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Opinion

The three deepest NRL teams best placed to cope this year

2nd March, 2022
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2nd March, 2022
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At no time since I’ve been following rugby league has the ability to effectively draw on an extended squad been as important as it is right now.

The team that will win the 2022 premiership will almost certainly be the team that does that the best. 

And history says that, while it may not be the Melbourne Storm, they’ll almost certainly be there when the whips are cracking – along with the Panthers and Roosters.

At the risk of being Captain Obvious, the side that wins the 2022 NRL Premiership will be the side that best deals with all eventualities.

And the biggest variant in our game right now – as with our lives in general – is COVID-19.

The National Rugby League in the time of COVID-19 has necessarily been a moving feast of contingencies.

While many are well and truly off his bandwagon, I am still thankful to ARLC Chairman Peter V’landys for keeping the competition going when it so easily could have ground to a halt.

Of course, the NRL’s key metric for success is that the competition keeps going. That games keep being televised.

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The pandemic has changed the way the NRL runs the competition massively, but they’ve managed to achieve those KPIs.

For a club, the key metric is success.

At every club success is measured through how well they are developing and growing their squads as a competitive and cohesive unit, whether they are attracting good crowds and sponsorship, and whether they are generating a profit.

Then there are the on-field results to consider. If your team just claimed the wooden spoon, not repeating the humiliation the next season would be the first achievement, with making the finals the most realistic goal.

If your side was in the finals the previous season, making the preliminary round would be the base marker for success, but winning the premiership is really the benchmark.

Before COVID-19 turned our lives upside down, teams had to perform many functions well if they hoped to be successful.

They had to carry out meticulous homework on both their opposition and the officials to create effective plans to manage both those variables well.

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They had to position themselves as well as possible in the media, trying to establish a narrative for their team that sees them viewed in the best light possible.  

They needed to manage the egos and personalities within their playing group to keep it competitive but also cohesive and focused.  

And, above all, they needed to have assembled – and to be continually developing – a squad with skill, experience and single-minded determination that could actually compete for the title. Or at least be building towards that goal.

Once COVID hit, all of those tasks got so much more difficult.

Firstly, you had to control your players and try and stop them breaking the COVID bubble. And that wasn’t easy at all. Players were smuggling women into their hotels, appearing on TikTok dances and attending barbecues.

Nathan Cleary passes the ball

TikTok star Nathan Cleary (Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)

This year, V’landys has declared that it will be a ‘soft bubble‘.

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“The players will be able to go to places but they must use common sense. They can’t go to pubs or nightclubs that are full of people but they can go to restaurants that are outdoor dining so their lives won’t be as disrupted as they have been the last two years because we are confident that if one player does catch it we will catch it early with the rapid antigen tests and that way they won’t infect any of the other players.”

While the soft bubble should avoid catastrophic scenarios like the fallout from the Dragon’s 2021 Shellharbour BBQ, you can be certain that we will constantly see players withdrawing from games due to positive COVID-19 tests.

That will see pressure placed firmly on each club’s 30-man roster. Already it has been proposed that clubs should be able to draw on players from outside their roster and common sense says that will happen.

However, clubs who have to travel will have to take large squads with them if we are to avoid games being called off and rescheduled –  a complexity that will not align well with the broadcast deal or the physical rigours of the game.

It then follows that the club with the best 30-man roster – as well as the best ability to draw on good players from outside it – is most likely going to be the 2022 premier.

When you are looking at the strongest squads in the NRL it is very hard to go past the Melbourne Storm. The Penrith Panthers look pretty good too, as well as the Sydney Roosters.

However, the Storm are the best placed to deal with this new reality. Because it seems they’ve been building towards it well before COVID-19 even existed.

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Melbourne have spent most of the last two seasons based on the Sunshine Coast but they have managed to maintain a consistent level of success.

It was a quite fortunate state of affairs for the Storm when they had to relocate to Queensland that their feeder club – the Sunshine Coast Falcons – was based there, giving them established facilities, as well as an extended squad of players to draw from.

But in reality, it is rarely luck where the Storm is concerned.

Craig Bellamy waves to Melbourne Storm supporters

Craig Bellamy (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

As I’ve said again and again, Craig Bellamy is brilliant at running a club.

There are no factors that can affect the success of his club that he does not consider and try – and usually succeed – to get an advantage with.  

Looking at the statistics, one of the things Bellamy does better than anyone is the management of his playing squad.

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Quite a number of times in the last couple of years we have heard about the Storms ‘next man up’ philosophy, where there is a real expectation that any of the players in their squad can take their place in the game day 17 and perform their role well.

While the long-term presence of superstars like Billy Slater, Cameron Smith and Cooper Cronk in his roster may have somewhat camouflaged his approach, Bellamy has deliberately been developing a squad that is so fit, well-drilled and focused that he is constantly producing great players and turning honest toilers from other clubs into standouts in his team.   

For years the prevailing logic has been that the fewer players a side uses each season, the more settled and successful the team will be. Conversely, the more players you use, the more likely you’ve had a bad season through injuries, suspensions, and poor form ringing the changes.

The stats do play that out too. As the table below shows, while the average number of players used per team, per season over the last five seasons is 29.6, the side that has ‘won’ the wooden spoon has averaged 31.8 players used.

Squad size averages
YearTotal players usedAveragePremierTop 4Top 8Bottom 8Bottom 4Wooden spooner
201745328.33127.527.928.7531.2531
201844527.82827.7527.2528.428.7531
201946128.82928.2528.2529.430.2530
202047829.93228.7529.2530.53032
202150831.75283030.932.63435
Overall average46929.329.628.4528.729.930.8531.8

But there is a fair bit more at play than that.

To summarise the above table:

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  • The amount of players being used per team has been growing over the past five seasons.
  • In the past five seasons there has been a 3.5 per cent growth in the amount of players used, with that growth being spread pretty evenly across all teams.
  • Feeding that overall growth has been a massive 8.8 per cent cumulative increase of players used over the last two COVID-19 affected seasons.
  • However, there has been very little increase in the average size of the eventual premier’s squad size, with that only rising by 1 per cent.

This last point shows that the Roosters (2018, 2019), the Panthers (2021) and especially the Storm (2017, 2020) have already been relying on their whole 30-man squads to achieve success. This shows the successful clubs have been shifting from a reliance on a couple of superstars surrounded by lesser lights to creating squads with genuine depth.

Leading the way in this has been the Storm. While the average squad size over the past five seasons has been 29.3, Melbourne’s average squad size has been 30.6. In that time they’ve been premiers twice, minor premiers three times and runners-up once. Their worst result has been preliminary final exits in 2021 and 2019.

The average total players used in the NRL per season between 2017 and 2019 inclusive was 453. The average for the last five seasons combined is now 469. In 2021 the count was 508 players used.

At the current rate of growth – 4.4 percent for each of the last two seasons – we can expect 530 players to grace the fields of the NRL in 2022.  That will be an average of 33 players used per team.

So, where will those players come from? If your club hasn’t figured out some pretty good options by now then they will almost certainly be also-rans.

Because you can be assured that the Panthers, Roosters and especially the Melbourne Storm already have their options already well and truly lined up.

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