The chopping block: The curious case of Jono Wright

Round 16 had some great late comebacks from South Sydney and Wests Tigers, a thriller down at Caltex Field – Shark Park, Endeavour, Remondis, whatever it’s called now – and the Bulldogs showed they will be major players once September rolls around.

The highlight was a rare sighting of what appeared to be a punch from Greg Bird, albeit more of a Bruce Lee/Jackie Chan open-handed slap. He should have been sent from the field for that effort, it’s an embarrassment to the legacy of greats like Kevin Tamati, Greg Dowling, Danny Moore and Andrew Johns.

Let’s get the ball rolling with two favourite targets of mine, who yet again provided their opponents with a leg up.

Jono Wright and Andrew McFadden
As the great men Stevland Morris and James McCartney proved with their hit single ‘Ebony and Ivory’, who lived in perfect harmony, the same cannot be said of the Warriors’ backline when Jono Wright is on the team sheet.

I’ve seen some left-field decisions in my time, but none more so than benching one of your best attacking youngsters in red-hot form, in case one of your playmakers can’t go the distance.

Sure, had he not called up a journeyman winger with a highlights reel of bombed tries and crucial errors with a longer running time than The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brenner, and won the game, we’d all be labelling him a genius.

Alas, not for the first time in Jono’s stint at the Warriors, he was guilty for a 12-point swing against his side. A bombed try with the line wide open was followed by a four-pointer to the Sharks.

Four further errors by the wing didn’t help justify the strange move by McFadden. Could you imagine the relief the Sharks had seeing a player they axed from their club starting on the wing with a young outstanding talent on the bench?

Surely if a playmaker went down, one of the mobile back-rowers in Simon Mannering or Bodene Thompson could have shifted into the centres. Both have more pace and better hands than the late call-up.

Ray and I have spent countless hours scratching our heads after pouring through previous inept performances from this winger and can’t come to any conclusions on why he is still at the club or a starter ahead of a huge back catalogue of outside backs.

A few decent ones have departed during his stint at the Penrose-based club. A few have also tried to gain a release. I’m all for experience and balance as long as the experience is not an error prone winger who is usually out-paced by the touch judges on a weekly basis.

In a perfect world, Wright would be sent packing to the Mull of Kintyre, along with Andrew McFadden’s team lists!

Chad Townsend
To the kid’s credit, I was critical of him last season and he has played out of his skin back home in the Shire. However, it is possible his old teammates got in his head last weekend and he also forgot which side he was playing for.

Three to four inept last-tackle kicks, either going dead in goal or an easily diffused bomb, giving the Warriors a seven-tackle re-start, would have had coach Shane Flanagan pulling his hair out and inquiring on Jeff ‘Lightning’ Robson’s availability as a mid-season back-up. Word is the Warriors have released Lightning on compassionate grounds.

As I stated earlier, young ‘Eddie Munster’ Townsend has had a breakout season, but with poor kicks against more quality opposition, the Sharks won’t be able to afford such luxury at the business end of the season.

Ray and I will put it down to an off night trying too hard against his old club, but we’ll be watching his form over the next three weeks. The Sharks have several options to shift players in the halves with Jack Bird, Ben Barba and to a lesser extent Paul Gallen, all capable of filling in. Gal’s passing game was a pleasant surprise in Origin 2.

Last season at the Warriors, Townsend had a tendency to overplay his hand with a poor kick or wrong option in attack, as well as being a liability in defence. He has improved in a number of areas and must take some credit for the Sharks’ displays this season.

Talk of him being selected for Origin was about as ridiculous for calls for Blake Austin last season, though. A first grader who has played in the NRL for over three to four seasons and has struggled to consistently make the top grade can’t be elevated to Origin after a golden run of 12-13 games.

Then again Dylan Walker got a call up for the current series…

Brayden Wiliame
I was watching the exciting second-half comeback from the Eagles on Monday night, preparing to fire another round at Brett Stewart when a winger spilt a simple pass with Manly on the attack. It was none other than Wiliame, not to be confused with Will.i.am.

Unlike his namesake, who has more wins in the column of hit singles over duds, the Manly three-quarter has a winning percentage of 1.05 per cent. He has been selected again this week in Monday night’s clash with the Dragons.

Will the 20 losses from 21 first-grade appearances reach 21? Or will he add to the one solitary win he enjoyed against the powerful Newcastle Knights of 2015? Ray pulled together these stats for me from his trusty Commodore ’64 on Monday night and we could not fathom how a coach would continually select a player who wouldn’t know the words to the team song.

Wiliame has a winning percentage on par with the average front-row forward’s IQ – taking Dr George Peponis out of the equation. Surely the more capable Wright brother, Matthew would be a better option.

Maybe Brett Stewart’s lack of urgency and form is down to the selection of Wiliame. He knows no matter how close the score is, he’d prefer to avoid the path of a ‘golden point’ loss and gift the opposition a chance to get two scores in front with five minutes remaining.

This would explain the total lack of urgency at diffusing goal kicks or bombs. Maybe he is the ultimate team player and is trying to deflect the attention away from the real elephant in the room.

What do silvertail fans make of this conspiracy theory?

Parramatta PR Machine
“Semi will be arriving back on Wednesday and attend training on Thursday!”

The folk out at Mascot are sick at the sight of the Danny Weidlers and Josh Massouds of this world, hanging out in the international terminal awaiting the arrival of Semi Radradra.

Ray discovered a link to the manuscript for flights on Fijian Airways but had to part with five Fijian dollars to join up to the Tabua Club. The only possible link to a return to Australia on the manuscript for this Friday was a passenger listed under the name of Eparama Navale, who played with the Eels back in the late 1990s.

With the year the Eels have had, they can ill afford to appease the fans by running out the same statement on a daily basis regarding the future of their most exciting star player. It is getting to the stage of a Monty Python skit.

So fellow NRL tragics, who is plastered to your dartboard this week and why?