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If you watch South Sydney games, you might have noticed a theme developing in the commentary. One of the analysts will mention that the Bunnies ‘enjoy a stop-start game’ and ‘like to play to their points’.
This often flies through the keeper without any further comment, but it shouldn’t: there’s plenty in those throwaway phrases that explain why Jason Demetriou’s men have been the best attacking team to watch in the comp for a while.
Beyond the aesthetics, it’s also why they might be able to find a solution to the Panthers’ dynasty, starting this Thursday night at Accor Stadium.
But let’s deal with the first bit first. Lots of teams like a stop-start game, especially bad ones, because games that don’t stop are very fatiguing.
Lots of teams don’t like a stop-start game, especially good ones, because they think they can deal with fatigue better.
You’ll notice that neither of these things are Souths. They are not a bad team, but they do enjoy stop-start footy.
As third throwaway soundbite would be that ‘they’re good when there’s fatigue in the game’, which is also worth discussing.
Sides with better structures of fatigue management – i.e. those that spread the burden of yardage generation around the team, and rely on backs for the bulk of it – are happy to keep the ball on the island, get into the grind and see who comes out on top. That’s Penrith, by the way.
Other sides just think they can outlast opponents, either through better physical fitness or a willingness to suffer that others won’t be able to match.
There’s a column for another day on the concept of ‘sufferball’ in soccer and how that relates to rugby league, but the short answer is that this is the Melbourne Storm under Craig Bellamy.
Again, Souths do not manage their fatigue across the team, and last year derived over half of their yardage from forwards, the second most in the NRL behind fellow big man enthusiasts Parramatta.
While the Bunnies are getting better at suffering, as their improved defensive record would attest, nobody would yet put them on a level with the Storm quite yet, and indeed, in a recent sufferathon with the Storm, they lost.
Cody Walker celebrates with Latrell Mitchell, Keaon Koloamatangi and Lachlan Ilias. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
So why do the Bunnies ‘enjoy stop-start footy’? To some extent, every team enjoys some parts of a stop-start game, which is why you see so many points scored from set plays such as central scrums inside the 20m zone.
But as mentioned, not every team enjoys the game actually stopping. Souths do, because they carry larger forwards than most, but also because it’s a lot easier to construct the sort of set that they want from a dead start.
Souths made an artform in 2021 by scoring from scrums and penalties, but they don’t always need to have one to put their plays on.
They can just as easily induce the conditions of one by ‘playing to points’, where a side can create mini set piece plays by building sets to a location on the field where they think their attack is most effective.
Let’s cycle back a little to understand where these points are, and why they matter.
Lots of football codes are played in a 360 plane, like soccer or AFL, but the rugby codes aren’t: the distance from the goal is vertical and the defenders are largely in a flat line across the horizontal, plus you can only pass backwards.
An attack attempts to advance the ball forwards to win territory with the goal of getting to the tryline or in the case of rugby league, moving the footy far enough away from your own tryline to make it difficult for the opposition to score when you have to hand it over or kick it away.
(Photo by Brett Hemmings/Getty Images)
Most good teams attempt to get into the grind, slowly winning territory over a series of sets that result in transitions of possession that move closer and closer to the opposing goalline, all the while minimising errors to increase the time the ball spends in play, thus raising fatigue.
But good teams don’t just do this. They also move the ball to points on the field horizontally that help them to put on pet plays attack, and this is where Souths excel.
But unlike most teams, they’re trying to do this all the time, with the intention of creating attacking opportunities on every set. They are more than willing to make the set play to come to them.
The Panthers, for example, are more than happy to have their back three, or even back five, run in all their carries, gradually edging towards the centre of the field, before Nathan Cleary gets a chance to pin the opponents back into a corner, a tactic known as ‘caging’.
The forwards are then rested to rip in in defence, pinning a side into a corner and, over the course of several sets, moving the game in the Panthers’ favour.
Look at their props: Moses Leota averages almost a third as many hit-ups per game as Tom Burgess in roughly the same amount of time on the field, but edges him in terms of tackles, tackle effectiveness and, tellingly, monsters him in kick pressures.
No side has so effectively controlled their opposition as the Panthers, who play the long game on field position and possession, forcing repeat sets and errors to suffocate the other team.
Ivan Cleary would hold it as a virtue that his side doesn’t try to score on every set, and he’d be right to, but Demetriou seems to think the opposite, and in that, he might have found the answer to the Penrith strangle.
Jason Demetriou. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
The Bunnies know that their advantage is attack, so they set it up constantly by playing to points. When the Bunnies deliberately head for specific areas of the field, they’re doing so for two reasons.
Firstly, they want to enable their backline to attack late in the set, which is easier when you have a short and a long side to play with, and secondly, they want to move the defence around sideways to create short-term fatigue and induce mistakes.
We think of the defence as a flat line, but it isn’t. It’s a line that bulges to wherever the ball goes. By shifting the points of attack, you can exploit this and find the place where the line is weakest, or if you attempt to go around, where the linespeed is slowest to advance.
There’s hay to be made in finding the gap between those that go forward and those that don’t, and more often than not, that’s where Souths go.
The seam, where middle becomes edge, is usually one of the weakest points in the line. For one, it’s where halves stand – ‘defending at three in’ as you’ll hear it called – and for two, it’s where the tacklers have to decide between jamming in and sliding out.
In Souths’ case, it’s where Latrell Mitchell and Cody Walker are most effective and it’s also where the quickest play the ball is usually to be found through one of Keoan Koloamatangi, Cam Murray or Jai Arrow.
Take the Dolphins game last Thursday: the Bunnies put on 19 shift plays, of which all but five were generated from within a few yards of the inside tramline, generally exactly there the defensive seam is. Not wider, not narrower. Hitting that specific point is perfect for Souths’ attack.
They can load up on one side, but the defence has to stay honest on the short side too, because they’re only three quarters of the way across the field and there’s plenty of room to go blind, especially if Damien Cook is your dummy half.
You can see here, against the Sharks, where they run on the last from 40 out because they’ve found their point perfectly. Almost everyone else in the league kicks here.
Credit: Fox/NRL
Teams sometimes refer to this point as ‘30’ on the left and ‘70’ on the right, as in 30% or 70% of the way across the field. Hit that with a Koloamatangi or Arrow and you’re likely to bring in a third tackler, or with Burgess or Moale, even a fourth, which is another bloke or two your draw from the middle to the edge.
Then they can spread through their best ball-players, who get as close as possible to the defence before unloading to the man behind.
It’s a race against time to get the ball either around the winger with their man on the outside, or a defensive decision for someone to make that allows either the centre, Cody Walker or Latrell Mitchell to break through.
Those two tend to get the headlines, but Murray and Lachlan Ilias are among the best in the league at taking the ball to the line, and are as much the architects.
Against the Dogs, Souths managed it back to back with two identical tries for Mitchell, who was back on the inside after flowing moves from the left tramline that saw Izaac Thompson freed on the right wing.
This is Demetriou’s central attacking gambit. He describes it as ‘backing their skills’ and rarely criticises his players for attempting to move the ball, despite having the worst error rate in the comp.
Last year, it didn’t work until Latrell came back from injury as Blake Taaffe didn’t offer as credible a threat out of the back, forcing the side to play further away from the defensive line. Errors often killed them as the final pass failed.
Early this year, it didn’t work because Murray was too busy being a middle forward in the absence of other big bodies, with the net result that the handling was too slow and predictable, with defenders not forced to load up.
They have, however, added another string to the bow. In 2021 and 2022, it was mostly right to left switches that ended up with Alex Johnston scoring the try, but now, Walker is just as happy to play second receiver with Ilias the man further out and one of either Koloamatangi or Campbell Graham, now positioned on the right edge, the strike player.
(Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
Souths training is generally open the public, and if you head down, you’ll see them run two-on-one drills that involve Graham and Isaiah Tass doing catch-pass to their winger as a defender approaches with a tackle shield. Those tip ons look improvised but they’re anything but.
You might think that lots of teams do this. They do, but Souths can do it better than anyone else.
The Panthers also use the middle service through a lock, with Isaah Yeo in the Cameron Murray role, but as mentioned earlier, they’re not doing it anywhere near as frequently, and they’re not using their bigger men to punch holes and win play the balls in the same way. They’d rather get into good ball and go from there.
Cronulla will go early, and like to pin tacklers on shifts with the intent of creating space along the sides – which is what Murray and Ilias are doing – but they use decoy runners and supports to shorten the width of the defensive line rather than line engaged runs or a ball-playing lock. It’s a different thing.
That’s why Briton Nikora is on four tries from six games: sometimes the decoy gets it. The Sharks also don’t use their forwards in the same way, preferring Penrith’s style.
The Roosters aren’t a mile off Souths, in that they will attack from anywhere, but the fluid movement doesn’t work as long as you think Joseph Suaalii is a centre and you’re parking one of the world’s best players out on one edge. The Chooks play for the two Josephs to be the strike, not the wingers.
Parramatta are very similar to Souths with their big men focus, but they pin via taking contact and then offloading, and by changing angles of attack to bring the man inside. Think Dylan Brown and Clint Gutherson lurking around Shaun Lane, Ryan Matterson and (previously) Isaiah Papali’i.
Nobody is hitting defined areas on the pitch with the intent of attacking on every set quite like Souths are.
They have, by a distance, the most errors per possession in the league and don’t really care. They top the line breaks, and 33 of their 38 have an assist, the highest proportion in the league. They want guys putting through holes.
Souths love to play to points in good ball territory, but they’re more than happy to do it in bad ball, too.
There was a superb example of it in the Dolphins game. It came at a time when the Bunnies were most under the pump, having recently conceded a try to Jeremy Marshall-King that took to the score to 14-6 to Redcliffe.
Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow had almost scored at the corner, which would have put the margin to beyond two converted tries with 90 seconds until half time and Souths were forced to begin their set from the least advantageous part of the field, a metre out and a metre in from touch on the left.
They take a hit up, but almost get pushed back into their in-goal for a drop-out. They take three more to take them to the 30m line, but more importantly, to almost the centre of the pitch.
The Bunnies sprung into attack, with Cook finding Walker then Mitchell to create a break that nearly lead to points.
In five tackles, they advanced 95m, more more importantly, manipulated the width of the field and the defensive line such that they generated a legitimate scoring chance and subsequently forced a mistake that won a repeat set.
It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that 90% of the other teams in the NRL would have taken that set, in the shadows of half-time with the game going against them, as a settler. Souths didn’t even think of it.
The win last weekend showed how that mentality has improved year on year. Souths have not changed their plan from 2022 to 2023, and they haven’t added any players, either, with no off-season signings. What they have done is double down on the style. They trust the process even more.
Teams with good systems, across all sports but especially rugby league, don’t deviate from them when things go wrong. The ability to dig yourself out of holes is why you have a system in the first place, so you have a framework to problem solve.
This is where Souths went wrong twice last year. They were at the very least even, if not unlucky to be trailing at half time to the Panthers in the Finals game, having conceded to an interception and a dummy half dart, while themselves offering more in attack.
But they deviated from their principles and were well beaten in the end by at team that was very good and very confident in its own system.
In their meeting late in the regular season, the difference was even more stark. At half time, the Bunnies had generated seven line breaks to one and were leading every statistical category despite a completion rate of 67%. In the gif above, they’ve hit right for three plays to get to their point, even though they gained just 20m, and put their footy on to make a break.
At half time, the scoreboard was level thanks to an interception and a set play, and in the second half, Souths played much more conservatively and ultimately lost late on.
This time around, things have to be different. It’s easy to back your skills and trust the process against the Dolphins, who for all their strong start, are not the reigning back to back champions.
Souths have to remember why they were able to compete with the 2022 Panthers, and stick to it. Their defence has improved to a level where they should be able to stay in games for longer, which gives the Bunnies more licence to trust their expansive attack.
Play to your points, put on the shifts, back your skills. If they pull it off, it might be the biggest signal yet that the post-Panthers era has begun.