Raymond Faitala-Mariner receives the ball from Michael Lichaa on his own ten-metre line. It is only the second minute of the Bulldogs’ match against the Rabbitohs, and Canterbury are on their second tackle in their initial set of six.
Faitala-Mariner runs straight ahead, before seeing South Sydney’s Damien Cook in the way. The big Dog springs to his right, before changing back to his original path, and lowering his left shoulder into Cook’s tackle, to ensure that the contact doesn’t instantly halt his progress.
He succeeds. Cook can hold on, but can’t bring him down.
They continue in this way for a few metres, before Angus Crichton also starts to hang onto Faitala-Mariner’s upper body. Even then, it is only when John Sutton starts grabs a leg that Faitala-Mariner is stopped, a metre or two past the halfway line.
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Faitala-Mariner takes some time to recover from his work, with his hands on his hips, having earned his rest. It is the first time in the match that someone has travelled a significant amount of distance in the tackle.
Tackles make up a key part of any NRL game, and even as someone who is only just starting to take more of an interest in rugby league, it is an easy enough matter to find statistics that are related to them.
Apart from counting tackles themselves, there are missed tackles, offloads, tackle breaks, ineffective tackles, and post-contact metres.
What is harder is finding out exactly how clubs approach tackles, how it affects their training, how they analyse the data from post-contact plays – like the aforementioned one from Faitala-Mariner.
What drills does Faitala-Mariner do at training to earn those extra yards? Let’s say that the Rabbitohs could have had any player in the world to prevent those metres, and that player had the aid of no other person. Who would it have been, if not Damien Cook? Whoever it is, how does that player prepare to provide his team with such an advantage?
The Bulldogs have the first match of the upcoming round, which provides another opportunity to look at Faitala-Mariner attempting to get post-contact metres.
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