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Hayne Plane or Spruce Goose?

Roar Guru
11th August, 2014
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Hayne will turn up in Blue. (AAP Image/Dan Peled)
Roar Guru
11th August, 2014
91
1863 Reads

There’s been a trend recently among rugby league columnists declaring Jarryd Hayne to be the greatest player in the world. People, please, settle down.

Hayne is a good player, possibly even a great player, but to call him the best in the world is a little extreme.

Yes Hayne has grown in both ability and maturity in the last couple of years. He still has the strength and the pace of his younger self but he has tempered it with an ability to better chose his moments. As Kenny Rogers would put it, Hayne now has mastered the art of “know[ing] when to hold them and know[ing] when to fold them”.

He can run, kick, pass, tackle, break the line with consistency and kick one hell of a drop out. He also seems to be reining in the petulance that was for so long a major feature of his game – the semi-permanent pout and the certainty that as soon as a call went against him or the video referee flashed the “no try” sign that Hayne would take his ball and go home.

As far as players go he’s pretty much the full package. But the greatest player in the game? Please. He’s not even the greatest fullback.

This week pundits started with the ‘best in the world’ cries when Hayne put in a starring performance in a tight game to get his team over the line.

What wasn’t mentioned is that tight game was against Canberra – a broken team with a poor coach who would struggle against a 17 you put together with your mates at a barbecue.

These pundits talk up the Parramatta outfit as genuine contenders after a win against the certain wooden spooners. They tell us that it’s ok for your team to be a one man outfit if that man is Jarryd Hayne, while ignoring the glaring hypocrisy of telling us in the past that South Sydney are too reliant on Greg Inglis, North Queensland on Johnathan Thurston, Cronulla on Paul Gallen, Melbourne on Cameron Smith, Team X on Player Y and so on.

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Anyone that watched the game on Friday night would have seen the sublime duel between two of the greatest fullbacks of the modern era – Brett Stewart versus Greg Inglis. In a game of one versus two, with the minor premiership on the line, these two put on a textbook display of fullback play – sensational catches, brilliant cover tackles to deny certain tries, line breaks, offloads and pinpoint cutout passes.

Is Hayne better than these two? Considering the Eels haven’t beaten either Souths or Manly this year, the answer is ‘probably not’.

But people aren’t calling Hayne the greatest fullback. They’re calling him the greatest player. They’re calling him better than Sam Burgess, who put in a dominant performance against the premiership favourites and after 70 minutes of tackling and hard running, outpaced a team of noted speedsters to a loose ball then scored the game sealing try.

They’re calling him better than Johnathan Thurston, who had the ball on a string on Saturday night in such a dominant show of skill that he was literally pulling off trick shots.

They’re calling him better than Cooper Cronk and Cameron Smith, who have won pretty much everything there is to win and have so consistently for the better part of a decade.

Better than Jamie Lyon or Kieran Foran or Daly Cherry-Evans.

Better than Sonny Bill Williams, who single handedly dragged the tri-colours to a premiership, minor and major, in season 2013.

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Jarryd Hayne is a brilliant player, and certainly deserves his place among these names as one of the best in the game. But he is not the best. Not by a long shot. And those saying otherwise might do well to take off their blue and gold tinted glasses and see where Parramatta sit on the ladder.

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