Stretch, rattle and roll: How Parramatta can beat the Cowboys

It’s a date with destiny. A make or break. Do or die. Certainly, a game of rugby league will be played in Townsville on Friday night, with the chance to lose to the Penrith Panthers in next week’s Grand Final on the line.

Joking aside, it’s a big ‘un. Parramatta are in their first preliminary final since 2009 and the North Queensland Cowboys are looking at turning a 14^th place finish last year into a runner’s up, at worst, this year. Narratives, as they say, abound.

The bookies will tell you that the Cowboys are favourites, $1.70 to Parra’s $2.20 with our friends at PlayUp, and who am I to disagree?

The hosts get home advantage, with a stadium that is going to be sold out – and actually sold out, unlike when Parramatta tell people that the ground is full but then there’s a raft of empty seats. This will be the only show in town on Friday night and that isn’t a dig at the leisure options of North Queensland.

The Eels will face a hostile crowd, a team that just had a week off to prepare and at full strength. They will not, despite what the pervading narrative would have you believe, face difficult weather conditions.

I find it very, very funny that people are worrying about how Parramatta will cope with the heat and humidity: the last two years of La Nina aside, Parramatta’s team were also raised in Australia, where the summer lasts for more than six months, including all their preseason training.

Clint Gutherson is from the Northern Beaches, Reed Mahoney is from a place literally named after how sunny it is and Maika Sivo grew up, presumably shivering, in tropical Fiji. They’ll be fine.

If anything, the Cowboys have to carry Griffin Neame, from the genuinely chilly Greymouth on the South Island of New Zealand, and he’s ginger to boot.

At the risk of sounding like my own father, until you’ve lost the feeling in your feet at Boundary Park – christened “Ice Station Zebra” by an Oldham Athletic manager – you don’t get to complain about the conditions at rugby league matches. Get on with the bloody game.

My own personal rant aside, it’s worth thinking through what Parramatta need to do to get the upset and make their way to the Grand Final.

Hard in da Paint

If you read my Finals Five tactical talking points from Parra’s victory last week, you’ll know that I’ve become slightly obsessed with their wingers.

They stand really, really wide, hugging the touchline and forcing the defensive line to stretch the whole way across the pitch.

Where most teams try and attack to the corners, Parra are much more interested in creating internal space, which is why you see so much angle running, changing the direction of attack and – consequently – so much creative production from their back-rowers.

With apologies to the Lane Train, it isn’t so much that Shaun Lane has become one of the most destructive second-rowers in the comp in the last six months so much as it is that he’s perfectly positioned to reap the benefits of Parramatta’s attacking system.

If there was a team that this was designed to work against, it might well be the Cowboys. The defensive work that their wingers have put in has been exceptional in 2022, but a few men inside, problems can be found.

The lateral movement of Jeremiah Nanai is suspect and Luciano Leilua isn’t much better, though his stats have improved since joining a better defensive structure in North Queensland.

If the Eels can force Val Holmes and Peta Hiku to be honest on the edges, space will open up around the Cowboys back-rowers.

Cronulla found it a fair few times – Will Kennedy’s second half try was a bad one for Leilua – and Parramatta will have watched that tape over and over.

Locked and loaded

You don’t have to have watched a lot of Parra this year to know that their offloads are the key to their success. It’s as closer a cipher to their game style as you could wish for.

My colleague Stuart Thomas has correctly pointed out the importance of post-contact metres (PCM) to Parramatta in terms of determining how well they are playing.

I would add to Stuart’s analysis that post-contact metres tend to tell you who is winning the war, as it were, and offloads tell you who is winning the battles.

For this prelim, it is the unstoppable force against the immovable object: the best offloaders against the best, er, wrapper uppers. The Cowboys concede the fewest offloads in the NRL, by a distance, and the Eels make the most, by an even bigger distance.

When these two met in Darwin in April, North Queensland tied the offload battle with 8 apiece but Parra still won the PCM battle, the possession battle and the sets battle (in that they had more opportunities to score). And yet – they were trounced, 35-4.

When they lost to Penrith in week one, it was because they tried to out Panthers the Panthers. When they beat them, twice, it was by bending the game to their will. If the Eels go to grind, they’ll find a North Queensland team that will go with them all the way.

When Souths beat the Cowboys – and when the Roosters beat them, and when Manly should have beat them, and when the Sharks troubled them last week – it was because they moved their forwards laterally, threatened wide and found rewards.

To win, Parra have to impose their game on the Cowboys and that means playing with more adventure than they did last time out. Free the arm, play second phase – and change the momentum.

Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ what?

Parramatta have been very bad all year in stopping opposing forward packs. Their average set distance, if you follow me on Twitter, is a long-term obsession of mine.

My long-held view is that this comes down to their forward rotation, or lack thereof. If you were looking for an example of this, you can look no further than their defeat to North Queensland in April.

The first 25 minutes was a proper grind: no linebreaks, no offloads and no tries, but with Parra very much on top as they battered the Cowboys into submission.

Then Junior Paulo, Reagan Campbell-Gillard and Nathan Brown – starting 8, 10 and 13 – all went off, replaced by Oregon Kaufusi and Ryan Matterson (as a front-rower) and Makehesi Makatoa (as a lock), and while those three were on together, the Cowboys broke the game open.

The first line of forward battle was a stalemate, but the second line saw Heilum Luki, Coen Hess and Griffin Neame win with ease. Both tries were on the back of sets that saw the Cowboys moving forward as the Eels’ line was still retreating. By the time the big men returned, the game was up.

This is potentially the biggest issue that Brad Arthur has to solve. Of late, he has started games with Marata Niukore on in the 13 and Matterson off, which helps to maintain intensity when the changes come, as well as playing Paulo and RCG for longer minutes.

Makatoa has been on the bench for their last three games – two in the finals, one a must-win to make top four – and has got six, thirteen and twelve minutes.

Now, if Tom Opacic is missing from the centres and Niukore most likely to move out there to cover, Arthur has to find a rotation that works. If Matto starts, then who comes on? Will Makatoa start, or will be go to Bryce Cartwright, named in the 14, or bring Brown in from the cold for a first game since Round 17 to take the lock position?

Why does he have Jake Arthur, who plays one position, on the bench, but also Cartwright, a bench utility. Expect movement on this come kick-off. What Arthur does will tell us a lot.