By Dan Walsh and Billie Eder
“This sh--t’s chess, it ain’t checkers.”
The stakes are high. Sacrifices are to be made - if you’re game. It ain’t Denzel Washington in his famous Training Day rant, but it’s two of the NRL’s more adventurous tacticians.
Manly coach Anthony Seibold and Bulldogs coach Cameron Ciraldo have both made season-defining with the finals looming.Credit: Graphic: Marija Ercegovac
Cameron Ciraldo and Anthony Seibold have tried more tactics than most NRL coaches in the past few years, and with a two-month finals run kicking off in earnest, they’ve both made season-defining calls with their most important players and positions.
Seibold - who has tried rugby-esque kicking duels and emphasised high-risk, high-reward ball movement at Manly - has shifted the once out-of-sorts Tom Trbojevic out of his favoured fullback role. The Sea Eagles campaign, and potentially the coach’s own skin, will ride on this call during the next month.
Ciraldo has turned Canterbury upside down with a high-octane, small-bodied game plan and utilities coming out of the walls. And now, the most scrutinised call of 2025 in the latest edition of its single biggest storyline - Lachlan Galvin in at No.7, Toby Sexton out.
With both decisions, the context of how and why they were made is critical. The potential upside and pitfalls, even more so.
Turbo time: Two fullbacks and a spluttering attack
Trbojevic has been at centre for two games now - a switch briefly tried last year as well - with longer term implications for the futures of Seibold, Trbojevic and Lehi Hopoate still to come.
The call to shift one of the game’s best fullbacks came after Manly lost games they shouldn’t have against the Gold Coast and Newcastle. Hopoate had looked fantastic at the back and Trbojevic, when he wasn’t injured, frankly still looked like he was.
For the first 39 minutes of the experiment, against the Tigers in round 17, it looked like it shouldn’t last another second. The Sea Eagles couldn’t get the ball wide to Trbojevic at right centre. Hopoate could only drop it when the Tigers bombed Manly’s new No.1.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Trbojevic reprised the roaming centre role that, on the all-too rare occasions he has played for NSW, has made him the most dangerous man in sky-blue.
Increasingly throughout Manly’s recent wins over the struggling Tigers and Rabbitohs, Trbojevic has slotted in as a left-edge ball-player just as he does when playing fullback.
Left-edge back-rower and brother Ben rightly points out that “Tom’s done that in the Origin arena many times”. Five-eighth Luke Brooks echoes feedback from NSW camp whenever Trbojevic has popped up wherever he wants.
The play is rarely practiced, Trbojevic instead left to his own devices and instincts “because he’s got such good game awareness, he just naturally does that. I feel like he just knows the right time to come.”
Not only does Trbojevic’s roaming keep one of the game’s most devastating ball-runners - when his body lets him - in the game, but it balances up a Manly attack that has been exceptionally right-side centric.
Understandably, Haumole Olakau’atu’s threat outside Daly Cherry-Evans on the right edge has played a significant part in 35 tries (second in the NRL) being generated on the injured back-rower’s side.
The issue when Manly’s attack has stagnated this season has been listless shifting from side-to-side trying to use arguably the quickest backline in the competition.
Especially if Jake Trbojevic is reduced to a non-running link man, where defences do not anticipate him taking on the line, and he doesn’t, so they just slide and comfortably shut down the play.
Manly’s go-forward has been hampered by injuries to Olakau’atu, Taniela Paskea and Nathan Brown, and upcoming top-eight clashes against the Storm, Bulldogs, Roosters and Raiders will put that firmly under the microscope.
So too Hopoate’s hands under the high ball - a month-long aerial assault from Jahrome Hughes, Matt Burton, Sam Walker and Jamal Fogarty looms if Tom Trbojevic stays at centre.
But if he is still swinging from edge to edge as a second fullback, the defence at least has food for thought, particularly if Brooks and Cherry-Evans make good on a conscious effort to play both sides of the ruck as playmakers.
“That’s something we’ve really wanted to bring to our game,” Brooks says.
“Getting our hands on the ball a bit more and sort of linking up together because we feel like when we’re linking up we’re connected, and we’re playing our best footy.”
Galvinised: The glaring issue still confronting Canterbury
With similar on-field context to Manly, and a significantly brighter spotlight because it’s the Bulldogs, Lachlan Galvin, Phil Gould and all that entails, Ciraldo has bitten the bullet on his star mid-season signing.
Toby Sexton is playing the unfortunate role of Bambi’s mother, shot down to NSW Cup with Canterbury still at the pointy end of the ladder as their attack begins to really stall.
Much has been made of Sexton’s own individual statistics - not a single try-assist in the past seven weeks, not one line-break all season.
With a wider lens though, Canterbury’s attack in the past month - albeit coloured by a brutal finals-worthy 8-6 loss to Penrith - has been statistically, the worst in the NRL.
It hasn’t been for lack of trying. The Bulldogs short passing, fast-moving attack went into overdrive trying to crack the Panthers with 297 passes and 17 offloads, bumping up their recent averages for both facets of the game.
The clunkiness has been plain to see though and has translated to the scoreboard because such a playing style with so many ballplayers can easily be thrown out of sync.
“The last little period we’ve been working really hard on our attack,” Ciraldo said on SEN radio this week.
“We’ve been trying to evolve our attack gearing towards the back end of the year, understanding what’s going to beat those top teams who have really good defensive systems. And we just felt like we weren’t sort of getting there.”
For Galvin’s spark to surpass Sexton’s steady hand, less will be more from the 19-year-old.
Galvin’s strength is his running game and a right-foot step that straightens the attack on the right edge, but can see him drifting and cramping his outside men on the left.
With Jacob Preston and Stephen Crichton making for a potent right-edge, Galvin doesn’t need to force his hand as was the case against Brisbane two weeks ago.
Points will come. But the same question mark over Sexton, Matt Burton and Canterbury’s mobile pack remains.
The Bulldogs were caught out at the end of last year by North Queensland and Manly’s big forward packs, and when the whips were cracking against the Sea Eagles in a sudden death semi, a lack of game management.
Sexton and Burton couldn’t guide the Bulldogs home that day, and expecting Galvin to take on the highest-pressure role in rugby league is fraught too. The finals are two months away, but Saturday’s clash against the Dragons will be the first time he’s worn the No.7 jumper in his career.
Galvin’s short kicking game has shown promise, but we’ve barely seen a long kicking game from him. Burton’s booming boot is a fine long-range option.
Yet without a fallback, Nathan Cleary pinched a critical charge down try last month because he knew the Bulldogs No.6 was the only man for a clearing kick.
How Ciraldo manoeuvres Galvin’s development alongside Burton, as well as the duel playmaking roles of Reed Mahoney and Bailey Hayward, all while trying to add big-game polish to Canterbury’s campaign will be fascinating.
Because after all, this ain’t checkers.
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