Welcome to this week’s (cross-code) edition of The Tip-On!
If you missed out on last week’s preview of the Steinlager North v South match or this week’s preview of the Farah Palmer Cup, you can find them both here.
If you’re an All Blacks fan who wants to feel better — or perhaps worse — about being outmuscled by England up front last October, you can think about what could have been while watching former Hurricane U18 forward Nelson Asofa-Solomona (2.00m, 115kg) crash over the try line for the Melbourne Storm last weekend here.
All in-game data per NRL.com unless otherwise stated.
Hot stepper
Ever since his time at Otahuhu College — when he tore up for the Blues U18 team and started in a box-office New Zealand Secondary Schools side with Patrick Tuipulotu, Ardie Savea and Ngani Laumape — Roger Tuivasa-Sheck has been coveted both by New Zealand Rugby and by the Super Rugby team he grew up with in Auckland.
Having taken up league “after rugby finished in [his] last year of school, just for something to do with the boys”, the fullback is now into his 9th season in the NRL — and has had a decorated career in the 13-a-side code: he won a Premiership with the Roosters in 2013 at age 20, has registered 3 selections in the Dally M Team of the Year and became the first player from the Warriors to take home the league’s top individual award (the Dally M Medal) in 2018.
However, COVID-19 has turned the 2020 season into a completely different proposition for everyone at the Kiwi franchise, and being stuck in Australia for months has been particularly tough on Tuivasa-Sheck — separated from his young family, he could only watch on his phone as his son walked for the first time last month.
Unsurprisingly, the Warriors’ on-field performances have suffered as a consequence of this disruption. Their attack has regressed significantly relative to recent years, with the team’s average of 16.1 points per game in 2020 (through Round 16) comfortably their lowest mark of the last 5 seasons.
As a consequence of their struggles on the pitch — and the uncertain situation the NRL franchise faces in 2021 — rumours resurfaced a few weeks ago that the Warriors stood to lose Tuivasa-Sheck to the Blues, whose Super Rugby schedule for next year would likely require him to spend much less time away from home. While those rumours were swiftly denied by the Warriors and addressed within the squad by the player himself — he still has 2 years to run on his existing contract — it is nonetheless interesting to consider what role Tuivasa-Sheck (who only turned 27 in June) would be best suited to if he were to move back to union.
Before the competition restarted earlier this year, the Warriors explained that — with the introduction of the ‘six-again’ rule — they would look to find “a way for [Tuivasa-Sheck] to be more effective in the middle and…use [his] footwork around forwards who’ve done back to back tackles”. Compared to the other top fullbacks in the competition, there does appear to be a difference in how Tuivasa-Sheck has been deployed by his franchise this season:
The way in which Tuivasa-Sheck has employed his power and footwork in tighter spaces contrasts clearly with the style another NRL fullback whose name has been linked with the All Blacks this year: Kalyn Ponga.
As well as contributing more with the boot in open play — he has kicked for 103.3 metres per 80 minutes on average this season, compared to Tuivasa-Sheck’s 11.5m — Ponga also takes on more of a playmaking role than his Kiwi counterpart. The Knight has run only 47.2% of his receipts in 2020 and averaged 0.7 try assists per game, whereas Tuivasa-Sheck has had much more of a run focus: he has carried the ball on 62.9% of his receipts, and contributed just a single try assist in 1200 minutes.
Ponga’s role is therefore much closer to how teams from New Zealand used their fullbacks in Super Rugby Aotearoa than Tuivasa-Sheck’s — and, for that reason, a shift to the wing might better suit the Warrior if he moves back to union in the next couple of years.
In fact, the All Blacks may already have a player they can use as an analogue in such a scenario. It’s not hard to imagine Tuivasa-Sheck causing havoc in the roaming role Sevu Reece plays off the right for the Crusaders — a position from which he sparked a try in Round 7 of Super Rugby Aotearoa after breaking through the middle of the defence in combination with his scrum-half.
Neither wing nor fullback is an area of real need for the Blues or New Zealand in the near term — were NZR able to pluck anyone of their choosing from the NRL, Asofa-Solomona or Jason Taumalolo would be much higher up their list than any outside back — but, if the opportunity presented itself, Leon MacDonald and Ian Foster would certainly both be happy to bring Tuivasa-Sheck back to the code in which he first made his name.
Frequent flyer
6 years on from his last appearance for the Sydney Roosters, Sonny Bill Williams will return to the NRL this coming weekend. Having hopped between league and union a number of times during his career, he is an interesting test case for how technical attributes transfer between the codes.
Sonny Bill’s most obvious point of difference as a rugby player has always been his offloading ability. According to ESPNScrum data for test matches between 2009 and 2020, Williams was far and away the best offloader for the All Blacks during his international career in union: against Tier 1 opposition over this period, he successfully completed an offload on 24.9% of his 389 carries.
(New Zealand had a team offload rate of 9.5% across this data set — second only to France at 10.7%. Williams also compares very favourably to their other regular midfielders: his closest challenger is Malakai Fekitoa, who completed offloads on 17.7% of his 175 carries; the current Wasp is followed by Anton Lienert-Brown at 16.0% on 313 carries, Conrad Smith at 11.4% on 413, Ma’a Nonu at 9.4% on 508, Jack Goodhue at 9.1% on 110 and Ryan Crotty at 7.0% on 215.)
Unsurprisingly, he has also been an elite offloader during his time in the NRL:
While he is obviously unlikely to be as valuable to the Roosters for the rest of the year as he was at his peak, the flashes of skill he showed at the World Cup in Japan are an indication that he still has something to contribute at the top level of the game.
Back and forth
The All Blacks have had a fluid relationship with the 13-a-side code throughout the modern era.
Before professionalism took hold in union, movement between codes was predominantly in a single direction. From New Zealand’s squads for the 1987, 1991 and 1995 World Cups, 9 players went on to spend a later part of their career in league — with backs John Kirwan, Craig Innes, Va’aiga Tuigamala and John Timu the most prominent names to switch.
However, since 1995, the national team have started to benefit from the prior cross-code experiences of a number of their key players. Even leaving Sonny Bill Williams to one side, Tana Umaga was with the Newcastle Knights for a brief period in the early 1990s, Brad Thorn followed stints with the Brisbane Broncos between 1994-2000 and 2005-07 with appearances for the All Blacks at the 2003 and 2011 World Cups and Nehe Milner-Skudder spent a number of years developing at the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs before starring on the global stage in 2015.
Cast away
If the Rugby Championship is completed in 2020, whichever squads are asked to spend months travelling away from home will need to pay particularly close attention to the mental wellbeing of their players — regardless of the delights of Queenstown.
Springboks head coach Jacques Nienaber has been clear on this point for a while, but SANZAAR would do well to learn some lessons from the Warriors’ experiences in this year’s NRL. While Roger Tuivasa-Sheck plans to stay for the entirety of the team’s campaign, 5 players have already returned home to New Zealand — and they felt they were let down by the competition’s governing body, who initially gave assurances that players who travelled would be able to be joined by their families in Australia at a later date.
Pass of the week
Rotorua Boys’ High has become fertile ground for rugby league recruiters in recent years: from last season’s first XV side, both Tuki Simpkins — a potentially significant loss to union, given his position and physical attributes — and Ceiza James have already signed NRL deals.
They follow in the footsteps of Hayze Perham, a former school teammate of Chiefs fly-half Kaleb Trask who signed for the Warriors at the end of 2017 — having spent time in the Penrith Panthers system in 2015, and represented New Zealand Barbarians Schools in the 15-a-side code in 2016.
A natural midfielder in union, the Kiwi franchise have developed Perham at fullback, five-eighth and halfback over the last couple of seasons. However, his 3 starts for the Warriors in 2020 have all come at centre, and he has filled that position for the team in the last 2 rounds of NRL action.
In last Saturday’s 36-6 win over the Newcastle Knights, he notched his first career try assist by effectively executing a simple draw and pass on the Warriors’ left edge. After they switch play back towards Hymel Hunt on the Knights’ right wing, Tuivasa-Sheck engages the line and hits Perham bouncing out behind the screen of second row Eliesa Katoa.
A quick scan just before Tuivasa-Sheck catches the ball alerts the centre to the space in the left-hand 10m channel; his acceleration and footwork are then enough to take him to the outside and draw the attention of Hunt, the last man in the Knights’ defensive line. Crucially, he straightens up his run after his initial diagonal burst, and — as soon as Hunt commits to him — releases the pass to his winger with his shoulders square and his momentum upfield:
George Jennings is able to canter over in the corner as a result of Perham’s excellent basic skills.
While he is just starting to break through at the top level in league, don’t rule out him returning to union later in his career:
While the NRL provides young Kiwis with an excellent development platform as they begin their lives as professional athletes, the pull of the black jersey always remains strong.
Quick hits
Back in the 15-a-side code, Kelly Brazier — who will be part of a stacked Bay of Plenty Volcanix team in this year’s Farah Palmer Cup — is one of a number of Black Ferns who could be chasing a 3rd World Cup success next October. Unlike teammates Renee Wickliffe, Carla Hohepa and Kendra Cocksedge, she is also planning to try and win Olympic gold in Tokyo a few months earlier:
While this year’s Jock Hobbs Memorial National Under 19 Tournament was one of the casualties of NZR’s cost-cutting measures for 2020, in a piece published by the Otago Daily Times last week Otago Rugby Football Union player development manager Paul Galland made clear that the national union are keen for U19 players to get the chance to feature in fixtures between provincial development sides over the next few months. As Steve Hepburn notes in his article, the New Zealand U20 selection panel “wants footage to look at prospective players for next year”.
Video footage is one of the key types of data England coach Eddie Jones uses in his own selection decisions, as he noted to the English media this week; in an appearance on behalf of new kit manufacturer Umbro, he also lamented the relative paucity of available data “that is meaningful in terms of giving feedback on more effective movement off the ball”. All Blacks Performance Analyst Jamie Hamilton provided some insight into his team’s approach to data analysis on a recent episode of The Rugby Analyst Podcast: he explained (from 16:20 onwards) how his analysis unit combines traditional on-ball metrics — which they take from a third-party data provider — with additional data (including more subjective measures of action ‘quality’) which they code themselves using the team’s own terminology.
To get an idea of the sort of things that can be done — from both a performance and a consumer-experience perspective — with off-ball player-tracking data, take a look at the relationship the NBA has developed with its third-party providers SportVU (until the 2016-17 season) and Second Spectrum (from 2017-18 onwards) over the last number of years. This piece from 2013 by Zach Lowe for Grantland is a good primer on the early impact of SportVU data on analysis and coaching, while Second Spectrum CEO Rajiv Maheswaran’s TED Talk from 2015 is a useful introduction to his company’s work; the NBA’s public Stats site is also full of advanced metrics using this data, which can be perused free of charge. (Second Spectrum have now started to branch into soccer too — a sport with much more in common with rugby from an analytical and data-collection perspective.)
Finally, make sure you listen to Ben Darwin of GAIN LINE Analytics on Monday’s episode of The Rugby Ruckus Podcast; worthy of note is his explanation of the asymmetrical impact of a team’s level of cohesion on their attacking and defensive performance — and his acknowledgement of the political difficulty of implementing optimal high-performance structures in practice.