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NRL Rugby League, Melbourne Storm v Warriors at Etihad Stadium. Digital image by Brett Crockford, © nrlphotos
In the post-game show after Monday night’s game, as the commentators sang the praises of the Melbourne Storm and their efforts against the Roosters, I began to join some dots in my mind. The Melbourne Storm are the FC Barcelona of rugby league.
My reasoning for this is two-fold. Firstly, as highlighted at length by Laurie Daley et al last night, the Storm have a system. A simple system, whereby each player has an individual job to do.
If your team mates know that you are doing your job they only need to focus on their own job, it doesn’t matter who the individual actually doing the job is.
Whilst positional requirements mean that this happens in all cases to an extent, the Storm are taking it to the next level in terms of matchday responsibilities, not just positional training. Anybody coming into the Storm’s team not just knows how to play their position, but also their role.
One of Barça’s great strengths has been the “Barça Way”, and the strict adherence to “the way” means that players can move in and out of the team for minor impact on the way it plays.
It means that you can offset personnel losses on match day. Losing a Billy Slater or Lionel Messi are going to have obvious impacts, but if you’ve got a player who can step into the breach, and know what is expected tactically as well as positionally, then you go a long way to offsetting the loss.
The second aspect is junior development.
The Storm have what amounts to a production line of high quality talent come through their system.
While they – like Barcelona – are not alone in this regard, when you couple this to the aforementioned “Way”, it means that any kid that comes through the system can slot straight into the team, and do the job that is required of them. It is a model that allows for near seamless generational change, and can offset the loss of any player due to injury (or in the Storm’s case, the annual Origin drain), as I mentioned above.
One of the things that has always been apparent to me is that the Storm always seem to be a sum of more than their parts. There are very few (I’m struggling to name any, except for Aiden Tolman) Storm players who have left and gone on to bigger and better things, and the club is notorious for taking cast offs and has beens and turning them into decent players.
This was born out of necessity in the beginning (unable to attract players to the frontier) and further perpetuated in recent times by salary cap issues (yes, they actually did lose players for “perceived” cap issues between 2006-09).
I guess the interesting thing, and the ultimate test of “the Storm way” will be if it survives full generational change. Barça have been around for a long time, but “the way” perseveres.
If in three or four generations of players (and maybe one or two generations of coaches), the Storm continue with this system, and it proves to ultimately be successful, then “the Storm way” is very much real and established.
Now, it is in its infancy, but the inspiration is definitely there for what it can achieve long term, but I can say, bona fide, they are well on their way.
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