Paul Kent: How Manly can reinvent their attack and get the best out of Tom Trbojevic
Penrith and Melbourne have revealed the Turbo Blueprint for how to dismantled Manly - and the Sea Eagles need to try a radical circuit-breaker to save their season, says PAUL KENT.
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The conversation is nearly always the same nowadays with Des Hasler.
He turns down the corner of his mouth and nods, offering a kind of silent agreement under that great flop of hair, and then each time he takes the path of least resistance to an answer no matter what is said.
Hasler has been cultivating the Mad Professor act for so many years now he has turned into a parody of himself.
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The less sense he makes the more he likes it. Nobody fakes Hasler like Hasler.
It got to the point where before last week’s opening game Hasler was asked a question at a press conference and he nodded once and grunted twice, repeated the question out loud, as if to acknowledge it, then looked up waiting for the next question.
Apparently, that sufficed for an answer.
The charade is that Hasler is anything but the spaceman he presents himself to be.
He is methodical and deliberate and whatever else is left to chance is not worth worrying about.
Hasler knows, though, that so long as everybody is standing back confused about the Mad Professor then nobody is taking much interest in what else is happening at Manly.
But a shake-up might be needed if Manly are going to repeat last year’s success.
And, it might be said, the Mad Professor might actually need to become the Mad Professor.
Penrith manhandled Manly last week and in victory revealed the way to beat the Sea Eagles, who rely so heavily on Tom Trbojevic.
It was a blueprint borrowed last year from Melbourne.
Stack the middle and show him nothing is there - a solid wall of defenders, one you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper through - and convince him to drift wide.
Once he drifts wide, the outside defenders don’t commit but drift with him and wait for reinforcements to push across from inside, all the while corralling him to the sideline.
And, like most that happens in the NRL, somebody coughs and everybody gets a cold.
So Melbourne came up with a blueprint to handle Trbojevic late last year and Penrith worked it perfectly in round one.
It effectively nullified Trbojevic, limiting his metres and, once achieved, the Panthers used Manly’s conservative style against them.
As crazy as it sounds, there are solid reasons to believe that moving Trbojevic to centre could be a circuit breaker for the Sea Eagles’ attack, and could reinvigorate their conservative game plan.
It immediately takes the predictability out of Manly’s attack.
At the moment opposition teams barely respect Manly’s back five, except for Trbojevic at fullback.
Penrith kicked religiously to Jason Saab and stood him up in the tackle each time, then got numbers in to the tackle and manhandled him backwards.
It set up their entire defensive set and enabled them to dominate the set from then on. The side-effect was a set and composed defensive line then helped them manage Trbojevic throughout the six tackles.
Shifting Trbojevic to centre, as crazy as it sounds, could upset this.
Trbojevic revealed in last year’s Origin series a threat barely seen before.
With James Tedesco picked at fullback Trbojevic moved to centre but, importantly, was given a licence to roam from coach Brad Fittler.
While the Queensland defence was prepared for Latrell Mitchell in the centres, and even for Tedesco to loom up somewhere, Trbojevic turning up on the left, alongside them both, threw a confusion into the Maroons’ defence.
It was not supposed to work like this.
When had they ever trained for this?
Trbojevic was all over the field and close to impossible to game plan against, heading where he thought there was opportunity, driven by instinct.
Manly got off to a poor start last season behind a conservative game plan, losing its first four games, and it wasn’t until the Sea Eagles began to open their style that the results turned.
Trbojevic emerged as the most dangerous player in the game.
Without a great deal of creativity at dummy-half, the Sea Eagles were again predictable last Thursday, perhaps driven by an early season need to get through their sets.
But it does not cut it anymore.
Penrith coach Ivan Cleary revealed after the game that the Panthers had spent three months preparing for the game.
Plenty of homework was done on Trbojevic.
Not enough was done, it seems, from Manly on how to counter that.
The game is shifting all the time and conservative footy, driven by high completion rates and dull ball movement, is no longer enough to win games.
The strong teams are moving the ball and taking chances.
Finding unorthodox ways to attack that their opponents have not trained over and over to combat.
It might be one for the Mad Professor to think about, in between nodding once and grunting twice.
Turbo’s greatness has an asterix
The popular brief around this town and several other parts is that Tom Trbojevic, barring any more unforeseen shower catastrophes, is on the quick march to rugby league greatness.
You won’t hear a peep from anyone declaring any less.
Trbojevic’s 2021 season was so dominant it has many wondering if he can repeat it and, if so, what rivals are going to do in a bid to possibly stop him.
Trbojevic dominated the Dally M Awards. He won convincingly, even though he played just 16 games after missing the opening to the season when he fell in the shower and somehow tore his hamstring.
Such dominance in the current climate is not a bad thing.
Having experienced the past 12 months as we have, losing Immortals Bob Fulton, John Raper and Norm Provan, as well as the great Tommy Raudonikis, rugby league could do with the addition of one who puts a light in our hearts like Trbojevic is doing.
Trbojevic has a mastery over the game that few before him have ever possessed.
He looks like the big kid in the under-12s, the one that has been shaving for several school terms and has an Adam’s apple as big as a golf ball and who swats away the young boys around him as if they were all several years younger.
The only time Trbojevic has not been the best fullback in the game in recent years was when he played Origin, when he was the best centre in the game.
How anyone can stop him is anyone’s guess.
The closest any team has come was when Melbourne rushed to attack him with numbers when he was around the ruck but, once he was out wide where the defence was thinner, waited patiently for support as they corralled him towards the sideline.
It is the best ploy yet to stop a player who is fast becoming unstoppable, but it is tremendously hard.
It takes enormous energy to be able to defend like that against Trbojevic for 80 minutes without a lapse in effort.
Still, greatness is an elusive quality and already some are waiting to see if Trbojevic can lead the Sea Eagles to a premiership before he is ordained as an all-time great.
Increasingly, though, as success becomes the barometer, athletes are having their being measured against the titles in their cupboard they can deliver for their team as much as any individual success.
It is a tricky claim.
Of the 108 men in the NRL Hall of Fame about a quarter have qualified without winning a premiership.
Sometimes, it even took greatness to deprive them of this.
Arthur Summons, Noel Kelly and Kel O’Shea are all in the Hall of Fame but spent the majority of their careers trying to topple St George from their 11-year premiership streak, which lasted an entire generation.
As strong as the Magpies were, they could not match the numbers of the Dragons.
In its team St George had at various times four Immortals, Raper, Provan, Reg Gasnier and Graeme Langlands, as well as other Hall of Famers, Billy Smith, Eddie Lumsden, Brian Clay, Johnny King, Ken Kearney, Ian Walsh and Harry Bath.
The most famous posse of the modern era to be included in the Hall without a trophy are the Balmain Tigers, where Wayne Pearce and Steve Roach are fully qualified for the Hall but are forever reminded of their failings at two attempts in the big one.
And before we progress let it be said that why Benny Elias is not among them, even without a premiership, is something the Hall of Fame college needs to explain.
There are other modern greats who also failed to land the big one, like Raudonikis, Steve Rogers and Andrew Ettinghshausen, as well as some old-timers like Frank Burge and Chimpy Busch.
Wally Lewis, an Immortal, and Gene Miles both failed to win NRL premierships but did win local Brisbane titles before the game was expanded to include the Broncos.
No doubt Trbojevic is hoping to avoid the asterisk that sits next to their names, if it does in some eyes, by taking Manly to a premiership.
At least Sea Eagles fans are hoping it is Manly.
Increasingly, though, as premierships are lobbied as evidence of an athlete’s greatness, the idea that it is okay for players to shift teams in a bid to chase a premiership has become acceptable.
It has already begun overseas.
The movement started in America, of course, where it was almost considered a hard rule that a player could not be considered an all-time great without a championship to fall back on.
Under this pressure NBA players have, in recent times, been accused of forming super teams, gathering under decreased salaries to win a championship, solidify their bona fides, and then disband to chase the money.
LeBron James was the league’s reigning Most Valuable Player, a five-time All-Star and an Olympic gold medallist but still without a championship as he tried to lift the eternally struggling Cleveland Cavaliers to a title.
So James took the shortcut. Along with Chris Bosh he joined Dwyane Wade at Miami — all three at the time the scoring leaders in their respective teams — in an audacious move to slay the championship stigma together.
They played four seasons together and reached the finals each time, winning two championships, then James left once any claims against his greatness were extinguished.
The Uber Eats title, one ordered in, is not so easy to do in the NRL.
Trbojevic is more of the Tom Brady model, the former New England quarterback who repeatedly took pay cuts at the Patriots so the team could stack the roster with enough quality to help him win his six Super Bowl trophies.
It did not worry Brady that he was the team’s most valuable player, and could have demanded much more. He understood the value those titles would ultimately add to his appeal.
The more well-informed might also point out that it did not hurt that his supermodel wife out-earned him by a ratio of about four-to-one, so money was not his priority.
In recent seasons Johnathan Thurston boasted a premiership in his career as a young replacement on the bench for the injured Steve Price in Canterbury’s 2004 premiership but it was not until Thurston delivered North Queensland a title in 2015 that some were prepared to acknowledge his claims as one of the greats.
Undoubtedly Thurston will soon join the others in the Hall of Fame.
As will Trbojevic if he continues on this same trajectory.
A premiership, though, will make it all that more easier to declare it.
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