Tag Archives: halfback

Mitchell Pearce saved Nathan Brown’s career

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Scene: C-Bus Stadium, Gold Coast. It’s the twenty-first of April and we’re in round 6 of the 2019 National Rugby League season. At around a quarter to three in the afternoon, the referee blows the whistle for half time.

The Newcastle Knights are down 22 to nil after the worst forty minutes of football in recent memory. The Knights conceded three long range tries to the Titans off the back of errors, compounded with extremely lazy defence.

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The Knights fervently loyal fanbase has endured years of failure since the financial demise of Nathan Tinkler in 2014. The club’s ownership was turned over to the NRL and a horror run followed, including three straight wooden spoons and fielding an historically bad 1-22-1 side in 2016.

The club, under the new ownership of the Wests Group, signed Kangaroos prop, David Klemmer, in the 2018-19 off-season. His acquisition was seen to be the last piece of the puzzle to bring the Novocastrians back into contention, joining young superstar Kalyn Ponga and premiership winning halfback Mitchell Pearce.

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Which 2018 NRL halves combo is working best?

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StatScore, a player rating tool I developed over the off-season, feels like something powerful but I haven’t had a real chance to use it yet. Thanks to Fox League posting individual player stats, I can at least keep updating the scores through 2018 which I was worried I wouldn’t be able to.

But here we are, about one-fifth of the way into the 2018 campaign, and it’s time to start assessing performances. StatScore gives a lot of props to players in the halves, so much so that three of the four top players from the last four seasons have worn the number 7. During the off-season, a lot of the halves shuffled around, including the top line names of Maloney, Cronk, Pearce, Green, Hunt and Marshall. Let’s have a look at how that’s panned out.

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