BY DAN

For the third time in five weeks the Canberra Raiders lost in the same way.

Their middle, a tried and tested group of men as good as any in the competition, were dismantled by unit operating with more pace and agility. The Roosters game added the bonus aspect of being physically overwhelmed too, but the common thread of Raiders losses in recent times is an inability to keep up when faster players challenge them. They end up defending like someone trying to catch a fish with their bare hands.

This is only a problem against the best teams. The Broncos, Sharks, Roosters and Panthers all attack with a back five that does a huge amount of their dirty work. Not everyone can do that, because not everyone has the personnel required. But good teams are using agility and width more consistently in recent times. The good people over at Rugby League Writers have been on this a while. A mix of early shifts and general agility is designed to attack compressed defences, force backrowers into covering inside and out, and generally creating havoc.

With an old school pack with plenty of size, Canberra are vulnerable. Faced with fast backs that can get to the fringe of the middle, and in between defenders, the big boys are having some games where they’re struggling to hold on. The Raiders have missed the 7th most tackles, conceded the 5th most linebreaks. Joe Tapine, Ata Mariota, Hudson Young, Elliott Whitehead are all at career low or near to in tackle efficiency. Danny Levi currently ranks 20th in the same metric and has the second most line-break causes among hookers.

A collapsing middle puts pressure on the edges to cover in and out. Young led the team in tackles against the Roosters, and Whitehead wasn’t far behind. They had sixteen misses between them. Smell had 37 against the Dogs. Against the Sharks (the second time) Simi Sasagi was forced into 40 tackles (with 10 misses). Zac Hosking made 19 tackles in half a game the first time through Cronulla. When teams can turn the middle inside out with pace the edges become both the saviour and the targeted. It’s not sustainable.

The solutions to this are tough. Canberra have made a strategic decision that Danny Levi is their man at hooker. Tommy Starling is a more stout and effective defender. He ranks first among hookers in tackle efficiency and the least line-break causes (noting the latter would be heavily influenced by his lack of minutes). But every time he passes the ball there’s time to say a little prayer to yourself that it will be in front of the receiver. I won’t relitigate the Zac Woolford thing, and he and Adrian Trevilyan are unlikely to play first grade soon no matter how well they tackle. There will be no saviour in at nine.

Canberra have found ways to paper over the cracks in a myriad of ways. Young, Whitehead, Hosking have all been critical in this. Starling, Pasami Saulo and Morgan Smithies rank 6th, 8th and 13th in tackle efficiency this season (per Fox for players with over 100 tackles on the season). Starling’s limited minutes and Saulo’s absence in recent weeks could be important. I also have a feeling that the early season stress put into Morgan Smithies is starting to take it’s toll. The Roosters’ first try came when Smithies, someone people had thought might be able to cover backrow early in the year, was unable to get two steps wide of his line to cover a straight run from Victor Radley. After routinely making forty plus tackles in the first month or so of the season he’s only made 23.

Introducing better defence and more agility into the middle may happen naturally when Saulo or Corey Horsburgh come back to remove Emre Guler. Guler is a poster child for this agility problem, something that becomes most notable when he gives away his weekly penalty for hanging an arm out when someone veers off the line he’d presupposed for them.

Hohepa Puru might be one option to add some agility in the middle third. Last year I was concerned about his physical ability to stand up to first grade middles. In watching him in Cup footy in recent weeks that gap is minimising. Given much of the tackling is of backs coming into the middle third, then perhaps you need match like with like. There’s more to like than just that with Puru, who could also add width to an attack that sometimes struggles to find it, and give Smithies shorter, more energetic shifts.

Otherwise I’m not sure how you treat this with game planning. Greater line-speed can reduce the impact but that feels unimplementable. How do you have more line-speed when you’re getting exhausted chasing backs around? Kick earlier and turn teams around? Get more out of your own back five and let the forwards just be tackle bags? They all have aspects of solution to them but presuming there’s any silver bullet among them is hopeless. Maybe all, maybe some, probably not none, of these solutions could be necessary.

In all likelihood it’s going to remain a problem. Not every week, because not every team has the capacity and the players to put this plan into place, but often enough that it will be a problem. Help is on the horizon for next year, but it will continue to be haunt them in any game against the elite teams of the competition, and ultimately could be the gap between them and greater success this season.

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