Last Friday, ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys was on stage at North Queensland’s season launch in Townsville, riffing about the NRL and all the wonderful things it’s done in the last few years.
When host Danika Mason asked him about the raft of rule changes introduced on his watch, V’landys told the room how the six-again rule for ruck and offside infringements had saved the game from the dreaded wrestle.
By doing so, he argued, the NRL had reintroduced fatigue into the contest, thereby allowing “brilliant” players to work their magic against tired defences late in the game.
“Someone said to me, ‘Imagine if we had the six-again [rule] with Johnathan Thurston’,” V’landys said. “Imagine how much better he would’ve been. You bring in Reece Walsh, Kalyn Ponga … Even [Nathan] Cleary in the grand final. If that fatigue hadn’t come in the last 15 to 16 minutes, it might have been a different result.”
Sitting in the crowd, Thurston’s immediate thought wasn’t about his career but that of another Cowboys superstar who regularly shredded defences.
“I thought, ‘Imagine how Matthew Bowen would have gone’,” Thurston chuckled when contacted.
Nathan Cleary after winning his second Clive Churchill Medal last year.Credit: Getty
V’landys’ remark about Cleary, however, was received differently when it found its way to Manchester, where Penrith are preparing for the World Club Challenge against Wigan at DW Stadium on Sunday morning (AEDT).
The Panthers’ miraculous win in last year’s grand final against Brisbane, when they turned around a 16-point deficit in the final 18 minutes, can be attributed to many things, but a set restart isn’t one of them — because there was only one.
It came in the 75th minute, when Broncos centre Herbie Farnworth was pinged for holding down Penrith back-rower Liam Martin on the first tackle from a line dropout.
Farnworth had flopped on top of Martin for a nanosecond too long, prompting a chorus of boos from Panthers fans. You see players do the same thing in every set of six, in every game, every round, with impunity.
Nathan Cleary cruises past Reece Walsh to score the match-winning try in the grand final.Credit: Getty Images
Four tackles later, Cleary darted inside against the tired Broncos’ defence to score the match-winner, handing Penrith their third consecutive premiership and earning himself a second Clive Churchill Medal.
The NRL argues the very threat of a set-restart hovering over every ruck has sped up the play-the-ball and therefore created more fatigue, but I dare say those Broncos defenders were tired because it was a grand final in which referee Adam Gee barely blew his whistle before Cleary tortured them in the final 20 minutes with his skill, vision and persistence.
Is the game vastly better to watch since the six-again rule was introduced midway through 2020?
It is, but generational players like Thurston, Cleary and many others would have revelled in any era, under any rules. That’s what class is. That’s what sets them apart from the rest.
In a column for the Herald in May 2020, Phil Gould explained how fatigue wasn’t created with faster play-the-balls. “Fatigue is caused by having more play-the-balls in the game, not so much by having faster play-the-balls in the game,” he wrote.
To that end, things have improved. On average, there were 279 play-the-balls per match last season. In 2019, there were 270. Ruck speed was marginally faster, too. The game certainly feels faster. The last three Origin series have produced, arguably, the fastest matches ever played.
There’s no dispute that wrestling techniques involving increasingly stronger and fitter players were squeezing the life out of attacking teams and kudos to the NRL for trying to do something about it.
“The wrestle did affect how I played,” Thurston said. “I would have to rely on a couple of players – like Matt Scott, Jason Taumalolo, Jimmy Tamou – for a quick play-the-ball to create that ruck speed for me to play off. There’s a lot more fatigue now, but the wrestle is still there.”
Cowboys great Johnathan Thurston.Credit: NRL Photos
He’s right. Three defenders still come into most tackles: two up top, one collapsing on the legs below, slowly bringing the ball-carrier to the ground like they’re putting a baby into his cot as the defensive line resets.
The difference now is a set-restart allows the attacking team to work over those three defenders again, providing playmakers more time and space on the next play because there’s less inside pressure.
What frustrates fans is the subjective nature of those calls, like Farnworth’s indiscretion in the dying minutes of the grand final, which was the right call but one that could’ve been made countless times earlier in the match.
Asked to clarify his remarks about Cleary, V’landys told me: “You don’t need six-agains to speed up the ruck. It was never going to be used a hundred times a match.”
As for perceptions he is taking credit for the players’ performances, he said: “You know me better than that. That is certainly not the perception I want to give. It’s about bringing the great players to the fore.”
How much faster can the game get? The NRL has struck the right balance with ruck speed, although Thurston – ever the crafty playmaker — reckons there’s another way to introduce fatigue. “Imagine if we could speed up the Bunker,” he said. He wasn’t laughing.
V’landys’ lesson in succession
Still on V’landys, if there were ever any doubts that former Queensland Labor sports minister Kate Jones would succeed him at some point, they evaporated at the ARL Commission’s annual general meeting in Sydney on Wednesday when he lavished her with admiration.
She’s not just a can-do operator but, as he told the room, “She’s Glen 20 — a breath of fresh air”.
NRL commissioner Kate Jones.Credit: Jono Searle/Getty Images
Jones would be aware of the QRL’s anger with the mothership over cuts to its funding. The QRL and NSWRL last week started joint-proceedings in the NSW Supreme Court over their distributions for the 2022-23 financial year.
On Wednesday, QRL chief executive Ben Ikin questioned NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo about a line item in the budget about development, but was promptly shut down by V’landys, who said it wasn’t the time nor place to argue his case. “To be fair, Andrew had answered the question comprehensively,” V’landys said on Thursday. “An AGM is not a forum for a debate.”
V’landys also raised eyebrows when he was talking about participation, claiming the NRL needed to target private schools because that’s where “the future decision-makers come from”.
He wasn’t backing away from it. “I realise as I go through my career that the decision-makers are all from private school,” he said. “That’s not being disparaging to those from public schools. I’m an example that you can get somewhere coming out of a public school.”
A question, though: how’s all that private-school decision-making worked out for rugby of late?
NRL strikes gold with 49ers boss
The rugby league circus rolls up the tent and heads to Las Vegas next week for the season-opening double-header.
Indeed, charter flights from Sydney and Brisbane early next week will carry the likes of James Graham, Wade Graham, Paul Gallen, Paul Vautin, Sam Thaiday, Greg Inglis, and former NFL convert Colin Scotts to the neon delights of Sin City.
San Francisco 49ers president Al Guido will be part of a keynote panel at the NRL’s Business in Sport Conference held at Resorts World the day before the double-header. He’s kind of a big deal, responsible for all strategic initiatives and business operations for the five-time Super Bowl-winning NFL franchise.
Colin ‘Funky’ Miller playing for Australia in 2001.Credit: Fairfax
THE QUOTE
“My advice would be if you are in a bar at 3am and you are approached by a beautiful lady just remember you didn’t suddenly get handsome. No one gets better looking after midnight.” — Former Australian Test cricketer and Las Vegas resident Colin “Funky” Miller issues a warning to the NRL players travelling to Las Vegas. Some of us have based our entire lives around being better looking after midnight.
THUMBS UP
Good to see sanity prevailed in the world of equestrian with three-time Olympic medallist Shane Rose cleared of bringing the sport into disrepute for wearing a mankini at a fancy dress show-jumping event in the Southern Highlands earlier in this month. As Borat himself might say, very niiiiice.
THUMBS DOWN
Very sad news about the death of champion mare Verry Elleegant, an 11-time group 1 winner that claimed the 2021 Melbourne Cup with James McDonald on board. The six-year-old died in Ireland while giving birth to her first foal.
It’s a big weekend for … Bazball, the England team’s so-called revolutionary approach to Test cricket hitherto known as “attacking cricket”. (Have any of these people ever heard of Doug Walters or Adam Gilchrist?) England meet India in the fourth Test starting in Ranchi on Friday.
It’s an even bigger weekend for … Super Rugby which, according to sources speaking on the condition of anonymity, starts this weekend. The Waratahs meet the Reds at Suncorp Stadium on Saturday night — a fixture that once enjoyed an Origin-like build-up. How can they make Super Rugby great again?
