Why Do Rugby League Wingers Jam in? Part One

by The Golden Shower Dribbler

It’s 9.26pm, Sunday 30 September 2018. The Sydney Roosters have just claimed the NRL Premiership by beating a Melbourne Storm side featuring the likes of Smith, Slater, Bromwich, Munster, Addo-Carr and Vunivalu.

But the Roosters didn’t just beat the defending champions; they dismantled them 21 points to 6. How did they do it, you ask? How did the Roosters execute such a clinical hit job on a star-studded and, well… clinical outfit mentored by the man who will go down as no worse than the 3^rd best coach of all time, Craig Bellamy?

Was it Luke Keary’s scintillating Clive Churchill Medal performance? Maybe. Was it Cooper Cronk, assuming the role of a bung-shouldered puppet master, pulling the strings and exploiting his inside mail on the Storm system? Possibly. Munster’s two sin bins? Perhaps.

These all contributed to the Roosters win, no doubt. But if you believe that ‘defence wins premierships’, which you certainly should, then you must examine what limited a finely-tuned attacking machine like the Storm to a meagre 6 points (courtesy of an Addo-Carr intercept).

To answer that, you need only caste your eye to the 24^th minute of the first half. Off the back of a quick play-the-ball inches from the Roosters try-line, the Storm shift the ball swiftly to the right in a familiar movement that will, somewhat inevitably, result in Vunivalu scoring comfortably next to the corner post.

But wait – no! Instead, Latrell Mitchell sticks to the inside shoulder of his opposite man Will Chambers and Daniel Tupou sticks to the touchline. With his options inside and out shut down, Chambers is bundled across the sideline and a heated scuffle, borne of the Storm’s frustration, crashes into the LED KFC signage bordering the battlefield.

This sequence was typical of a pattern of play that repeated itself throughout the night. The Chooks choked out the Storm attack, starved them of points and, ultimately, broke their spirit. How, you ask again? Let me spell it out for you: THE ROOSTERS’ EDGE DEFENCE DIDN’T FUCKING JAM IN!

That match highlighted for your writer a conundrum that has plagued the minds of many league observers over the years – why do wingers always jam in? Or, to put a more technical and accurate slant on it, why do rugby league edge defences so often play up-and-in rather than man-on-man or slide defence? This three-part investigation will try to answer that question and hopefully offer a solution to the problem.

Just how bad is it?

Allow me the indulgence of sharing some statistics and analysis that, although weighty, highlights the severity of this problem and how it has a material adverse impact on the performance of sides game-in, game-out.

It was in the closing stages of the 2019 NRL regular season that the issue began to itch at me like the spiders under the skin of a meth addict. With each try scored down the edge, the itch evolved from a slight annoyance to a concern and then to an all-consuming unhealthy obsession. I couldn’t stand idly by any longer watching full-time professionals leak tries that, in my opinion, were entirely preventable. Something needed to be done. There needs to be an investigation, and so investigate I did.

I watched every try scored in the NRL through rounds 18, 19 and 20 of 2019. The results were damning and, in many ways, even worse than I expected. Here are the key findings:

Of the 167 tries scored during this period, 54 were preventable by slide or man-on-man defence, or one could argue, were caused by up-and-in defence (U&I).
That is 1/3 of all tries in those three rounds could have been prevented if the defence employed a sliding or man-on pattern (and in many cases, if the defence just did not employ U&I). Let’s call these ‘preventable tries’.
That proportion gets close to 100% when just looking at tries scored down the edge.
54 preventable tries over those rounds equates to 2.25 tries per match (or 2.5 tries a match if you remove some anomalies explained in footnote 1 below).

This data confirmed what I had anecdotally perceived up to that point – that roughly 2 to 3 tries a match could be prevented if a slide or man-on-man defence was used.

Surely eradicating these tries would change in-match momentum, reverse results and potentially form the foundations of premiership glory – just ask the 2018 Roosters.

Alex Johnston has made a career out of scoring off the back of wingers jamming in

If you’re a real sicko, feel free to peruse some more in-depth analysis of the 2019 research referenced above.

The trend is less apparent in ‘blow-out’ matches where one side is dominating the other. It seems that when a side is blowing another off the park, they can score their tries through the middle and don’t need to test the edges.

The majority of the preventable tries are blatant – the defensive winger comes in off his man, causes an overlap and either makes it easy for the attacking winger to score, or creates a line break that leads to a simple 2 on 1 with the fullback/cover defence.

There were instances where U&I doesn’t just fail to prevent the try where slide could have, but where U&I almost proactively causes the try by putting the defensive line so out of whack. See Kalyn Ponga’s try against the Tigers in Rd 19 circa 6th minute where he scores back on the inside because the defence is so in tatters due to outside defenders jamming in.

Another example of U&I creating havoc for defence is Brad Parker’s try for Manly against Parra in round 18 (31st minute). Defensive winger comes in off his man even though the centre has Parker covered. Defensive winger doesn’t stick his tackle on Parker, meanwhile defensive centre has to scurry to cover the unmarked winger left open by the Parra winger, and Parker strolls over for the try.

The Parker try raises another point about U&I defence having a much larger margin of error than other defensive structures. It creates a bigger hit, but it’s much harder to be accurate with and to ‘stick’ the tackle then if sliding on to someone. With slide, even if there is a missed tackle (like the winger on Parker), the inside defender can help finish the tackle off.

Sometimes the defensive winger using U&I is providing ‘help’ to his centre (rather than making a 1-on-1 tackle on the attacking centre). But that help is either: not needed by the defensive centre; it arrives too late anyway and the defensive winger doesn’t affect the tackle properly or in time; or the defender inside the centre (usually a backrower or half) is there to provide the help needed. In either case, the result is generally the same – the attacking winger is free to stroll over if the attacking centre can free his arms to pass the ball.

Of the 167 tries scored over the 3 rounds reviewed, I didn’t note a single try caused by slide defence.

There was only a handful of tries scored on the edge which were not caused by U&I defence (i.e. the tries would have been scored whether slide or U&I was used e.g. the attacker simply overpowers the defence). These tries were not counted as ‘preventable tries’.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where, with the help of punters, dribblers and experts alike, we seek to understand why up-and-in defence is so widely used in rugby league.

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