With a new NRL season kicking off and a federal election looming, it’s time to return to the Menzies era when innovation was not stifled by regulation; when the monied Silvertails ruled.
Power is now in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, where a new stadium is being built for those hard hat Panthers who have won four consecutive premierships and are poised to repeat in 2025.
The Menzies rugby league needs isn’t the former Liberal Bob Menzies variety – Australia’s longest serving prime minister. The NRL already has a Supreme Leader in Peter V’landys.
No, it needs a Steve Menzies, the Manly back-rower who won premierships in 1996 and 2008 and who holds the record for the most number of tries scored by a forward.
Menzies could play on the left and the right side of the field, unlike today’s edge forwards who play on one side, under the coach-endorsed left field-right field division of (defensive) responsibility. They are so wedded to one side, you are entitled to wonder how the right-side players drive a car to training, or how left-side players manage with scissors.
Edge forwards today have become labourers, unlike Menzies who carried the ball out of his own half from either side of the field. Coincidentally, Manly are still the best in the NRL at shifting the ball in their own territory, via clever halfback Daly Cherry-Evans, a strategy probably forced on them by a lack of robust wingers capable of returning the ball forcefully from kicks.
Yet back-rowers who can move the ball, aka Sonny Bill Williams, are what is needed to beat Penrith. If field position and possession is the holy grail of the game, the Panthers are masters of the former. They trap a team in its own half with a high hang-time clearing kick to an opposing winger, driving him back in the tackle with the best kick chase in the NRL.
It is so effective that it becomes a game of forcings back, with their opponents finding each successive set of tackles begins closer and closer to their own line, while the Panthers move further away from theirs.
NRL coaches are inherently conservative, but the first to release a back-rower to assist his wingers, centres and fullback in a link to halfway, is a chance of breaking the Panthers’ stranglehold on the game.
Former NSW coach Frederick Fittler encouraged this strategy against Queensland with a mantra of “attack the halfway line as if it is the try line.” But his forwards were so steeped in the NRL club culture of strolling back for three tackles after a kick, it rarely happened.
His opposite, Queensland’s Kevin Walters, when asked whether edge forwards could do more in attack, said: “I couldn’t agree with you more.”
Canberra’s Ricky Stuart, never one to fear experimentation, has been working in the off-season to rush an edge forward back to develop, as he calls it, “some shape in attack.”
Steve Menzies celebrates with teammates after scoring against Melbourne in the 2008 grand final.Credit: Dallas Kilponen
When the Panthers receive the ball from a clearing kick, they use their backs as crash test dummies. Their forwards don’t touch the ball until they reach halfway, thereby conserving energy for their brutal kick chase. So, an opposition coach has to move the ball in the Panthers half as well, tiring their forwards, forcing them into making multiple tackles.
The Panthers have been trend setters in capitalising on the flurry of rule changes of recent years. In the 2021 grand final, they exploited the six-again rule by conceding early breaches to trap the Rabbitohs in their own half.
The previous year, when they lost the grand final to Melbourne, halfback Nathan Cleary was frustrated on the last tackle by Christian Welch rushing at him. Welch successfully repeated the pressure for Queensland against Cleary’s NSW Blues.
However, NRL headquarters subsequently ruled that any player making contact with the kicker in the act of clearing the ball attracts an automatic penalty. Welch retired this month at age 30, a victim of his role becoming redundant, a trend to smaller middle players who can keep up in an increasingly helter-skelter game and the NRL’s admirable stance on concussion.
However, if a player is penalised for touching a kicker, why not relieve forwards of the role and release a back-rower to revive attack in the backfield?
Defensive agility was the buzz phrase last year. Let’s try attacking agility this season, with say Melbourne’s Eliesa Katoa, or even the Sharks’ Briton Nikora, or the Cowboys’ Jeremiah Nanai doing a Menzies to stop the Panthers’ reign.
