If the NRL’s first round produced the most lopsided set of results in more than a decade, it also set a record for the most number of players who took the field without having played a trial match.
Some of the best performers in round one, such as Manly’s Tom Trbojevic and the Storm’s Ryan Papenhuyzen, had been excused from pre-season matches and their dominance on the weekend was a major contributing factor to the average winning margin of 18 points across the eight fixtures.
“There is no coincidence between the explosion of points scored in round one and some clubs standing players down from trials,” Melbourne’s long-standing football manager, Frank Ponissi, said.
The Sea Eagles excused eight players from trials and thrashed the Cowboys 42-12 in week one; the Storm held four players back from pre-season games and thumped the Eels 56-18, while the Panthers beat a highly competitive Sharks team in Las Vegas 28-22, with none of their premiership team having played a trial.
OK, the Broncos humbled a threadbare Roosters 50-14 after playing their top squad in their final trial match, a win over the resurgent Bulldogs.
But, as coach Madge Maguire says, “Everyone was in against the Dogs, but I only played the top team for 30 minutes and then ripped them off the field. I had new combinations of players, such as in the halves, and need to give them a run.”
A fit and fresh Tom Trbojevic was too hot for the Cowboys to handle.Credit: Getty Images
Asked whether he would do the same in his second season in Brisbane, Maguire said, “I wouldn’t normally play the big boys that close to the season start. Training is so close to trial form, anyway.”
Manly coach Anthony Seibold agrees that modern training has reached a level of intensity that closely equates to a trial match. “We had a scrimmage against the Dragons, and it was about 70 per cent of the effort of a normal game,” he says.
However, the main reason Seibold wanted to send his players fresh into the new season and reap the benefits of their extra energy is the short coffee break between the end of a long, gruelling season with its added representative games and the beginning of a new one.
“The amount of football our representative players had with World Cups and Origin meant that some did not return to training until January 4,” he said. “It’s such a long season. We play 24 matches in 27 weeks. The amount of football they play means they need a long break.”
A freshened-up Sea Eagles side, playing at home, had too much energy for the Cowboys, who fielded their top team in their final trial match in Melbourne and embarrassed the Storm.
While Storm coach Craig Bellamy continued his record of winning every round one match, he also set a club record for the most number of players to take the field without a trial game under their belt.
The four players who missed the trials (Jahrome Hughes, Will Warbrick, Xavier Coates and Papenhuyzen) scored six of Melbourne’s ten tries against the Eels. However, Bellamy said injury concerns had been a factor in standing them down from pre-season duty, with Warbrick concussed during training, Coates spraining his ankle, and Papenhuyzen and Hughes troubled by foot and neck injuries respectively.
But the Storm have a bye in round two, and Bellamy concedes: “I needed them to play a bit of time because I didn’t have a choice with the draw. I usually go on the opinion of the top blokes who know what is best for them.”
The average points differential in round one was 50 per cent higher than the average margin across the last ten seasons, raising questions over whether the game has the necessary depth of talent needed to sustain an expanded 20-team league.
However, as this column has written many times over the past five years, the problem is not so much declining numbers in the pathways but a lack of expert coaching in the junior ranks.
The ARLC point to record sums spent on development, but there is a disconnect between the philosophies on the one hand of encouraging broad-based participation, where juniors play for no points, and promoting elite development on the other.
Most of the elite junior coaching is left to the NRL clubs, with some doing it extremely well, such as the Panthers, while other clubs rely on the salary cap to import talent shed by the top clubs.
The trend-setting Panthers, having won four successive premierships and the Las Vegas game without a trial, may well herald an era where the pre-season NRL games disappear and are replaced by the All Stars and World Club Challenge matches.
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