Everything is not what it seems: The tactical trends of the 2022 NRL

Predictions are useless. Go look at The Roar’s tipping comp if you were wondering what knowing anything about tactics in rugby league was worth when it came to picking a winner.

Right at the start of the year, I wrote a piece that went deep into what my expectations were for the season in terms of tactical evolution.

Some bits went better than others: we’re yet to see the roaming playmaker – though Joey Manu did basically do that when he played five eighth for a few fun weeks – but we have seen a general fall in running from dummy half (mark one for Wood) and the ball-playing lock is now just an expectation of good teams rather than a nice-to-have.

With a full season of sample size, I thought it was worth returning to that piece for ideas, and having a look at where things have moved over the course of the year.

The coach is more important than ever

There was a time when the coach was responsible for tactics, but not strategy. They had ploys, but not philosophies.

Target this guy on attack, work over that bloke in defence, kick to this corner has been replaced by an overarching theory – at the good clubs, at least.

Looking at the league ladder in 2022, the clubs that have done best are those with a coherent, organised and recognisable style of football.

I’m not just saying this, by the way: friend of this column Rugby League Eye Test crunched the data and found that the top seven clubs in the NRL are ‘better’ in terms of attack and defence than ever before. Never has the league batted so deep for Premiership contenders.

My contention is that this is because more teams are playing like elite teams, with coherence and cohesion that runs from the top down. Elite coaching is more elite than ever and coaching matters more than ever.

We already had this at the Panthers, Roosters and Storm – quelle surprise, the best teams in the comp over time – and now we have a few other sides that have joined them.

The Cowboys built a defence-first style in 2021, then adding attack in 2022 as their players matured and were able to add consistency. They’re still not the most creative, relying a lot on kicks and extended pressure to score points, but they are rarely breached.

Jason Demetriou. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

The Bunnies and Sharks both play expansively, though they go about it very differently. Jason Demetriou’s method is about shape and speed of hand, while Craig Fitzgibbon’s relies on deception – push supports, remember – and hitting to corners. Neither are afraid to make errors or to play wide early.

Parramatta, again, have another way. They try to use their large forwards to generate second phase and build space for their strike back-rowers to work in.

What is noticeable across the lot is that they have picked a style and stuck to it. Compare and contrast with the Dragons and Raiders, in particular, who have no discernible method, or with Newcastle, the Titans and Manly, who have never been able to consistently implement whatever their plan was intended to be.

There’s a wider point here about the use of analytics in sport, and where that leads coaches. If you have a plan that you believe in and stick to, then you can track its success more readily than ever before.

You can look at key metrics to get a read on whether what is happening on the field is actually what you set out to do.

That might be push supports at Cronulla, offloads at Parramatta, line engagements at Souths or any number of other things we don’t know about.

‘Control the controllables’ is a cliché, but there’s never been more things that you can control for and then feed back to the group.

It’s also a question of buy-in. You can sell ideas to your players if they can see that it works even when results might not, initially at least, follow.

When you hear Brad Arthur talk about ‘physicality’ or Jason Demetriou mention ‘backing our skills’, that’s what they’re doing: they’re repeating the mantras that they tell their players to make sure that the philosophy is followed.

It’s obvious, to say the least, when this is not the case. It’s teams that struggle to form 40 minutes of coherent footy, because they don’t have first principles to work from.

They have access to data, but they don’t know how to use it to their ends. Data and philosophy go hand in hand.

Things like effort are non-negotiables, and you very rarely see NRL teams not try. But a smart team beats a committed team every time. The ladder bears that out.

Breaking at the seams

In the old world, before the six again, there was a general feeling that you ‘won the middle’ to ‘earn the right’ to play wide.

What that actually means is that you broke the linespeed of the opponent, because the ruck was in your favour and thus you were moving forward while they were still retreating.

The six again blew that up, because it inherently advantaged the attacking side, and last year, we saw attack greatly overwhelm defence for the majority of the season, which in turn empowered strong ballcarriers to run through tired defence, and for quick handling to create line breaks for outside backs.

So what happened? Well, there’s been a subtle change to this. As teams wised up, the best teams have begun to change the angle of attack. They’ve begun to target what I call the ‘seam’, the meeting point of middle and edge defence, far more frequently.

(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

The stats back this up: the numbers for tries, try assists, line breaks and line break assists for backrowers have exploded in 2022 compared to 2020, when the six again was introduced, and have grown even on 2021 when there were far more tries and line breaks across the board.

That means a higher proportion of attacks are now aimed at the seam rather than the wing, and for me, there’s one easy reason for this: the ball-playing lock.

A lot has been made of the vogue for ball-playing forwards, but it’s real. Penrith, Souths and the Roosters play with genuine creative 13s, while Parramatta and the Cowboys do the same but using Junior Paulo and Jason Taumalolo in the middle.

That means that there are generally two options when they shift: through hands to the halfback in shape, or a back-rower on a crash line.

Ball-playing locks tend not to show up in widely-available data, because their best work happens too far away from the relevant play, but they exist to create a ripple effect that is effective wider out on the field. Try assists and line break assists are going to someone else.

You can check the possessions, to see how often they get the ball, but that doesn’t tell you if they were any good at it: Jake Trbojevic and Josh Jackson (under Trent Barrett, at least) touched the ball a lot, but did little with it.

You can combine possessions with line engagements to work out how interested the defenders were, and then add pass per run ratio (PPR) to discern how credible a run threat they were. No surprises for guessing who ranks highly, because you can also just watch.

Last year, a solution to losing the linespeed battle was for OBs to jam in, which created the opportunity for the ‘harbour bridge’ ball or the kick in behind.

Indeed, ask anyone in the sheds who has created a try with one of those passes and they’ll tell you the wingers that jam, because they do video.

Now, there’s a second option. The first receiver forward can go out of the back to the now-wider halves, or they can bring their backrower into play, either to make the break themselves or to fashion an opening via a late pass or offload.

Think Jeremiah Nanai or Keoan Koloamatangi for the former and Viliame Kikau or Shaun Lane for the latter. In fact, watch Koloamatangi do it right here as the Cowboys defence doesn’t know where to go up or stay back because they have to hang on Cam Murray.

It seems – pun vaguely intended – like we have a proliferation of strike edge forwards in the game at the moment, but actually, we have several teams adopting an attacking set up that is designed to create space on the seams rather than relying on hands to find the space.

Some sides – Cronulla in particular – still like to play around, but if you have a forward with sufficient handling skills to take the ball to the line authentically enough that the defence has to stick with the player in possession, then a gap forms elsewhere, because the edge defenders – usually a centre or a halfback – either has to decide to come in or opt to stay out.

Possession is more valued than position in a six again world

Rugby league is a game that has always lived on the balance between territory and possession. All football codes have this push and pull to some degree, but league lives on the edge more than most.

Some might say that it is what makes the game so interesting: the constant battle of physicality and skill, of guts and guile, of individuality and solidarity.

Rugby union loves territory more, as you can defend position and capitalise on penalty goals, so basic tactics involve kicking with no intention of getting the ball back.

Soccer heavily values possession, because territory is so easily gained, so tactics factor in who has the ball far more readily than where the ball is.

Rugby league, perhaps uniquely, vacillates between the two. The six tackles means that you have a finite time with which to work,  but the same ‘use it or lose it’ forces you to pick between doing something now (possession) or choosing where you turn the ball over (territory).

Greater minds than mine can crunch the data on the relative merits of sets dependent on where the ball is, but this year, we’ve seen a demonstrative shift in how the best teams value the footy.

Firstly, the huge increase in short drop outs shows that, at a basic level, teams value getting the ball much more highly than where the ball is.

There is the alternative theory that the risk/reward aspect that teams think that defending their own line is easier from a set but close distance rather than an unknown but still close distance.

This actually existed in Super League for years, not in terms of short dropouts, but because teams would actively carry a player into the in-goal area to hold them up rather than stop them within a yard or two. They thought the ten metre line was a good place to defend from.

Even if we assume that short dropouts are a function of a simple ploy, rather than a wider strategy, we can move on to the opposite side of the bargain. Who thinks keeping the ball matters at all?

In 2019, the best three teams forced the most dropouts. Last year, there was a little less correlation, but generally better teams forced more dropouts. This year, that’s blown to pieces. There’s no correlation between forcing repeat sets and winning at all.

The Eels are the best, then the Warriors, then the Panthers, then the Titans and it continues basically all the way down the list alternating good teams and bad teams.

This is backed up by coaches. When Ivan Cleary talks about his attack, you can bet that the word ‘patience’ won’t be far away. The Panthers don’t try to score on every set and back their attack to force repeats and wear opponents down.

They’ve got the most tackles within 20m of anyone in the comp, the fewest errors and the third most forced dropouts. Obviously, they also have the most possession.

Second in that stat are the Eels. They love their power game, so you can bet that they are happy to take multiple sets on the opponent’s line. They’re top for forcing repeat sets.

But that’s only one way to skin the cat. The Bunnies, Sharks and Roosters don’t give a flyer about errors, because they make lots of them, yet all sit in the upper echelons for possession. They’ll use it now, thank you very much, and no need to wait.

The recent Souths v Panthers game showed this: the Bunnies had 29 sets from 41, the Panthers had 31 of 36. So even though South Sydney completed at 71% to 86%, the number of potential scoring plays was basically equal – and Souths had nine line breaks to four.

When Souths smashed Parramatta in Round 16, both teams completed at 74% but Souths had 31 sets to Parra’s 28 and created six line breaks to two, even though the Eels forced five drop-outs to the Bunnies’ one. It was as clear a clash of styles as you could have hoped for.

Anyone who has watched these three sides will know that they are not at all afraid of going wide early. Indeed, Souths and Cronulla love an early shift in their own half to unsettle the defence, and as discussed above, will actively seek to play to their speed and handling skills.

Special mention for Mick Potter’s Bulldogs too, who were trying this very hard in their midseason renaissance. I hope they keep it up, because it was a lot of fun to watch.

The Roosters are a little different, because they don’t as readily shift on plays one and two in their own end, but they are more than willing to promote the footy when the opportunity arises.

No team empowers their playmakers as much. For what it’s worth, Walkers Sam and Cody and Nicho Hynes are well ahead of the pack for chip and chases, with Adam Reynolds out alone in first because he’s often making it up on the fly rather than being given the proverbial ‘licence’.

There’s two teams missing here. There’s the Cowboys, who were have discussed are more a defence-first team at the moment.

Though they do try to dominate the ball, their attack isn’t quite there and they’re right down the list of the top 7 for line breaks, tackles inside 20, attacking kicks and, consequently, tries.

They’re really good at getting in position but not as good as the others at scoring, which stands to reason if you’ve seen how many tries they score off kicks. They often get to the last and then have to force it.

Ryan Papenhuyzen. (Photo by Ashley Feder/Getty Images)

Cede the floor, however, to the Melbourne Storm. They’ve managed, despite a heap of backline absences, to both play wide often and not make errors in the process.

I was quite perplexed by this, and dove deeper into the numbers, and what you can see is that their numbers took a huge hit when they didn’t have their best players on the field in the midseason run of defeats, and were blown out by running up scores on rubbish teams earlier in the year. Call it the Ryan Papenhuyzen effect.

What we can discern from all of this is that the grind – better defined as a battle for territory based on ceding possession – isn’t that big a thing anymore. Parramatta and Penrith value it a lot, but Cronulla, Souths and the Roosters are much less interested.

It’s worth noting that the Chooks and Bunnies are last and second last for kicks, with Cronulla in the middle of the pack and Penrith and Parramatta top and second.

Trent Robinson, Jason Demetriou and to a lesser extent, Craig Fitzgibbon are all empowering their team to try to score rather than to cede the ball in a place of their choosing.

Nowhere I know of produces a stat for ‘halfback caught in possession on the last’ but my eye test will put Lachlan Ilias and Sam Walker top of that list.

What we can draw from all of this is that who has the ball is now much more important that where it is. Four of the top six now orientate around using the footy when they have it and not waiting to move into position.

This might help explain why Parra are so uniquely good at beating Penrith, because they are the only side who can legitimately throw them off, and also why they are so bad at beating other sides: what’s the point of bashing through the middle if your opponent will pass round you?

This might all change come finals footy, which is traditionally more grinding, but on the evidence of 24 rounds, there has been a change in philosophy.

My suspicion is that Penrith and Parramatta haven’t changed and the Roosters didn’t need to under Robinson, because the game has now moved towards what they did anyway. This might include the Storm, too, who adapted very fast last year, but has excluded Manly, who largely played like it was still last year.

Souths and the Sharks are the outliers, though. New coaches, new ideas but also coming from a decent starting point of rosters. 2023 will tell us whether this is the new normal, or if they too were outliers.

The best ‘product’ of the NRL is probably somewhere between the ultra-grind of the mid-2010s and the quasi-touch footy of 2021, so I hope the latter is the case.

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