The St George Illawarra Dragons have been nothing short of surprising so far in the 2015 season.
They have come from nowhere with most tipping them to be in contention for the Wooden Spoon at the start of the season.
If you had have asked even the most optimistic Dragons supporter at the start of the season if they would have taken a top eight finish a as a success, they would have told you it didn’t even look like a possibility.
I was one of those Dragons supporters. I had no faith in what the team might have been able to deliver this year before the start of the trial matches.
Paul McGregor was a rookie coach and while I had liked what I had seen when he took over last year, he had no experience. The Dragons recruitment over the Summer looked horrendous.
They had signed primarily players that had failed to make their mark at other clubs. It looked like they were set for a miserable season.
Rewind to Round 3 now at halftime, and the Dragons have lost their first two games convincingly and are in trouble against the Raiders. From that second half in Canberra it was a different Dragons team all together. It was a side that had the best defence in the competition and even sat on top of the NRL Ladder for a brief period of time.
However, every week during that run the Dragons were rank outsiders. Everyone in the media, the betting agents and most followers of rugby league were still writing them off. They weren’t going to win anything they said. The cracks will appear soon.
Well, it’s true, the cracks have appeared but contrary to some reports and opinions which are just plain stupid claiming things like the ‘Dragons wheels have fallen off’ and ‘Paul McGregor needs to go’, it is the complete opposite.
While the Dragons are on a five-game losing streak right at the moment, it is not a case of the wheels falling off.
What many in the media failed to acknowledge is that the Dragons have been struck down with a massive injury crisis during the hardest period of the season – Origin. All of their losses in this streak have come during a very hard time of the year and the injured players are only making life harder.
They are again at this stage being written off as mere outsiders and a team that will struggle to make the top eight come the end of the season.
The problem with the Dragons’ injury crisis is the players that have been getting injured add a massive amount of value to the team. When they are injured in chunks are about as close to irreplaceable as you can get.
Against the Cronulla Sharks last week and indeed the North Queensland Cowboys before that, the Dragons were missing a majority of their second rowers which included Tyson Frizell, Joel Thompson, Trent Merrin and Jack De Belin.
Frizell and Thompson have been two of the best second rowers going around this year and De Belin in particular has added some great value off the interchange bench for the Dragons. The major problem with all of these players being injured for the red and white at the same time is that they are the Dragons’ big minute players.
Thompson and Frizell often play an 80-minute game while De Belin adds plenty of minutes, most of the time upwards of 60 from the interchange bench.
What this then creates for the Dragons is a lot of minutes that need to be filled by players that haven’t been used to playing so many minutes. The fact that the likes of Ben Creagh, Leeson Ah Mau, Mike Cooper and Jake Marketo have been able to play small minutes and play an intensive game style.
With most of the injured troops getting back on board for this weekend’s game against the South Sydney Rabbitohs, it will be interesting to see how the Dragons react. As long as they can get back into their aggressive game plan that worked so well for them in the pre-Origin period, then they will be a big chance for the win this week and picking up another bunch of wins in the lead up to the finals.
They will undoubtedly start this week’s game as outsiders, and most of their games to the end of the season will be spent in the same position. Yet it looks to me like the Dragons might just be the underdogs that can give the NRL a serious surprise this year.
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