That’s it for the Raiders and Sharks for the 2023 NRL season. So, can we consider their campaign a success?
Evaluation time for the Sharks & Raiders
The Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks ended up as one of the surprise packets of the 2022 NRL season. They struggled against the better teams and dropped out of the finals in straight sets, but the feeling was that they had laid the foundation for an improved 2023 season. That hasn’t played out. Finishing 6th on the ladder, losing in Week 1 and never really looking like premiership contenders, Craig Fitzgibbon and company have been left to figure out where things went wrong.
Meanwhile, the Canberra Raiders Canberra Raidered their way through another NRL season. This team doesn’t make sense. The results don’t make sense. With a stale attack and a spine that doesn’t feature the put-the-team-on-his-back player others flirting with finals footy might, the Raiders were one pretty poor extra time period away from Week 2 of the NRL Finals.
Both Fitzgibbon and Ricky Stuart went with similar responses to their respective defeats.
“It’s fine margins, some moments, some decisions, but from where we were at the mid-point of the season, I’m proud of how we’ve ended up,” Fitzgibbon said to NRL.com post-match.
“I thought we were very brave, I thought we played really good football and don’t underestimate the word proud, because I am,” Ricky Stuart mentioned after the loss.
Both teams ended this season earlier than they did the last. While both are surely proud given the circumstances of the year overall, there will come a time in the next few weeks when they reflect and put more emphasis on why – for all intents and purposes – they went backwards.
Injuries and suspensions played a part for both teams. The Raiders, in particular, were digging deep into their reserve grade side to send 17 players out there against the Newcastle Knights. Still, neither threatened to significantly improve on their last season.
I recently covered how the Sharks rely on seeing cues in the defensive line. It’s hardly high-level analysis that how a team attacks depends on what the defence does in front of them. However, it’s a particularly large point of the Sharks attack. We see them rip through the bottom teams in the NRL but fail to pile up points on the better defensive teams in the competition.
“They play what is in front of them rather than to points on the field by laying the line. If a defence gives up a cue, Blayke Brailey, Nicho Hynes and the Sharks attack swings into action.” – Shark Attack: How they play to cues & why they struggle against the top teams
While the Sydney Roosters haven’t been a top side for the majority of the year, they’ve come into form when it matters. Their defence, in particular, has kept them in the hunt this long.
Where an inexperienced Jayden Campbell wasn’t able to consistently organise his line a few weeks ago…
James Tedesco was able to organise his defence around the ruck well enough for his B and C defenders to disrupt Hynes’ time with the ball. At a spot where the Sharks like to take the short side, the Roosters shot up and out off the line to cut down his time if not turn him back in.
Luke Keary played an exceptional game in defence when it came to his effort and decision-making as the Sharks shifted to the edges.
The Roosters didn’t make things easy for the Sharks. If you don’t leave yourself caught short on an edge, if there aren’t regular lazy efforts to marker or slow peels out of the ruck, Hynes and company didn’t often have an answer.
I enjoy watching the Sharks attack at its best. Their slingshot shapes to the edges are so hard to stop when it all comes together. But how they construct tries throughout a set might be something they look to work on over the summer. For Hynes, he’s still relatively new to the position. Halves don’t typically enter their prime until reaching their late 20’s and he was a late bloomer as it is. If they can find a bit more yardage through the middle and some consistency in the five-eighth position, I think we will see them start to trouble more Top 8 teams in 2024.
The Raiders finished Round 20 sitting 4th on the NRL ladder but the eye test, and their -55 points differential, suggested they had overachieved to that point. In the end, an uninspiring attack made it difficult to back them in big games and while they could turn up defensively and find a way to exceed expectations, their attack didn’t. Stuart’s side finished 13th in attack scoring only 20.6 points per game. The Wests Tigers being the only team to score a higher proportion of their tries through the middle than the Raiders’ 31% goes a long way to summing up their approach – crash and bash.
Perhaps it came down to personnel for Stuart more than anything else. When you have guys like Josh Papalii and Joseph Tapine in the side, just carting it up the middle close to the line will work at times.
The Raiders struggled on the edges, though. Serviceable as they might be, Seb Kris and Jordan Rapana aren’t creative fullbacks out the back of shape.
Instead, the Raiders played flat. Again, it suits the team. Matt Timoko has proven to be one of the most destructive centres in the NRL and simply feeding him one-on-one is an approach that pays dividends. But it leaves Canberra rather one-dimensional.
Following an unthreatening long side shift and strange short side option against four defenders, the Raiders move it back to the middle in this sequence. Upon shifting the ball wide there is one decoy looking to drag the defence in but, in the end, it’s fairly easy for Bradman Best and Greg Marzhew – neither considered elite defensively – to slide across and close the shift down.
So, it’s a drop back to the middle and to the left edge this time. Again, they use one lead inside but the Knights defence contains their flat shape with ease.
Having looked left and right the Raiders drop Tapine back to the middle again before forcibly exploring the short side with the same flat shape that the Knights can defend one-on-one.
The game has moved beyond simple block plays, but the combination of changes of direction, decoys and deception are still major features of the best-attacking teams in the competition. The Raiders didn’t threaten often enough with the ball to do their toughness and reliance justice this season.
However, if they can keep that “Raiders DNA” as Stuart calls it and implement a few new features to the attack in 2024, the Green Machine will once again be a finals team and probably look more the part this time around.