Round 5 Repeat Set: Finding positives in the Bulldogs attack, a weekend of controversy & selling my Brooks shares

Repeat set

Recap the latest round of NRL action with the Repeat Set: Talking points, highlights, lowlights and the Play of the Round.

Here’s your Repeat Set for Round 5 of the 2022 NRL season:

  • Drawing positives from the Bulldogs attack in Round 5
  • A shambles of a weekend
  • It was a round to remember for… New Zealand Warriors
  • It was round to forget for… Brooks Believers
  • I can’t stop thinking about…
  • Play of the Round: Cookie’s dart from dummy half

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Drawing positives from the Bulldogs attack in Round 5

The Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs have played with the worst attack in the NRL across two of the last three seasons. They scored only 28 points at seven points per game heading into their Round 5 clash against the Penrith Panthers. Still, with all of the attacking flare they added over the summer and with Kyle Flanagan back in the #7 jersey, I set the task of putting together a feature on the Bulldogs attack for this week.

Sharpening the pencil as Matt Burton connected on the first 40/20 of his NRL career, we had a full set to see what the Bulldogs had in attack against the best defence in the competition.

0 tackle – Crash ball to the middle
1st tackle – Failed right shift, back to the middle
2nd tackle – Crash to the middle although Pangai Jr. looked dangerous
3rd tackle – Left shift through the hands, easily defended
4th tackle – Back to the middle
5th tackle – Left shift, died with the ball

I then started thinking about different ideas for this segment…

However, as the game progressed and the Bulldogs began to work themselves into the grind, we saw signs of promise. Very, very small signs, but signs nonetheless.

With another full set attacking the Panthers line in the second half, the ball moved a lot cleaner with the key playmakers featuring regularly.

It’s clunky on this occasion but Burton has a bit of shape around him and is able to ask some questions of the defence. Corey Waddell makes that question a little bit easier to answer with a slightly mistimed run, but the action of Flanagan at pivot out to Burton with space is promising. Unable to produce points here, the Bulldogs settled the ball back to the left post.

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This action below is encouraging and a glimpse of what the Bulldogs seem to be working towards. It’s not his greatest strength but Josh Jackson can throw this pass and few backrowers demand more attention from the defence than a charging Tevita Pangai Jr. The intention is for Jackson to use Pangai Jr. to hold Viliame Kikau’s slide before playing to Flanagan who is then presented with a four-v-three opportunity out wide.

The Panthers line speed spooks them this time and Jackson doesn’t attempt the pass. Instead, he takes the tackle at the right post as Flanagan reloads on the left.

(Side note: This is exactly the sort of thing Mike Meehall Wood asked Trent Barrett about after the game only for Barrett to walk out of the press conference).

Jeremy Marshall-King then steps out from dummy half and uses two big bodies to hold up the Panthers middle – Nathan Cleary, in particular. Again it’s Flanagan at pivot, but instead of going to Burton out the back, he plays short. Look at how many times Liam Martin motions towards Burton before bouncing back to Waddell.

Animated GIF

If Flanagan does a little bit more to engage Cleary and makes the right pass depending on Martin’s position, this shift looks a lot different.

Clunky is again the word, but we can say it alongside encouraging.

So, what now?

I ignored the ‘duty of care’ stuff last week. Regardless of what that was about, Flanagan didn’t look out of place on Sunday night. The #7 jersey looks like his to lose in the coming weeks.

Matthew Dufty, on the other hand, will be lucky to run out for the Bulldogs again.

In the same week Origin Hero Corey Allan returned from injury in reserve grade, Dufty played out a horror 80 minutes.

24 touches
6 runs
46 running metres
1 offload
0 Linebreaks, linebreak assists, tries, try assists, tackle breaks
4 errors

The numbers don’t tell the full story either.

While this game might be exceptionally bad in isolation, it only adds to the argument that Dufty is too often a net-negative. Sure, he might play out a good game with the ball, but even in those good games, he is a target in defence and often concedes just as many points as he creates. The Bulldogs in their current state can’t afford to carry that sort of player in a key position. It’s too easy to exploit Dufty in defence on the line, in particular.

Allan isn’t a highlight-reel player that will produce individual game-winning performances. He will, however, add some starch to the Bulldogs yardage game in exit sets and provide the final pass on the end of shifts in good ball. Allan is the perfect player for this shift releasing Josh Addo-Carr down the outside (note Luke Thompson’s carry with the ball out in front and another forward available short too).

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Where Dufty is looking for early ball before trying to make a play himself – often a skip to the outside of the defender and a premeditated pass to the winger – Allan will compliment Burton.

The Bulldogs need consistency and reliability. They need to excel in the effort areas and be prepared to enter the grind of a game. As we saw last week as Dufty pulled up short as Jackson took the line on, those things the Bulldogs need aren’t part of his game.

Animated GIF

Next is consistency in the team list.

Yes, calling for a change at fullback contradicts the call for consistency. However, it’s in the halves where the consistency is needed most.

Flanagan is going to struggle at times. He’s fairly limited in what he can offer the attack and when things go bad for the 24-year-old, they tend to spiral for 80 minutes. He can fill the role required, though. It looks as though the Bulldogs have a similar approach in good ball to the 2021 South Sydney Rabbitohs where they look to for a split at the right post and use a ball-playing middle or their halfback (sometimes both in the same shift) to get the ball wide to their five-eighth running at the defensive line. Flanagan, at the very least, can be the player to engage and play at the line before releasing Burton into space out wide. He is best positioned to create space for Burton on the edges and if nothing else, is an above average kicker that can end sets well.

To help Flanagan create that space by digging into the line, we’re looking for the Bulldogs middles to compress the defence.

Luke Thompson is an excellent ball-carrier with great footwork and the ability to tip the ball on. Like Addin Fonua-Blake tipping on to Matt Lodge ahead of a long-side shift at the Warriors, Thompson and Paul Vaughan need to be linking up more often. Again like the Warriors, it shouldn’t be too often. They struggled throughout the opening rounds by putting too much of a focus on moving the ball through their big bodies.

Somewhat over-hyped to start the 2022 NRL season, the Bulldogs have the pieces to be a lot better than what we’re seeing at the moment. Their plan in attack is still difficult to make out at times, but we started to see what it could look like on Sunday afternoon. There is a lot of work to do. The team list will make for interesting reading on Tuesday. Their terribly difficult draw to start the year still has the Rabbitohs and Roosters to come over the next three weeks along with the Broncos at Suncorp.

Still averaging an NRL-low eight points per game, one borderline positive showing in attack isn’t signaling an end to their issues. However, it could be the start of a gradual improvement provided Burton and Flanagan, in particular, continue to develop their combination.


A shambles of a weekend

Getting away from what happens on the field isn’t often a focus here but sometimes it can’t be avoided.

What an absolute shambles of a round that was… Entertaining and enjoyable, but a shambles.

There are a few things to cover and, unfortunately, this first one has been a regular for years.

We don’t need the voices of a game referring to controversial decisions days after the fact while covering a different game. We especially don’t need those voices preempting more controversy despite the try they’re already complaining about being given without their noticing.

Referees aren’t perfect and rugby league’s demand for them to be is what causes so much of the ‘controversy’ to begin with. There is a place for talking about and critiquing the decisions of referees, but this instance on Sunday, and far too many others every week, aren’t constructive.

In saying all of that, how good is it that games are entertaining and close enough for the discourse to return to referees in 2022?!

Marcelo Montoya’s use of a homophobic slur is another frustrating talking point. There is no room for ‘heat of the moment’ and ‘what is said on the field, stays on the field’ arguments here. Be better.

Junior Paulo was sent for 10 minutes on Saturday night after, quite clearly, connecting with the head of an attacking player. It looked like a perfectly fine tackle at first but Paulo’s shoulder does make contact and the Bunker responded accordingly. We can argue over the terminology and use of “direct” which the NRL might need to look at in an effort to remove this sort of ‘controversy’. Whether or not it should be a penalty or a sin-bin will be a talking point every time this occurs regardless. However, lets not get away from the fact that these shots – accidental or not – need to be removed from the game as much as possible.

Those captain’s challenges in the same game dominated post-match discussion. It’s not a great look when players give away penalties to trigger a captain’s challenge. It all looks a bit silly. To make it all worse, Graham Annesley had only last week said “a team can’t try to create a stoppage in order to challenge something that has previously been missed.”

But, if a player wants to risk a penalty and possibly ten minutes in the sin-bin to challenge what are often very close and 50/50 decisions, then so be it. While we saw it work for the Titans twice on Saturday, it will only take one or two players being sent to the bin in game-defining moments before teams decide not to take the risk so often. The biggest issue for me is the confusion. In fairly typical NRL fashion at the moment, they’re changing rules and interpretations weekly and the referees are struggling to keep up. If the officials have ruled correctly on both of these challenges, why does nobody else seem to know what is happening?

Lastly, and in one of the most unexpected controversies ever, pitch-invaders ran out onto the field of two games this week. Remarkably, the issue wasn’t around the poor security and potential for these pitch-invaders to do anything once they got onto the field, but that one was tackled too hard!

What a weird, weird round. For those that don’t know, 16 teams played eight games over the course of the weekend, too.


A round to remember for…

It took two weeks for Shaun Johnson to provide the Warriors with exactly what they’ve been missing since he left.

In Round 4 he displayed all of the game-management qualities the Warriors have been without over the last three seasons. His try assist on Jesse Arthars’ first try is a prime example of what he brings to the team.

In Round 5, he kicked the game-winner. While far from perfect throughout the whole 80 minutes, Johnson came up with the goods when it mattered. We saw the Warriors get close at times in 2021. However, they too often failed to produce in the later stages of a game and failed to close out leads.

Enter Johnson.

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