Buzz Rothfield: How to pick the top 50 NRL players
BUZZ Rothfield names his long list of players which will be whittled down into the NRL’s top 50 and revealed on Thursday.
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PICKING my best 50 players in the NRL is an almost impossible assignment.
You weight up past form, statistics, potential and good old fashioned footy judgment.
The first thing I did was analyse the top 17 in each club’s roster and focus on those players that have the biggest impact week in and week out.
That’s the easy part. I finished up with 104 names.
What it does show is the incredible strength of the Penrith Panthers who managed 12 out of the 104 contenders and also why the Newcastle Knights, with only Dane Gagai making the list, will struggle.
You then look for the obvious top 10 candidates such as Johnathan Thurston and Cameron Smith. But along with rewarding sustained excellence over a number of seasons, there is a need to allow for some new blood. Of course that means, for every new face, one has to drop out.
Below is my long list of 50, we will be revealing 50 to 26 on Wednesday afternoon with the top 25 announced on Thursday, the opening day of the 2017 season.
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