NRL

The last month of rugby league hasn’t done much to cement a clear favourite for the 2024 National Rugby League premiership. Nearly every team in the top eight has had serious issues with injuries, or issues with being serious. It’s created some much needed uncertainty after the early 2020s domination of Penrith, who are starting look like four straight seasons with multiple finals games is catching up with them. Along with Melbourne, it’s difficult to see a grand finalist let alone another winner coming from the field. The uncertainty of the past month culminated in the Roosters being unable to...

Last season around this time I tried to “simulate” Dally M or Player of the Year voting, based purely on statistics. I used this site’s player impact metric the Eye Test Player Contribution Rating (ETPCR) to give out “votes” to the top three players from every game to see how it would look compared to the Dally M award.  This season I’m trying it again, and from the looks of the numbers it will be an incredibly tight race between James Tedesco and Jahrome Hughes. The Storm’s planned resting schedule might end up influencing the vote. Unsurprisingly Hughes is running...

Play the ball speed and “tunnel ball” has been in the NRL news cycle over the past week, on the back of a story by Adam Pengilly in THIS MASTHEAD the Sydney Morning Herald. In this article, Pengilly noted that as the Panthers ran down Parramatta during the final minutes of their game in Round 23, they only played the ball correctly once in 11 tackles. Every other time the Panthers did not make a genuine attempt to strike the ball with their foot. The reasoning is obvious, and Pengilly does a great job of explaining why. The desire for...

After the minor distraction that was the 2024 Paris Olympics, it’s time to get back to more significant matters. The Eye Test is back with another of my favourite posts of the season – NRL Sockwatch 2024. And because bootwatching is a way of life and not something you can switch on or off, there’s some bonus boot related content at the end of this post. For new readers, the process is similar to the Bootwatch methodology. I watch every game from a round of NRL and tag whether a player wears their socks up or down at the moment...

Saturday’s 18-16 win was the first time St George Illawarra have won a game in Melbourne this century, and the Dragons now have a win over the top two sides in the competition. That’s something the Roosters haven’t done in five seasons. Friend of the site JonnyForeigner has his usual tremendous match review up at Storm Machine, which is well worth subscribing to, even if the result didn’t go the way he would have liked. Of course, when they played a stronger Panthers side outside of the Origin period, the Dragons were thrashed 46-10, and they’ve been very up and...

The 2024 Paris Olympics may have started and I might be incredibly sleep deprived already, but that won’t stop me bringing you the Eye Test’s July NRL team efficiency update. Just over one year ago I wrote about how the Broncos defense was just as elite as Penrith’s in 2023, albeit in different ways. They were able to sustain significantly more goal line attack than any other team in the league without conceding points, and was one of the hallmarks of their run to the grand final. However, over the past two months it’s an area of their game that...