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The New Zealand Warriors will win the 2016 NRL premiership. Apparently.
The Parramatta Eels will improve massively this year. Apparently.
The Manly Sea Eagles will dominate everybody. Apparently, in the 2016 NRL season it is all about attack. The Warriors recruited Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Issac Luke, and their combination with Shaun Johnson is supposedly going to take them to that big night in October. Okay, fair enough.
The Eels have the biggest signing in the club’s history, if you believe some of the experts, in Kieran Foran. He and Michael Jennings will alleviate all the Eels’ troubles and provide stability and speed, thus winning enough games for the Eels to make the top four. Seems reasonable. Moving on.
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The Sea Eagles have added Marty Taupau and Nate Myles in the forwards to provide some more grunt up front, plus Dylan Walker, who will use his great skills and experience as an outside back to play as partner to rugby league’s most expensive halfback, thus winning all the games!
I recently wrote an article about my beloved Canberra Raiders and their 2016 chances, due to their recent recruits in Aidan Sezer and Elliott Whitehead. To the top four, I say!
Even some Tigers fans have hope of a great season. Brooks and Moses have another year of showing off their skills at training. Hooray!
OK, this has to stop.
Stop acting as though attack is the only important part of rugby league. In almost every season preview of the teams that are apparently going to dominate or improve in 2016, there tends to be one sentence that refers to defence.
It generally reads as, ‘…if they can improve their defence, they have the attacking prowess to win games and make the finals’.
Defence is not an afterthought, people! Defence is fifty per cent of a rugby league game. You cannot simply pass off defence as something that just happens. You cannot just assume that a team’s flashy new players will bring success.
Take the Warriors as an example. The lethal trio of RTS, Luke, and Johnson is supposedly going to light up the competition and lead the Warriors into a new era of success. One problem with this theory is that the Warriors have never had a problem with offense!
Their problems have always been defence and mental strength in pressure situations. How is recruiting two players who only thrive off the back of a dominant forward pack going to change their fortunes?
Will the superstar trio score the 30 points needed to win a game when their forward pack is dominated? Time will tell, but it would be an incredible feat for it to happen on a regular basis.
The Eels are quite a well-rounded team, but to suggest them as one of the high-flying sides for the 2016 season is very ambitious, especially considering their ‘biggest ever signing’ is playing without his old mate next to him for the first time.
Michael Jennings has had some quality years, certainly, but you could question whether these days he is the kind of player you can build premiership hopes around. Again, defence is just as important as attack, and barely anyone is mentioning it with the Eels.
Manly has beefed up their forward pack, which has many people thinking this will provide them with the intimidation factor necessary to win games. Also, they have signed the excellent Dylan Walker, so that adds to their attack and gives them that extra push needed to be successful.
That argument will still be quite weak if this weren’t the case, but given he is a centre playing at five-eighth means it has even less of an impact and makes it irrelevant. Manly needs to stay in matches for the full 80 minutes and work effectively as a unit in defence to win games.
As for my Raiders, well, everyone made it quite clear in the comments of the aforementioned article how they feel about their top four hopes. But even I know that their defence needs to be a vast improvement on last year or they will not make a splash this year.
Edge defence has been a huge problem for them in recent years, and until it improves they will not be a force. The Raiders could have kept last year’s exact squad, improved their edge defence by 60 per cent and they would have been a top four team. But a 60 per cent improvement is a big ask, so optimism due to attacking brilliance it is.
Seems like I’ll just have to join the chorus of experts.
Bring on the attacking in 2016!
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