Opinion
Glenn Hoddle, the Spurs and England midfield legend, used to tell a story about when he moved to play for Monaco under Arsene Wenger in 1987.
Although Hoddle was probably the most technically gifted footballer in England, he was still schooled in a system where everyone was expected to ‘do their doggies’, the lung-busting runs to harry opponents when not in possession.
In his first game for Monaco, Hoddle had been doing exactly that, but at half-time, Wenger took him to one side and told him off.
Though the coach admired his enthusiasm, he thought it was stupid for a prime attacking weapon to be wasting precious energy on defensive pressing, and instead instructed his playmaker to play exclusively in the opposition half.
You might wonder what this has to do with rugby league. Well, if you’ve been watching the way the role of the fullback role has changed in recent years, you might get the reference.
Fullbacks are expected to take the hard carries of a forward, deliver the strike running of a centre, the link play of a half and the finishing of a winger, alongside the more traditional elements of the role such as fielding kicks and making last-ditch tackles.
It’s this unique blend of abilities that makes the top fullbacks so highly sought and so well paid. What is surprising is that, despite the huge investment in the position, nobody is really sure what they want their fullback to do and how they want to measure it.
There’s 16 starting fullbacks in the NRL – it’s actually one of the most settled positions, injuries permitting – and of those players, you can break them into a few categories.
You might call five of them truly elite players who have the size – upwards of 90kg and some over 100kg – and speed and playmaking, the best of the best who can do a bit of everything.
Tom Trbojevic, James Tedesco and Latrell Mitchell would be the clear top three and among the best players overall in the game. Will Kennedy and Clint Gutherson are a tier down, but still very, very good and within the top three players on their team.
The next five to mention are Ryan Papenhuyzen, Kalyn Ponga, Daine Laurie and Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow, what you might call the purely attacking fullbacks.
This group are also very good, but aren’t really trying to do the same thing as the first five, largely because they aren’t as big and are more expected to inject themselves in attack through speed and elusiveness while being hidden in defence.
Then you have Tyrell Sloan, Reece Walsh and Jayden Campbell, all very young but closer to the second category stylistically, and who might find themselves playing elsewhere as their careers progress (or don’t).
You might think of this group charitably as the early period Lockyers, who begin at the back but become halves after they gain experience in first grade (and learn to tackle better).
Tesi Niu at the Broncos is also young, but doesn’t fit this category because he sometimes looks like a converted winger, sometimes like a fullback and all the time like a raw rookie.
Xavier Savage also falls here: if either end up as anything at the back, it’ll be the first group, but the jury is still very much out on whether they will end up with the skills to go with the size and speed.
(Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
The last group is Dylan Edwards and Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad, who essentially are the opposite of Papenhuyzen et al because they exist primarily to defend and set things up rather than do the flashier offensive elements of the game.
They’re big, truck the ball in hard, don’t miss many tackles and rarely make defensive errors. Edwards made one kick error in the entirety of last season, Nicoll-Klokstad (admittedly in a smaller sample size due to injury) made zero.
Their role in attack is often more in terms of set starts and finishes, with other players called upon to provide flair. On metrics such as line breaks and line break assists, neither feature prominently at all.
They perform something akin to the old Makelele role in football: a defensive lynchpin that you might notice, with an attacking impact that you might not. When they don’t feature, you’ll know about it.
Nicoll-Klokstad is a good example of this: Canberra win around two-thirds of games when he does play, but that drops to below 50% when he doesn’t.
This last group is most representative of what fullbacks used to do. Of the first 30 years of the Dally M Medal, only twice did it go to a fullback, and on both occasions it was Mick Potter. (Preston Campbell, who played a lot his career at fullback, won in 2001 while playing halfback). Since then, seven of the 13 winners have worn the No.1 jersey.
Despite the importance, we have no real idea of how to measure how good anyone is at it, because fullbacks are judged on metrics that don’t really correspond to their role in a team.
Run metres, for example, are often wheeled out as a way of analysing how well a fullback has played, but they don’t really tell you much, because lots of those metres were accumulated under little pressure from opponents.
A good run metres tally might be the result of repeatedly catching the ball on the full – sometimes a positioning skill, sometimes a result of poor kicking or chasing – that allowed a fullback to truck it back in or simply due to taking lots of carries, which can be highly counterproductive to the effectiveness of a creative player.
Kick return metres are generally a good barometer for wingers, because yardage work is such a vital part of their place in the modern game, but they aren’t then expected to be fresh to use their brains and handling skills three tackles later.
Edwards has received rave reviews this year because of his exceptional running metres – 725m in three games – but does that explain his benefit to his team? I have no idea. It just tells you that he ran a lot.
This brings us back to the Glenn Hoddle analogy. Someone like Edwards might be well measured by their ability to return the ball efficiently because. it suits their position in their particular team, but that doesn’t work for players that exist to provide magic.
James Tedesco. (Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
Last year, Papenhuyzen was 48th in average running metres per match, and he was ahead of Mitchell, Kennedy and Ponga. Papenhuyzen in particular will often field a ball and pop it up to his winger to take the tough carry, because it isn’t his job.
In terms of touches of the ball, Gutherson, Ponga and Trbojevic were getting it as much as their five eighth – Ponga actually got more touches per match than five-eighth Jake Clifford- and for players you want to get in a position to make a crucial impact, that’s way, way too much.
Gutho and Turbo are particularly guilty of this: taking the ball on the fourth tackle as a hit-up, or running sideways across the line, probing for a gap that might not exist. They’d then get tackled and rule themselves out of the last-tackle options.
We remember the amazing tries where they carried four blokes across the line, but forget the many times they wasted their abilities. There’s no stat for N4PC – needless fourth play carry – but if there were, you know who would be top of it.
William Kennedy. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
There is a metric for tough carries, though, and it’s confirms this theory. Edwards led the fullback last year in the number of one-out hit-ups, because his role in the team is often to take the first carry after the winger has fielded a kick and been tackled.
Trbojevic did that nearly 50 times last season too, and you wonder if he might not have been used better elsewhere. (CNK, incidentally, managed 55 in just eight games last year because he is the king of workhorse fullbacks).
This isn’t overwork argument criticism of the fullbacks in question, because they’re football players who want to help their team. It’s more that their team shouldn’t give the ball to them as much.
If you contrast those three to Mitchell, Tedesco and Kennedy, they get far more offensive production per involvement because they are much better at picking a moment.
That might look different – compare Mitchell chiming into the line to Tedesco buzzing around the ruck – but the principle is similar. Less is more.
It could be that we now look at fullbacks as the go-to person to make something happen, and thus they are the obvious person to chuck the ball to when nothing is on.
If you look at Manly, Parramatta and Newcastle, however, the problem became obvious later in the season when the good sides worked out that it was quite easy to stop an attack by stopping them.
Maybe try assists – and their cousins, line break assists and last touch assists – might be the best yardstick, because they’d tell you when your fullback actually made the impact at the right time.
On those metrics, you can separate your very good – Turbo, Teddy, Gutho, Latrell, Kalyn and Kennedy (as well as Nicho Hynes in 2021, when he was a fullback) from your quite good Daine Laurie, Matt Dufty, Hamiso tier.
Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad (Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)
Greater minds than mine could work out an algorithm that combined try/line break/last touch assists with a raw number of tries, a smattering of run metres (because every set needs a start) and then average that out against how many times they touched the ball to work out a fullback efficiency metric.
You could call it the JC number, after Jake Connor, the master of offense-only fullback play, and it would stand in contrast the run metres x hit ups x no errors that we’d call the CNK number. It would be a lot of maths to tell you that Trbojevic and Tedesco are really good.
As a sport, rugby league is one that values sublimation to the collective and taking one for the team. In this case, however, the good teammate thing to do might also be the dumb thing to do.
That’s on coaches to sort out. They hide playmakers to save them from making unnecessary tackles. They tell their props not to race back to take hit ups after kicks.
Now, they should tell fullbacks to stop doing doggies, let their centres and wingers take yardage carries and get their hands off the football until it really matters.
It could be that the secret to a successful fullback is letting them do more with less.
The younger brother of NRL star Nathan Cleary, Jett, has inked a three-year deal with the New Zealand Warriors to start in 2025. Cleary,…
The rugby league is in mourning following the untimely death of former Kangaroos centre Terry Hill from an apparent heart attack in the Philippines.…
Amid Dale Finucane's forced retirement call, NRL 360 co-host Paul Kent said teams should be forced to alter their tackle technique through significant suspensions,…
Dale Finucane will go down as one of the most honest, hard-working and inspirational players of his time. He’s what we want out of…
New coach Michael Maguire is considering as many as 50 players for the State of Origin series opener with not even captain James Tedesco…
All the team list information for Round 8.
