The NRL team of the year (so far)

With every club having completed eight games and the representative season underway, now is a great time to take stock of the competition and name our team of the first trimester.

Firstly, I’ll try to avoid naming players out of position. So while there have been a half a dozen incredible fullbacks you won’t find any of those players named on a wing here just to squeeze them in.

Secondly, this team is based on club football performance only. So certain invisible performances for representative teams over the weekend won’t influence these ratings.

Finally let me stress that selecting one player ahead of another here in no way means that I think the second player has been rubbish. Some of these decisions were very close.

That being said here is my first trimester team.

Fullback – Matt Moylan
With the wealth of talent playing here, fullback is probably the hardest position in which to identify a standout player. Josh Dugan, James Tedesco and especially Roger Tuivasa-Sheck all have a strong case, while Jack Wighton and Lachlan Coote have also had strong seasons.

Moylan however gets the nod on the basis of his overall contribution to the Panthers. While he may not have the crazy running metre numbers of Tuivasa-Scheck, Moylan has essentially been the primary playmaker for the Panthers this season with the injuries to Jamie Soward and Peter Wallace.

Moylan has 10 try assists, twice as many as the next highest fullback and good enough for first in the league. Moreover Moylan has added four line breaks (second among fullbacks) 10 line break assists (first) and 11 offloads (first).

Along with James Segeyaro, Moylan has been critical in keeping the Panthers’ season above water despite a flood of injuries.

Wingers – Marika Koroibete and Curtis Rona
In the modern NRL the vast majority of players have a preferred side of the field on which they operate. This goes for wingers, centres, halves and even second rowers. This can make naming an awards team tough because you often find that the two top candidates nominally operate at the same side of the field for their club.

For example as of eight rounds into the competition the top five try scoring wingers are all left wingers and even accounting for other contributions, such as average metres and tackle breaks, it’s hard to find a strong enough right-wing candidate.

As such we’re sticking with Koroibete and Rona, who operate on the left for the Storm and Bulldogs respectively. There is much similarity in their stories this season. Both were forced out of their previous club through lack of opportunity, with Koroibete joining the Storm from the Tigers in mid-2014 and Rona moving south to the Bulldogs from North Queensland in the offseason. Both have very quickly made themselves invaluable to their teams.

With Billy Slater hampered by injury and – just whisper it – in decline, Koroibete has emerged as the Storm’s key weapon in attack, with six tries so far this year to lead the team. Koroibete has also taken the pressure off Slater bringing the ball out of his own end with over 43 metres per game in kick returns along with his league-leading (among wingers) 176 metres per game.

Rona meanwhile may not have the gaudy running numbers or even the tackle breaks of Koroibete but what he does have is tries – lots and lots of them. With nine tries already this season, Rona sits alongside James Roberts as the league’s leading try scorer.

Furthermore, for a team that has struggled for consistency Rona has scored in six of eight games and is the only member of the Bulldogs’ outside backs to play every game in the same position.

Centres – Will Chambers and James Roberts
While for wingers the stand-out performers this season have mostly been on the left side, for centres the standouts have been mostly on the right edge, with Chambers and Roberts narrowly edging out Dane Gagai among others.

A quick word on Gagai; while he began the season magnificently, his recent performances have been much less impressive with only one try from his last five matches to go along with a sharp decline in overall production. In addition, Gagai is a poor defender and has missed the most tackles of any centre by a colossal margin (Gagai has 34 missed and the next worst is Dylan Farrell on 21).

For Chambers it has been a season of steady, professional production. He has scored in five different matches and has only failed to make 100 metres on one occasion, on the back 14-plus runs per game. Importantly for a player who touches the ball as much as he does, Chambers has an excellent error rate with less than one error per game. Always a prodigious talent, Chambers has now become a mature veteran who can anchor the Storm’s right edge for many years to come.

It would be easy to say that James Roberts has been a revelation this season for the Titans, but that implies that his talent was unknown or unexpected. Quite the opposite, this level of performance has been long expected.

A standout in the NYC, Roberts had well documented difficulties off the field but one does not get as many opportunities as he has without demonstrable gifts on the field. With an amazing nine tries from eight games, along with 28 tackles breaks, Roberts has been the Titans’ most effective attacking player.

Importantly, Roberts’ defence has also been solid with only eight missed tackles and nine ineffective from 118 attempted all season, a remarkable rate for a centre.

Halves – Ben Hunt and Johnathan Thurston
For this section we’re going to completely ignore the number on a player’s back. While there are still some halves whose natural game is to complement a more dominant primary playmaker (Kieran Foran or Blake Austin for example) for the most case the six and seven in each team simply run a side of the field each. As such, I have no hesitation naming two players who both wear number 7 as my halves.

Firstly, the chuckling assassin. Honestly, how much needs to be said about Johnathan Thurston at this point? Yes his team started slowly this season but his stats are typically amazing. He leads all halves in try assists and line break assists. He has run the ball effectively and kicked well. But stats don’t tell the real story for Thurston. He certainly racks up the numbers but for Thurston it is the eye test that is most telling. When Thurston has the ball nobody is clocking off.

Hunt meanwhile has been the anchor for the Broncos. While he is amazingly yet to be credited with a try assist and has recorded only one line break assist, there is little doubt that it is his organisation and particularly his kicking game which has been instrumental in leading the Broncos to the top of the table after one trimester.

To say that Hunt kicks well may be an understatement. He has over 1000 kicking metres more than the next best (Cooper Cronk). Of course raw kicking numbers aren’t the whole story but it remains a remarkable statistic.

The true measure of Hunt’s contribution is just how little support he is getting from his fellow half. While Anthony Milford does have a couple of typical circus-show tries to his name, as a playmaker he has been an effective zero. With Milford struggling to adapt to the front line Hunt has had to take on all the playmaking responsibility.

Props – Aaron Woods and Jesse Bromwich
As the leading metre-maker among all forwards, Aaron Woods has this season begun to consistently deliver on the potential that he has flashed throughout his four years in first grade.

Woods’ statistical output is amazing. In addition to taking over 21 runs and averaging a shade under 200 metres per game (first among props for both), he also makes 33 tackles and two offloads per game, and has made only three errors all season. Along with Robbie Farah he has been the beating heart of the Tigers team this year, and his absence during the Origin period will be a critical test for the team.

Jesse Bromwich has also taken the leap from good to great this season. While not quite making the metres that Woods is, Bromwich is filling up the stat sheet everywhere else. He is in the top five among front rowers for average minutes, average tackles, tackle breaks and offloads. With an inexperienced coterie of forwards around him, Bromwich’s huge minutes, over 63 per game, have been critical for the Storm.

Hooker – Cameron Smith
Like fullback, hooker is another category where there is far more talent than there are positions available. This award could have easily gone to sparkplug James Segeyaro, tackle machine Andrew McCulloch, or even the old stager Michael Ennis. Moreover it would probably be more fun to nominate a youthful player on the rise like Michael Lichaa or the one-man fast-break Issac Luke.

But the fact remains that Cameron Smith is really, really good at rugby league.

Smith is something like 57 years old at this point and has played several thousand NRL games, but his performance never declines. For NBA fans you can think of Smith as the Tim Duncan of the NRL. Nothing he does is flashy but everything he does is fundamentally sound. Like Duncan he always seems to make the correct decision with ball in hand and he makes everyone around him better. Even the calm way he handles referees is similar to that of the eternal man in San Antonio.

Smith’s defence is first rate, not simply in the raw numbers of tackles made and missed but also the execution of the Storm’s patented wrestling techniques. Maybe one day we will see Cameron Smith wane, but there is no sign of it yet.

Second Row – Manu Ma’u and Jason Taumalolo
A partial cheat to my positional integrity promise here, with Taumalolo being named as a second rower despite playing mostly in the middle unit this season for the Cowboys. However as with fullback and hooker, the lock-forward role is one with simply too much talent and it’s not like Taumalolo couldn’t play on the edge if need be.

While he is yet to get over the line for a try Taumalolo is averaging over 150 metres per game with ball in hand and has broken 32 tackles, easily the most among back rowers.

However as with his Cowboys teammate Johnathan Thurston, statistics alone do not tell the full tale of the impact that Taumalolo has on the field. Phrases like ‘wrecking ball’, ‘unstoppable wave of destruction’ and ‘destroyer of nations’ leap to mind when watching Taumalolo run the ball. He regularly draws three or more tacklers and routinely makes plenty of metres after contact.

While Manu Ma’u’s average metres of 116 seems low compared to Taumalolo it is actually very good among genuine edge backrowers, with only Alex Glenn ahead of him. Ma’u also has competitive numbers in the key categories such as tackles made and tackles broken along with offloads and errors.

Again though, much like Taumalolo, none of those capture the sheer ferocity with which Ma’u carries the ball and hits in defence.

Lock – Paul Gallen
This section was initially being written for Trent Merrin – who has been outstanding – however a quick inspection of the numbers provides a compelling case for Gallen.

Among lock forwards Gallen is first in metres made (by a huge margin), first in runs per game, equal first in offloads, fifth in tackle breaks, and sixth in average tackles made (after disqualifying players with less than five games at the position). He has made only two errors and conceded only three penalties all season, which are both remarkable given his enormous participation in each game.

Gallen’s injury record is a major concern for the club, with his current hip injury the latest in series that have seen him miss over 45 per cent of Sharks games over the last three seasons. However when he is on the field he remains a force.

Follow Lachlan on twitter @mrsports83