Cowboys hold winning hand
Favouritism no guarantee of success, writes NRL 360 co-host Paul Kent
THE tarot cards say North Queensland.
Take last year’s grand final team, add Johnathan Thurston and Matt Scott, Jordan McLean and a pinch of salt and suddenly a Four of Wands springs from the deck and everybody assumes success is to follow.
It was a form line that held true last year when Melbourne took a losing grand final team from the season before and had the luxury of adding Billy Slater after he missed most of 2016 with injury, and off they went to premiership glory. But do the cards know anything about premiership hunger and five-day turnarounds? What happens to the middle forwards if the back five aren’t up to the job? Or do we all follow the smart money again? And all get trousered. Again. Since premiership betting began in 1999, only Melbourne – in 2007 – have begun the season as favourites and carried through to win the premiership. And that was later taken off them after it was proved they cheated the salary cap.
For all the talk about this being one of the most even competitions ever, three teams dominate the experts’ tips: North Queensland, Melbourne and Sydney Roosters. Everybody else will need luck.
The experts threw their darts at the board and almost all settled on North Queensland, Melbourne or the Roosters. Some came up with Newcastle and Gold Coast making the eight, and they really should learn the darts must be thrown with the pointy end first.
Hope and optimism don’t win premierships or get you to the top eight. Players do.
When Jimmy Johnson took the head coaching role at the Dallas Cowboys in 1989, he called in his players to tell them he had good news and bad news.
The good news, he said, was in a few years they were going to win the Super Bowl.
The bad news was not everyone was going to be around to celebrate it.
Johnson knew there were players in the squad never capable of winning a Super Bowl and that he had to get them out and replace them with players that could, and so he went on a tear, trading players and drafting others.
The good NRL clubs follow a similar philosophy.
Some players are capable of winning consistently over a season and some simply don’t have it in them. Some can influence a big game, some can’t.
Bad coaches might be able to win with good players but good coaches can never win with bad players.
And so the roster is where it’s at. There are only two teams premiership hardened right now.
The Cowboys and Storm are primed. Premiers in two of the past three years, they each retain enough of those rosters to, with some astute additions, have them ready to win again.
The trick for Paul Green is to find a way for Michael Morgan to be as effective as he was last season, when he filled the space left by Thurston, now that Thurston is back.
Morgan’s rise in form came when he filled Thurston’s absence and went from about 40 touches a game to about 70 – which was Thurston’s domain. But both can’t demand 70 touches in the same team, so what gives?
No team has gone back-toback since Brisbane in 1997-98.
Despite every team promising to stay hungry after a premiership, every team that failed has later looked back and recognised a drop in the little one percenters they were so strong on the season before.
Even Melbourne has failed to go back-to-back.
The Roosters aren’t the pure contenders everybody believes and sit on the next rung with
Suliasi Vunivalu ................ $7 Josh Addo-Carr ................ $7 Alex Johnston .................. $9 Jordan Rapana ................ $13 Bevan French .................. $13 Corey Oates ..................... $17 Valentine Holmes ........... $17 Sione Katoa ..................... $17
Parramatta, Cronulla and Brisbane.
Expected to fight for the remaining two finals positions are Penrith, Manly, St George Illawarra, Canterbury and Canberra, with Gold Coast, Warriors, South Sydney, Newcastle and Wests Tigers playing for luck.
Only five teams can win it, though. The rest are playing to save their coach.
When most of us look to choose our premiers, we go the usual route and sift through the spine to identify what team has the best combination of hooker, half, five-eighth and fullback.
But is the Roosters’ outstanding spine – Jake Friend, Cooper Cronk, Luke Keary and James Tedesco – going to be given the platform from their middle forwards to get the job done?
The four squads in every team are the spine, the middle forwards, the back five and the bench.
A weakness in one squad puts stress on the others.
There was a time when the greatest differential in win percentage at the Roosters came not when Mitch Pearce or Jake Friend or Boyd Cordner was in or out, but whether Jared Waerea-Hargreaves was in or out.
Yet Waerea-Hargreaves challenged Jason Taumalolo before last year’s preliminary final and came up short, throwing up the question: Can Cronk do what is needed if his side is struggling to roll through the middle?
The Roosters seemed to acknowledge a deficiency when they announced Tuesday FrankPaul Nuuausala was back on a one-year deal.
Cronulla is tough and hardened but their success will depend on the resiliency of their spine. Brisbane must stiffen up through the middle, which explains why the Broncos are prepared to wear the criticism for signing Matt Lodge.
The rest of them have too many of those players similar to what Jimmy Johnson identified in Dallas. Their team might be on the road to a premiership, but they won’t be there when they get there.
But he got the Cowboys home. Just like our Cowboys.