beauty on the wing for the Storm. The massive Fijian made things look so easy you’d be forgiven for thinking it was game 100, not game one. With catches over his head, comfort under the high-ball and powerful runs in return, Lumelume did exactly what was asked of him on Sunday night.
Suliasi Vunivalu won’t be there next year. Josh Addo-Carr is working hard to get out of Melbourne after this season too. In Lumelume, the Storm - yet again - appears to have a readymade replacement for Vunivalu on the right wing at the very least. With what we’ve seen so far, the 22-year-old won’t have any problems living up to the growing reputation of Fijian’s flying down the Storm wing.
A round to forget for…
The Eels need to wipe their 38-0 loss to the Rabbitohs from their mind ASAP. While it wasn’t all that surprising to see the Rabbitohs play well on Thursday night, I never expected quite that level of dominance. For a side that hasn’t had to deal with the injuries or Covid disruptions of other clubs, the lack of cohesion in the Eels side right now is the biggest surprise.
One set from Thursday night highlights how one-dimensional they’ve become and a visibly annoyed Clint Gutherson.
Starting the set on their own 40-metre line and working their way up the field with two one-out hitups, Parramatta searches for space down the right side. The Souths defence has no trouble sliding across with the ball so clearly going to Gutherson that Waqa Blake is barely considered as a lead runner.
When Nathan Brown gets his arms free to release an offload on the returning play, the ball goes straight to the left side of the field. Michael Jennings threatens to break the line but ultimately runs out of space and is forced to throw the ball back infield.
Now 15 metres from the goal line on the left side, Parramatta shifts the ball to the middle of the field with another offload sending it further out wide. By the end of it, they’re 15 metres from the goal line, but now on the other side of the field…
As Reed Mahoney sends the ball to Mitchell Moses, Gutherson throws his arms in the air. He clearly wanted the ball. There’s a good chance Gutherson hitting the short side would have troubled the defence a lot more than Moses’ grubber to nobody too.
The Eels look a shadow of their early-season selves. While playing an admittedly a friendly draw, the Eels produced the sort of form that put them into the premiership conversation. More recently, they’ve not been able to score on the other premiership contenders.
Just as plenty were quick to build them up following a promising period against sub-par teams, Parramatta’s premiership chances have been torn down over the last couple of days. They’ve never been quite as good as many pegged, but they’re not the Finals fodder others are now claiming. They still have the makings of a very good football side. With a powerful middle, excellent attacking edges and a capable spine, expect the Eels to turn things around again soon.
The conversation will change with a strong performance against the Warriors on Sunday.
Play of the Round
It came inside the first 30 minutes of Round 16 but was always going to take some beating this week. This shape from the Rabbitohs is something Oscar and I don’t think we’ve seen before (I thought we had, but can’t find it in any notes…), but it will more than likely be something we see again.
You can see Adam Reynolds and Cody Walker talking out the back earlier in the set. Once awarded with a six-again restart, the two come together again to talk things over. Two tackles later, Reynolds enthusiastically points to a hole that doesn’t exist around the ruck before tracking across the field and holding up the defence.
He shapes to dump the ball off to Mark Nicholls and Jaydn Su’A, putting Shaun Lane and Dylan Brown on their heels and in two minds. Eventually, Brown turns in and the gap opens up for Walker who has hit the hole with expert precision.
The reverse angle really shows how much uncertainty Reynolds promotes in the defensive line. Lane stops his run twice while Reynolds moves across him with Brown forced to make a decision. He made the wrong one.
Pretty, pretty stuff.
Graham Anselsey’s Briefing Summary
Despite not being ones to spend a lot of time focused on referees and measuring the impact a single poor decision can have on a game, we want to offer a summary of Graham Annesley’s weekly reviews that doesn’t deliberately mislead or misuse quotes to generate further controversy.
Perhaps in response to the worryingly large margin of victory this week, Annesley opened things up with a few more positive-looking numbers: Tries and line breaks are up on last year while penalties are down.
Although, he did touch on margins with a strange comparison while adding: “There is no doubt we've had more games with bigger margins"
Adam Pomey's try apparently created a bit of discussion on Saturday afternoon. It may have looked like a knock-on to some but no angles definitively show separation between the ball and his hand.
"It looks like there may be separation there, but it's fuzzy...I'm honestly not prepared to say they're wrong."
Josh Dugan appeared to have scored on Saturday night but the Bunker correctly ruled that Dugan hadn't retreated behind the point of the prior play-the-ball. The only way he can get himself onside is by retiring behind the previous play-the-ball.
A few keen eyes saw Nelson Asofa-Solomona spill the ball before he played it back to Cameron Smith at dummy half. Although, the correct ruling would have been a strip. Play shouldn't have been allowed to continue but Annesley added: "It should have been a penalty against Manly."
On crusher tackles: "We certainly saw a decrease over the weekend."
Jason King made an appearance this week to talk about the NRL Finals and NRLW.
The main takeaway from King's discussion is that finals time slots are determined by turnarounds and ground availability more than anything else. He also confirmed where teams will play home games and when throughout the finals:
NRLW will go ahead with double and triple-headers alongside the men's finals series.
The NRL is working closely with the Warriors and NZRL to get players across the ditch to train while in isolation and play in the competition.
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