Benji Marshall says it will be game on when fatigue hits NRL players

The NRL resumes this week. Players may be underdone enough to compile their own comedy clip. Best Of Park Footy.

Benji Marshall warms up for a Wests Tigers training session at St Luke's Park North in Sydney on Monday. Picture: Getty Images

A video is doing the rounds called Best Of Village Cricket. It’s funny stuff. A chubby batsman swings out of his shoes and falls onto his stumps. Fielders crash into each other like they’re playing in the dark. An offspinner scurries sideways to the crease like a crab escaping high tide. Umpires go base over apex. Run-outs involve multiple shouts of yes and no, half-a-dozen U-turns … and a sorry. It’s the very best of amateur hour.

When you hardly play a sport, you can hardly expect to be any good at it. The NRL resumes this week. Players may be underdone enough to compile their own comedy clip. Best Of Park Footy.

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Overweight props falling flat on their faces, skin-tight jerseys sliding over bulbous stomachs, revealing belly buttons the size of open-pit mines. Three-man cut-out passes that land in the front row of empty grandstands. Defenders falling off tackles like punters have fallen off the Roosters as premiership favourites. Blokes like Benji Marshall, the genius, the real Tiger king, sans mullet, the crowd-pleaser with no more crowds to please, have played twice in nine months.

We’re ga-ga at the thought of the NRL restarting, but given the universal lack of conditioning, match toughness and cohesion, what’s the standard actually going to be like?

“For all us players, we’re all going to be in the same boat. Expect the unexpected,” Marshall says.

Marshall’s Wests Tigers play Cronulla at Bankwest Stadium on Saturday. He says the final 20 minutes of matches may show who’s knuckled down during isolation and who’s been having too much nachos and Netflix. Who’s been meticulously professional and who’s had too many amateur hours of their own.

“I don’t think the standard will be too much different,” Marshall says. “What I do know is that as footy players, the expectation we put on ourselves is high. At our club, just from the amount of energy I’ve seen at training, from the contact and the intensity, we’ll be ready to pick up and be better than where we left off.

“You’ve got to go out on the field and do it now. With the new rules, the game might be sped up a bit, and that might help us in terms of playing a bit quicker and on the front foot. We’ve got a lot of nippy guys around the ruck who can exploit that.”

The NRL’s new law about six more tackles for ruck infringements may run everyone off their feet. There’s no business like show business, and there’s no fitness like match fitness, and players have none of the latter. They’re in decent nick, of course, but they don’t have the miles in the legs and the hits on the body. Marshall says it will be game on from the 60-minute mark.

“Quite typically, toward the back end of each half, a lot of fatigue sets in anyway,” he says. “The littler blokes take over a bit. It’s going to be interesting. We’re going into a lot of unknowns with one ref, and how the ruck is going to be policed … it could be the 60th minute, it could be the 70th minute, where it opens up. At some stage, I guarantee you it’s going to open up. I can tell you that fatigue already plays a massive part in the game. We’ve done a lot of work over this break to make sure we’re ready to roll.”

Marshall was part of an All Stars game in 2012 that experimented with the six-again.

“I was tired. It was in the pre-season. I wasn’t in shape to play. It was a tough,” he said on Monday. “It takes its toll. Takes a lot of your juice out. You could be defending two and three sets in a row, and that’s going to catch up with you at some stage. I think you’re going to see teams fighting harder to get quicker play-the-balls and trying to exploit the rule by getting six-agains.

“I think it could open up the game and potentially make it a better spectacle than what it already was. It could help the game get quicker but for all of us, there’s a lot of unknowns until we get through a few rounds and get to see a bit of a benchmark.”

Marshall said the absence of spectators would not cause a reduction in intensity.

“I won’t lie. It’s tough playing without a crowd. It’s just different,” he said. “We’ve just got to suck it up until we can get the crowds back. It makes a difference, no doubt, from a player’s point of view. I’ve been used to crowds for so long. It’s a situation no one’s ever been in before. Not hearing the roars when you run out, the celebrations after tries, the intensity is different. You’ve got to find the energy in yourself as a player. The intensity is still there, but it’s just a different feel.”