It’s hard to go past Johnathan Thurston and Sam Burgess as the finest brains and brawn respectively in the NRL this year, but neither player is the one other teams are trying to emulate.
I headed along to the SFS last Friday night, despite (or perhaps because of) last week’s piece that had me misconstrued as either passionless or a Sydney hater, in the hope that the Cowboys would put a rotisserie skewer through the Roosters and set their campfires to ‘barbecue’. And I don’t even eat chicken.
What I saw instead was a ridiculous game of rugby league, watched by passionate fans from both sides who will never forget what they witnessed, and circumstantial evidence that coaches secretly want their props to be James Graham.
The Cowboys’ relentless second-half assault may have been orchestrated by the irrepressible JT, but the grunt work was done up front. And it was the way Matt Scott played which caught my eye.
The bash and barge he so ably displays come Origin time was evident as always, though interspersed with a cunning running and passing game. Take the ball left from a centre-field play the ball, approach the defence with intent, then loop the ball behind a dummy runner to JT to feed a sweeping attack down his favoured channel.
The following night, Manly were reading from the same playbook, their props running in pairs called by their own left-side general in Kieran Foran. Except it didn’t look anywhere near as graceful as when their opposing Bulldogs ran the same play off the man himself, James Graham. Nor was it as effective.
Ball-playing props are generally massive units who can occasionally slip a cheeky offload, or a cluster of impossible ones in a row if they’re Paul Osborne hitting a career high watermark in the 1994 grand final.
Graham is a little different. As a frustrated fantasy football coach, I spent good portions of this season shaking my fist at the big northerner as he lurked at the advantage line to the left of Mick Ennis without demanding the ball to tear into the defence anywhere enough for my liking.
With my clipboard long in the top drawer and life as a post-season neutral feeling as comfortable as general spiritual malaise, I can accept that he’s positioned there as a permanent decoy – like a short-leg under a batsman’s nose to keep them in two minds about attacking the spinner.
When the ball does come his way, he can tear into the line with the ferocity (if not the size) of his fellow expat Burgess, or loop a better ball to a sweeping backline than all of his imitators combined.
He can also let fly torrents of abuse at teammates that make Brett Mullins talking tactics with Mark McLinden look like a deep philosophical discussion, all the while getting praised by commentators as ‘committed’ rather than ‘should be committed’ in the process.
Additionally, he hasn’t attempted to feast on anyone’s earlobe for nigh on two years now.
If the Bulldogs do defy the odds of entering the finals in seventh place, off the back of a pitiful post-Origin slide, and somehow make the decider, one suspects Graham will have added another man of the match envelope to last Saturday’s (and the rest).
And even if they don’t, the attack of the clones when season 2015 rolls around will no doubt be relentless.
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