NRL

The first half of the 2021 NRL season is over already. Time sure does fly, unless you’re a Raiders fan, and then it probably doesn’t move quick enough. With the passing of the midpoint, it’s time to look back at what has transpired and see what has changed thus far. Fatigue has been the main talking point this season, with the NRL claiming there is no link between the rule changes and fatigue. I figured it was a good time to take a broader look at how fatigue and injuries has changed minutes played and players used in 2021. Earlier...

We all know the Raiders have had some shocking second halves this season, and Round 11 was no different. It’s been documented a number of times and it’s not any ground I’m going to attempt to cover. The Raiders are very, very bad in the second half, I can’t provide any new information here. This article on NRL.com goes into great detail of the changes in the Raiders stats after half time. What I am going to look at is how their second half struggles compare to the rest of the league to see if there’s anything that stands out....

Nothing like a quiet week in rugby league. Magic round has come and gone, and the game is further slipping into territory that could be best described with the “f” word – farce. The blowouts have continued as well, as shown by the wonderful charts from friends of the site NRLFanalytics and AndrewRLP at the conclusion of Round 10. It was only four seasons ago that we had almost 40% of games decided by one score. Now it is almost half of that, with just 21% of this seasons 80 games decided by 6 points or fewer. We know that...

Last week the NRL noted that there would be a “crackdown” on deliberate infringements on early tackles that lead to set restarts, as it has become more obvious that teams are gaming them for reasons that myself and many others have mentioned before. Basically, it comes down to field position, as giving away one or two extra tackles is far outweighed by conceding an extra 20-30 metres down field as well as a fresh set of six. What was the result of this set restart “crackdown”? Fewer penalties than Round 8 and slightly more set restarts. Not a lot of...

There was a lot of talk in Round 6 after the Warriors beat the Dragons around completion rates, as it looked like the New Zealand had finished the game with a 100% completion rate, a rare occurrence. The NRL later downgraded them to 40/41, although Fox Sports still has them at 40/40 for that game. Either way it was the highest completion rate in a game since at least 2014 and probably earlier, a mark that used to be held by North Queensland (we’ll come back to this later). Commentators will often talk about high completion rates during games as...

During the Raiders loss to the Cowboys on the weekend, Canberra five eighth and Dally M medal winner Jack Wighton did something he seems to do far more often than any other player in the NRL – kick a ball out on the full. Andrew Voss mentioned it on commentary on Fox League as well, bringing up that according to the Fox Sports Lab he’d kicked out on the full 16 times since 2019. It’s something that appears to happen so frequently that NRL Twitter continually dunks on him for it. This had me thinking, is Wighton the worst offender...