NRL 2022: Melbourne Storm tackling technique injures two Cowboys stars

North Queensland have privately raised concerns about Melbourne Storm tackles that have left two of their stars sidelined with knee injuries - raising fears a new dirty tactic is at play.

Brandon Smith launches at Jason Taumalolo’s knee.

History will never be kind for the Melbourne Storm, for as long as tendons snap or ligaments tear.

The benefit of the doubt went against the Storm again on the weekend when two North Queensland players limped off, unable to return for several weeks.

The Cowboys will feel the loss of Jason Taumalolo and Kyle Feldt significantly. Their absences in the end did not benefit the Storm, who fell anyway, but for a Cowboys outfit surging up the table the loss of both will hurt.

The match review committee saw no need for action.

“They were reviewed,” Annesley said.

“They are just legs tackles, there’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

What was out of the ordinary, though, was that Feldt tore his medial cruciate ligament (MCL) and is out for six weeks and Taumalolo injured his MCL also and is out for, the Cowboys believe, one to two weeks, or possibly three.

Both tackles were almost identical in manner and execution.

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In each, Brandon Smith comes in from the side and gets to the ball-runner first, driving in at the region between the knee and hip, though closer to the knee, and drives through the tackle.

Such is the force Smith that drives, Feldt and Taumalolo both shift sideways.

They are both then hit high by Storm defenders coming in the other direction fractionally later, which causes a sharp shift in direction.

Their bottom half is going one way before the top half begins going the other way.

As the body creases under force, the weak point for both is the knee, which in each case is the first to break.

Six weeks for Feldt, one or two for Taumalolo.

In the Cowboys coaching box, suspicions were aroused.

“The tactics were to go low and hard into the legs,” a Cowboys insider said.

“Most teams coach their guys to hit hard around the bottom of the arse, but they were real low.”

Brandon Smith launches at Jason Taumalolo’s knee.

Suspicions spiked again when in a slightly different version Tyran Wishart hit Coen Hess from behind just above the knees and quickly slid, to end the tackle around the shins.

Hess’s head twists and his mouth opens in pain from the tackle.

It was not an illegal tackle, but only by inches.

Aware of the way it generally goes whenever Melbourne’s tackling techniques are raised, nobody at the Cowboys was overly keen to talk about the tackles that have cost them two players for the short term.

The Storm came out hard, for instance, when former Souths boss Shane Richardson raised Melbourne’s controversial tackling style several years back and the situation quickly reached DEFCON 3.

The Storm, naturally, countered it was a pre-emptive strike ahead of their finals campaign, which it might have been, but also it did not mean it was necessarily untrue.

With all this to consider the Cowboys were concerned enough at what they saw in the tackles, to say nothing of the injured two, to believe the tackles should at least be raised and monitored moving forward.

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So they spoke quietly out of the corner of their mouths.

As we know, the match review committee has a history of being late to the party in such instances, so the match review committee seeing nothing untoward in these tackles should not be accepted solely on face value.

There was nothing much to see when players first began doing cannonball tackles or grapples or chicken wings, either.

The difficulty in these latest examples are the tackles do everything to mimic the classic legs tackles that us veterans grew up watching and which we all now concede that we miss so dearly.

Annesley admitted as much.

“It’s not like they held another player and he came in late,” he said.

“In an old-fashioned sense we would have said great tackle.

“There’s no evidence I can see or the Match Review Committee saw that was an illegality, or hold, or wrestling movement.”

Kyle Feldt. Picture: Ian Hitchcock/Getty

Jason Taumalolo. Picture: Ian Hitchcock/Getty

The trick to this one seems to be the timing, in Smith’s urgency to hit the ball-runner before he reaches the meat of the defensive line.

Some will hold that it is ridiculous to believe that tackles could be timed to specifically create the snap collision necessary to tear a ligament.

But if we can marvel at the precision of the winger who is inch-perfect when he extravagantly dives to score in the corner, contorting his body like an Olympic diver, why can’t such precision be repeated in defence?

It is a particularly troublesome topic here, given much like Richardson and Souths I have my own history with criticising Melbourne’s defensive techniques.

Doesn’t necessarily make it wrong, though.

Once or even twice is an accident but if it continues it is a technique, and a worrying one, and once again the NRL must intervene.

The simple solution is for the Storm to have a quiet word with Smith to alleviate any future problems, before DEFCON 2 is reached.

Originally published as NRL 2022: Melbourne Storm tackling technique injures two Cowboys stars