Tedesco’s heroics highlight NRL’s weakness

The freakish James Tedesco highlights everything that is good and bad about the lopsided NRL competition.

Roosters fullback James Tedesco scores one of his three tries on Monday night

Circus rolls on. Four great games a week. Four duds. That’s the norm in the NRL. Well, they’re not all duds – landslides are worth watching for the might and power and destruction — but the lesser fixtures have become predictable enough for journalists to write their match reports before the match has even begun.

Take the Roosters versus Bulldogs, 7pm, Bankwest Stadium, Monday night. Three hours before kickoff, I scribbled this on a piece of paper: “Sydney annihilated Canterbury by XX points to XX. No one could lay a hand on James Tedesco.”

Was there any doubt it would come to pass? The margin would be huge. Tedesco would be untouchable. It was like this when Ian Thorpe was swimming. Before his heats, you’d write, “Ian Thorpe cruised into the final of the yada yada yada with a time of XX …” All you had to do was watch the race and fill in the XXs and the yada yadas and you were off to the pub. Results and stories could be written before they were written.

The NRL has the haves and the have-nots. What do the haves have? Great players. What do the have-nots not have? Great players. The Roosters won 42-6. They had Tedesco and a dozen others that Dean Pay would have killed for. Tedesco finished with three tries, two try assists, five linebreak assists, 12 tackle busts, 231 metres, an Oscar, three Grammys, not a hair out of place and not a speck of dust on him. He’s running so hot he’s not even guaranteed to pass his pre-match temperature checks.

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He’s nearly too good for the NRL, is he not? He gets around a footy field like one of those Mario Kart characters who’s found the speed of a rocket ship. He has a freakish body shape, you know. When he whipped his shirt off at NSW Origin training last year, his torso actually looked like a flesh coil spring. He could not pull his Roosters’ jersey down past his chest on Monday night; Trent Robinson had to drag it past the coil spring for him.

That was the team performance of the year. That was the NRL benchmark in all its pomp and glory. The rooster making the cock-a-doodle-do noises after the team’s seven tries should have put some overtime on his invoice to Fox Sports. What do the haves have? Line speed. Understanding. Mateship. Hands quick enough to be a concert pianist. Feet quick enough for tap. The tricolours had so many bodies in motion, on the ball, off the ball, all around the ball, that they could not all be seen on the television coverage. Half the fun of being at the ground, when that is allowed again, is seeing Tedesco in the background, homing like an Exocet missile. On TV, we only see his moment of impact.

What do the haves have? Options. The most memorable image of the Roosters’ swarming, multifaceted enthusiasm and effort was when Brett Morris slipped an offload for Kyle Flanagan’s sixth-minute try, after a glorious one-handed, no-look flick pass from Joseph Manu, and Morris had no fewer than FOUR support runners. So many Bulldogs players were on the ground it looked like ten-pin bowling after a strike. “He was Teddy,” was Robinson’s description of his fullback, and enough had been said.

This week’s four great matches, the matches I will go out of my way to watch, the matches that can conceivably go either way: Knights versus Broncos, Panthers versus Storm, Raiders versus Sea Eagles, Roosters versus Eels. The landslides and/or duds: Titans versus Dragons, Rabbitohs versus Warriors, Tigers versus Cowboys, Sharks versus Bulldogs. They’re either predictable or of a lower standard. The NRL is as lopsided as the EPL without the saving grace of a relegation system that spices things up at the bottom of the ladder.

The gulf between the haves and the have-nots is rammed home when the team sheets are released every Tuesday. Before the Roosters have lapped the Bulldogs like they’re Ian Thorpe in the yada yada, when you’ve placed a looking glass over both squads, not one Bulldog has been worthy of making a combined side.

This week is a little different, given the Eels are on top of the ladder, but, if you’re them, you’re quaking in your fluoro boots right about now. The Roosters are the best team in the comp and you just know they will relish the opportunity to prove it.

If I do the player versus player comparison for the Roosters and Eels, there’s only four of 17 Eels in my combined side. Maika Sivo pips Daniel Tupou for the No. 2 jersey. Blake Ferguson gets the No. 5 jersey from Brett Morris. Mitch Moses only just gets the halfback jersey from Kyle Flanagan. Moses gets a hell of a lot of praise for someone who hasn’t done much yet, and Flanagan, really, is still on his L-plates. Ryan Matterson pips Angus Crichton in the back row. I’ll take the Roosters’ bench. In other words, I think 13 Roosters have positional superiority. That doesn’t say everything about the likely result in a team sport, but it spells trouble for Parra.

The Roosters have emerged from the plague-enforced lockdown with a new lease of life. They play have-nots like the Bulldogs like Steve Smith plays the Sheffield Shield. If they don’t reach 50, they’ll get bloody close. They’ve scored 101 points in the past two weeks, and had Tedesco only once.

Four great games. Four duds. It’s odd the Roosters and Eels are on Saturday night while the Storm and Panthers get the prime-time Friday slot. The Storm are not especially popular — there’s an understatement! — and the Panthers seem a bit dull. Still, it will be a belter, and if the Eels avoid a belting, they have even more going for them than we think.