Nathan Cleary has his issues but I think a lot of people need to look at more contributing factors to why our attack is bad, it’s not bad because Nathan Cleary isn’t Shaun Johnson, it’s bad because there is literally no plan, unless of course you count passing to kikau and hope he barges over 4 players to score as a game plan. Even James Maloney, a proven creative half struggles massively in our system.
Our attacking coaches whoever they may be have a lot and I mean a lot to be held accountable for, we have no set plays, we refuse to use forwards as decoys, our forwards don’t even run good lines, there’s a reason why wingers don’t score much tries at Penrith, it’s not because they’re bad players or anything it’s because at other clubs a wingers job is to fall over the try line, when was the last time a Penrith winger ever did that because I seriously can’t remember, they usually have to score some freakish try in the corner.
As time goes by I think more and more people are realising how stupid it was to let Moylan go because with him we had sweeping plays and he always knew which pass to throw, go short or cut out 1 or 2 players, or throw the dummy and go himself, in today’s game a ball playing fullback is pretty much essential because of how slow the game is played at, they create an extra man In attack. In today’s game halves have almost become obsolete, you could count on one hand the amount of truly consistent top halves in today’s era, and none of them compare to the great halves of years past, I mean ffs Cooper Cronk will go down as an all time great even though he is a textbook 7/10 halfback, has a good kicking game and competes well, compared to Andrew Johns he’s not even in the same stratosphere.
A lot of people say we over paid Nathan Cleary and I agree with that, problem is nearly every single half today is not on anything near what they’re actually worth, the market for halves is a shit show, okay Nathan isn’t worth 900k, but is Milford worth 1 mill? Is Moses worth 850k? Hunt 1.2 mill? I could go on and on and on, truth is most halves are on around double what they’re actually worth, maybe we shouldn’t have paid Nathan more than 500 but I guarantee you there would be clubs out there that would have thrown a lot more at him because there is a shortage of halves out there.
