It’s been a turbulent old week in the NRL: we have seen the longest home streak in the league disappear, watched a 12 man team defeat a 13 man team for the first time in 15 years and even seen the Canberra Raiders win a game of rugby league football. Anything is possible.
Melbourne remain top of the rankings, of course, because they are whacking all comers at the moment, but there may well be changes afoot come Magic Round in Brisbane this weekend. Panthers v Storm is set to be one for the ages.
Until that arrives, however, there’s the little matter of sorting them all into neatly-packaged boxes and dispatching clubs up to Queensland. Here’s your Power Rankings for Round 9.
Melbourne are a relentless attacking juggernaut, ruthlessly crushing crap footy teams beneath the grinding wheels of their attack.
This is self-evident, because they’ve scored a lot of points for in the last three weeks, with very few points against.
Their issue might be that you don’t really get anything out of putting the boot into the Warriors, Knights and Dragons, whom you will find at the very end of this ranking list, because I don’t rate them at all.
It’s hard to say “I’ll believe it when I see them beat a decent side” about a team that has beaten Cronulla, but it’s not actually wrong: the Storm beat the Sharks, but lost to Parramatta and other than that, have played all teams that are in the bottom eight of these rankings.
If only there was a real test waiting around the corner…
Given the above, you might then question why the Storm are still top. Well, if I’m being honest, I had expected to drop them to second behind the real deal Panthers, only for said Panthers to lose on Friday night to Parramatta.
Don’t read too much into that loss, however. This was a high quality game and it will go down as the sort of result that we all look back on later in the year as a vital learning exercise.
Penrith might have needed the defeat. I asked Isaah Yeo as much in the post-match presser on Friday and he admitted as much. Expect fireworks next Saturday night in Brisbane.
A golden rule of rugby league is that you don’t read too much into games where someone gets sent off in the first half.
The Sharks might be the exception to that rule, because the manner in which they managed Sunday’s victory despite playing with 12 men for the vast majority of it was masterful.
That said, the Warriors are genuinely useless and will give anyone a chance. But you can’t knock such a disciplined and committed defensive showing, or the attacking flair that Cronulla maintained. It was great, so they stay third.
Imagine going away to the premiers, who haven’t lost at home since a time when we thought a pandemic was a cooking implement, and knocking them off in style. Then you open your favourite sports website on Monday and you get no credit for it.
It’s hard to move the Eels much higher than fourth on this list, given the situation above them, but Parra fans can be confident that the gap between fourth and fifth is now huge.
The issue for them is they have proven unable to properly replicate results such as Friday’s in Penrith, or that in Melbourne in the early rounds. They’ll need to be right at it against the Roosters at Magic Round.
The Cowboys keep on keeping on, but I keep not really believing in them. Using the Knights as a punching bag doesn’t earn you that much in my ranking system, and my core belief that the draw has been soft and that they caught the Eels at the perfect time remains.
You have to give them a wrap, however. I had them at the bottom of my pre-season expectations, along with the Bulldogs and Tigers, and North Queensland are evidently a lot, lot better than that.
An upcoming fixture with the Tigers to round out Magic probably won’t teach us much, but after that, they run into the Storm at home and the Panthers in Penrith. Suffice to say, I expect them to lose on both occasions.
Manly sit just one win behind the Cowboys, with a 5-4 record, but look at the four: Penrith in Penrith, Roosters at the SCG, Sharks in Cronulla and Souths with 12 men.
They’re the Paulie Malinaggi of the 2022 NRL: you name the best, and they’ve lost to them. Manly have battered everyone beneath them – bar the Bulldogs in a monsoon.
This is the sort of thing that happens when the team isn’t that good, but you have the oldest and wisest heads in the game doing the leg work. 500 games of first grade in the halves, Turbo, Jurbo (and now Burbo) through the middle and an experienced pack.
They’re above the Broncos because they’ll beat them on Friday night, and until they lose to them, that is how it will stay.
In Round 1, when the Broncos beat Souths, I called it one of the luckiest performances I’d ever seen. In Round 9, when the Broncos beat Souths, there was no luck involved.
So are the Broncos now good? Well, on the evidence of recent weeks, they’re certainly a lot better than previously thought.
I would never have tipped them to beat anyone half-decent without Payne Haas, but they managed it.
Though the was positive variance at play on Thursday night in terms of the Souths attack, a lot of that was induced by good scramble defensively, and that’s all about effort and buy in.
The Broncos are more than capable of scoring points, so if they can keep that tackling up, they’ll do very well.
You don’t get many points in this ranking for beating the Gold Coast Titans. The Roosters aren’t that great, but they are a damn sight better than the Gold Coast, who couldn’t tackle a fish supper.
There is still a lot of clunkiness in the Roosters’ attack, their go forward is still deficient and their goalline defence remains questionable.
But – and in fairness to Trent Robinson, he brings this up in victory and defeat – they are working month-to-month to improve their lot. Come finals, as a true believer in the Roosters, they’ll be a good team.
As the Scottish comedian Limmy puts it: don’t back doon, double doon. I have double and now triple downed on the Bunnies actually being good. I believe in them even more than I believe in the Roosters.
Thursday night was not a vintage performance and their error rate remains a massive concern, but here’s some not-at-all randomly picked stats for you.
Third in line breaks, top in tackles within 20, fourth in tackle breaks, top in line engagements. Also: fourth fewest line breaks conceded and fewest missed tackles.
What you’re looking at there is a list of reasons why it won’t take a lot of change in variance for Souths to suddenly look very good. They sit last in completion rates, with 72%, and if that moves even as high as 75% they’ll start to destroy teams.
The gap on this list between, say, South Sydney and St George Illawarra, is just one. But in reality, it is a gaping chasm.
The Dragons main their spot here because losing to Melbourne in Melbourne is just whatever at this stage, and you do have to give them a smidgeon of credit for being better than some of the dross beneath them.
With that in mind, they now run into the Titans at Magic Round, and that’s about as easy a gig as you get in the NRL at the moment if you’re a team that likes to try to barge the ball in from close range as their primary method of scoring points.
Then they get the Warriors, who (spoiler alert) are terrible and can’t gain metres, before the Spoonbowl for the ages with the Dogs at Belmore. I am that meme of the Sickos guy at the window at the prospect of a Sunday arvo in winter at Belmore.
On those Dogs: they will be very disappointed that they didn’t make more of their trip to Canberra, especially with the Raiders at something of a low ebb. But in truth, both sides are just about as bad as each other, and you wonder if Trent Barrett might well take a fair bit out of their loss on Friday night.
It was a terrible game, in which the Dogs completed south of 70%, but their defence kept them in it until very late. The Bulldogs are good at making teams fight their fight, for want of a better expression, and should be able to spoil their way to a few results – starting with Newcastle at Magic.
One tip though: one of the best ways to grind your way to results is to take every two and make every four into a six, and I doubt that will happen as long as Matt Burton is the one kicking the goals. Give Kyle Flanagan a go.
Wither the Wests Tigers? They were actually pretty good against Manly and might have got a result on a different day.
The Tigerenaissance continues apace, and my feeling is they’ll likely get more points in the near future. If they defeat the Cowboys on Sunday night, it genuinely won’t be a surprise.
Madge Maguire did have a cry about the ref on Saturday – how about telling your players not to lie in the ruck? He’s right in the sense that, once the man went to the bin, his team didn’t stand a chance against an ultra-professional Manly.
But the intangibles aspect remains: they appear to have leadership, appear to have direction and appear to be playing for the coach. These are not things that you could always say about the Wests Tigers. Keep the faith.
The Raiders beat the Bulldogs, sure, but remain behind them in this list for two key reasons.
One, the stats are fairly conclusive that, despite the win, this was not a good performance from Canberra and will likely result in more defeats in the long term. 61% territory and 44 play the balls inside the Bulldogs’ red zone for a grand total of two tries is very, very poor.
Two, the Raiders now go Sharks, Bunnies, Eels, Roosters and Brisbane in Brisbane. Barring some serious Origin-themed variance, they’ll lose all five.
Newcastle actually looked alright, for a bit at least, in losing to the Cowboys. They’ve had a really bad injury list of late and are still piecing together what remains of their season – not least this weekend, when they debuted an entirely new halves pairing.
With that in mind, to complete at 83% and lead at half time against the Cowboys in Townsville isn’t that bad. It’s certainly a sign of improvement on the last two crushing home defeats to the Eels and Storm.
Don’t totally put the pen through the Knights because, at the end of the year when they potentially have a full team out, they’re not the 14th-best team. Until that time comes, however, they are.
It’s been mentioned in these rankings previously that the Gold Coast tend to save their best performances for fixtures in which they are likely to lose anyway – see Penrith last week, or Manly/Parra away – and serve up trash in games that they are expected to win.
Well, on Saturday teatime, they were both rubbish and playing a semi-decent team, hence the doing the copped from the Roosters. The defence in the latter stages of the first half, in which Greg Marzhew and Brian Kelly defended like saloon doors, was unforgiveable.
The Titans are rubbish, of course, but the manner in which they are rubbish seems to change on a week-by-week basis. This week, it was goalline defence that was the major failing.
No amount of flashy attack can overcome a simple inability to tackle the man in front of you.
The Warriors are miracle workers. That this team has managed to jag a 4-5 record is astounding, because they lack the fundamental tenets required to win football matches.
To wit: last in run metres and second last in run metres conceded, as well as last in offloads, second last in line breaks and second last in tackle breaks. If the game is won and lost in the forwards … yeah. Not good.
These stats are also not things that you can change quickly. There’s not enough deck chairs to move around, particularly in the backs, that will provide the requisite go-forward to start sets well and win games.
Marcelo Montoya is 16th for wingers in run metres per game and he’s the only Warrior in the top 50. There’s yer problem.
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