Time for the NRL to start recognising backbone as well as spines

September may signify that the finals have started, but it also means we’re in the thick of awards season.

While the Dally Ms are still a couple of weeks away, seven clubs have already named their player of the year:

Canterbury Bulldogs: David Klemmer
Gold Coast Titans: Ryan James
Manly Sea Eagles: Jake Trbojevic
Newcastle Knights: Kalyn Ponga
New Zealand Warriors: Roger Tuivasa-Sheck
Parramatta Eels: Daniel Alvaro
Wests Tigers: Luke Brooks

The Cowboys are set to have their event this coming week, while – perhaps as an indication of their intentions for 2018 – the Sharks, Panthers, Storm and Broncos will all hold their night of nights in October, with the Roosters and Dragons set to choose a date after their finals campaigns end.

In a piece of horrible scheduling, the Raiders’ awards night will be held this Tuesday, which is the same evening the RLPA Player of the Year awards will be announced, at a ceremony in Sydney.

The five finalists for the top gong, The Players’ Champion, are Damien Cook, Valentine Holmes, Cameron Munster, Kalyn Ponga and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck.

As the RLPA noted in announcing the finalists, “With Holmes, Ponga and Tuivasa-Sheck all donning the number one jersey throughout the season, it’s clear that RLPA members acknowledge fullback as one of the most important positions on the field.”

Of course, Cook and Munster play in the all-important positions of hooker and five-eighth respectively. And it appears a ‘spine’ player will also be named the Dally M Player of the Year, with most bookmakers listing Tuivasa-Sheck as the favourite ahead of Cook, Ponga, Holmes and Luke Brooks.

It’s fair enough too – Tuivasa-Sheck has led from the front in what has been the Warriors’ best campaign since 2011, Cook has had a breakout year, while Ponga, in his first full NRL season, has surpassed even the highest expectations held for him.

What’s more, when a game’s on the line, it’s inevitably the guys wearing the 1, 6, 7 or 9 jerseys who demand the ball and make the magic happen.

But what about, y’know, the other 13 guys?

Rugby league is a team sport and while there are four key positions, those players can’t weave their magic without the blokes up front doing the grunt work, while the men out wide tend to be the ones who have the freakish ability to score tries that defy physics.

Yet, the last time a non-spine player was named the outright Dally M Player of the Year was all the way back in 1989.

With Zero Tackle finding the mean NRL player age in 2018 is 26.27, that means the average player wasn’t even born the last time a forward was recognised as the outright best player in the game.

Yes, yes, Jason Taumalolo was co-champion with Cooper Cronk in 2016, but he’s the exception that proves the rule – literally the only non-spine player to take out the top gong in the past three decades.

So it’s particularly noteworthy that in the ’80s (the award was struck in 1980), four of the ten years saw forwards win – locks Steve Rogers (1981) and Ray Price (’82), as well as second-rower Gavin Miller (in both ’88 and ’89).

For the record, Rogers played five-eighth and centre throughout his career as well, but let’s not get caught up in semantics.

Now, I was focussed on far more important endeavours than footy in the ’80s – it was the golden age of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and GI Joe action figures, to say nothing of how good both Sesame Street and Play School were at the time – but as best I can work out, the game hasn’t changed so drastically since then that forwards and fast men have ceased to matter.

And, in fact, as evidence that more than four players are central to a team’s fortunes, I refer you to the individual clubs’ awards.

Klemmer, James, Trbojevic and Alvaro – more than half the men to be named their club’s best thus far – are forwards. While the 16 club awards may end up skewing towards spine players, there will be a strong representation of other positions.

It points to the idea that players recognise the blokes who do the dirty work, earn the hard metres and rack up the big tackle counts – the ones who may not be in the spine but show plenty of backbone – are the true heroes.

This is somewhat reinforced by the men who have taken out the Players’ Champion award – which, as its name suggests, is voted upon by the players – since its inception in 2004, with Taumalolo, Akuila Uate, Petero Civoniceva and Ben Kennedy having been recognised by their peers as the game’s premier players in the last 15 years.

Jason Taumalolo of the Cowboys. (AAP Image/Julian Smith)

But, without meaning any disrespect to the RLPA Awards, the Dally Ms still stand as the game’s night of nights, and the Dally M Award its greatest individual honour.

So should the NRL perhaps try to pull a bit of focus away from stats such as linebreak and try assists, and instead give more attention to numbers like post-contact metres and tackle counts?

Or do the Dally M metrics need to be altered slightly – perhaps each match also seeing points awarded by the players, with a nomination of who they saw as best on field for both their team and their opponents?

I don’t claim to have the answers, but all I know is the likes of Glenn Lazarus, Gorden Tallis and Manu Vatuvei were among the best at what the did, as are current players such as Paul Gallen, Matt Scott and Suliasi Vunivalu.

Don’t they deserve more than a mathematical chance to earn the game’s top gong?