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If you were hanging around to the end of the Bulldogs’ press conference on Sunday night after their 32-12 defeat to Penrith Panthers, you’d have heard this exchange.
Me: “Trent, I was just looking it up there: Kyle touched the ball 21 times in that match. Wakeham averaged 29 and Averillo 33.
“The first time you got into good ball – I think it was off the 40/20 – Kyle stationed himself out on the right and then three times the ball went that way and then came back inside with a forward. It’s something that I’ve noticed happens quite a lot. Do you think potentially you struggle to get your halfbacks involved in good ball?”
Trent Barrett: “No”
First, a mea culpa: it’s a long question and could have been more concise. These things are hard when you’re working off notes and trying to blurt your words out live in a room full of people.
That said, it’s a legitimate thing to ask the coach of a team that currently props up the points-for column why his side aren’t scoring very often and why his halfbacks – whoever he picks – fail to get involved.
Trent Barrett can give any answer he likes and I personally have no problem if he doesn’t want to engage, or simply thinks that I’m wrong.
The point remains, however: depsite all the selection drama about the Bulldogs halfback, whoever it is that gets the number 7 jersey barely sees the football.
There’s a stat for this, of course. Possession measures the simple dynamics of who touches the football and how often, and for the Dogs, it makes terrible reading.
The Dogs average 45.1 possessions per game for their halfback, which is the one of the worst. Of regular halfbacks, only three have had fewer.
(Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
Those three Brad Schneider, Jahrome Hughes and Adam Clune: the first two of whom play non-traditional playmaking roles to help superstar 5/8s in Jack Wighton and Cameron Munster respectively and the third who plays in a unique double-pivot with Jake Clifford at the Knights.
Kyle Flanagan’s 23 possessions – the stattos at Fox Sports upgraded his numbers post-match, hence the discrepancy between my question and the numbers – is an outlier even within the context of the Dogs.
In his defence, on Sunday Canterbury only got a few good ball sets against the Panthers and nobody gives the footy to their smallest player until they’re in good ball. You would expect that to revert to the mean as the Dogs get more possession against worse teams.
But it’s still a shocking number: it’s lower than Matt Dufty, who had a horrendous night from fullback, and only three more than Josh Addo-Carr, who plays on the wing.
This isn’t a knock on Kyle Flanagan, by the way, because he can’t pass it to himself and what he did with the ball when he got it was good – eye-test only, better than the other two guys who played his position. He should keep his spot and probably should have had it since Round 1.
The halfback involvement issue is one that those numbers from Flanagan laid bare, but which has existed well before this week.
Brandon Wakeham got 32 on average in his two games and Jake Averillo has 35 from his two, though that is artificially low due to also having featured twice in the centres.
We’ve only had five rounds, so it’s possible to dig really deep into this. Round 1 away at the Cowboys, Averillo played halfback and got 48 possessions, which is quite bad – bottom 25% of the league average per game – despite an equal share of the ball. Chad Townsend, his opponent in the 7, got the ball 62 times.
Round 2 was better – 68 for Averillo – but off a huge 60/40 possession split in their favour. You’ll remember that they created next to nothing from that possession split, as I detailed extensively at the time.
Round 3 saw a new halfback, Brandon Wakeham, but the same issue: 41 possessions against Daly Cherry-Evan’s 63. Obviously comparing anyone to DCE is going to make them look uninvolved, because he touches the ball constantly for Manly, but still, 41 is bad.
Round 4, Wakeham again, same issue: 46 possessions when they had 53% of the ball (despite the heavy defeat) to Melbourne. Then, of course, Round 5 and Flanagan.
It’s worth cutting across the league for comparisons. Up the top of the halfbacks list are the names you might expect, the creator-in-chiefs for their team.
There’s DCE, Ben Hunt, Nicho Hynes and Shaun Johnson in the 60s, then Nathan Cleary, Toby Sexton and Chad Townsend in the high 50s.
There’s some correlation with how much a team has the ball in general, but it’s not total: Sexton and Townsend have far less net possession to work with, but get plenty more opportunities to impact the game.
(Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
The Dragons, for example, got smashed in the possession count last week against Parramatta but threw the ball to Ben Hunt a massive 72 times. When the Tigers got battered by the Knights and had 42% possession, Luke Brooks still had 47 touches.
This isn’t because the Dogs are getting less ball. By whatever metric you want to use, they’re pretty much in the middle of the pack. The issue is that they don’t do anything with it.
The Bulldogs are 3rd in the league in one man hitups, suggesting that they really like running it straight, and last in line engagements and line breaks, which means that they really hate, well, engaging the line and breaking through it. These things happen if you never give your halfbacks the football.
The Dogs are second to the Bunnies in terms of tackles in the opposition 20, which confirms the theory that they are really good at getting into position but when they get there, they just try to crash over.
The incident that I mentioned in my question to Barrett bears this out. In the 25th minute, Matt Burton kicks a 40/20 to give the Dogs their first good ball set of the game.
They run a first play hit up – no issue, it’s play 1 – but on play 2, with Flanagan waiting out the back of shape … Jackson steps inside and takes another hit up.
Then there’s another hit up – again, Flanagan waiting for the ball out the back – and on play 4 he decided to involve himself, going to the left to stand as first receiver and move the ball to Burton.
Play 5 he again assumes the position to run some attack and Jeremy Marshall-King jinks against the line and leaves his halfback hanging. They run it to the left on the last and are easily tackled.
Six tackles within the opposition 20 is worth one touch for the halfback, who was three times shunned by forwards who decided against giving him the ball.
There was another similar set in the second half, where Flanagan touched the ball twice – nearly resulting in a try assist, as Joe Stimson was superbly tackled by Dylan Edwards – but again where he was shunned twice by forwards. In one of the good ball sets where Flanagan touched the ball three times in six tackles, the Dogs scored.
It’s obviously a bit silly to extrapolate individual sets and point fingers at them, but I’ve attended every Bulldogs game in Sydney this year and can tell you that it happens often enough to be an identifiable problem. The forwards often call audibles on the play and run it in before it ever reaches the halfback.
To me, two questions arise. The first concerns the many times in which a forward takes the ball into contact when they should either pass it along the line or simply get out of the way.
Are the forwards taking hit-ups in good ball because they lack confidence in their playmaker and thus decide, consciously or subconsciously, to back themselves over their halfback?
Or is it that the halfbacks lack the personality to tell senior players to get out of the road and let them do their jobs?
After all, forwards take hit-ups most of the time when they get it, and if you’re Luke Thompson and you get the ball in the line, you’re far more likely to truck it in than pretend you’re Joey Johns.
If it’s the first, that’s very bad and not an easy fix. If it’s the second, then Barrett could simply tell his halfbacks to back themselves and take over. With Flanagan, a pure organising 7, that might just happen anyway as he gains in confidence.
The second question comes down to an imbalance in the team that many have noticed. The five-eighth, Matt Burton, is stationed on the left touches the ball roughly 50% more often than the halfback, out on the right.
Further down the line is Averillo, now a centre, and then Addo-Carr, the superstar winger. If you have $1m worth of winger and five-eighth out on the left, plus a good running centre, that’s where the ball is likely to go.
It does make it very easy to defend against, however, and might be something that Flanagan can offer to the team going forward.
If they can increase his touches of the ball, it will almost certainly rebalance the attack away from the massive left-side dominance that we see at the moment.
Again, that requires a conscious effort on behalf of the coach to tell his team to play both sides of the field more, and likely requires him to inform them that the current playmaking set up is now set in stone.
If Flanagan is in for the foreseeable, it sends the message that he is to be trusted with the footy. It would also free up the left to get better ball as well as adding to the threat on the right.
But for that to happen, there has to be acknowledgment of the stylistic issues that the team have faced. Back your man. And give him the football.