Poupou Escobar
Post Whore
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He doesn’t really need to though. He’s about the same size as Billy Slater, and there are downsides to increased size, just as there are advantages. He’s more than big enough for an NRL fullback.
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He doesn’t really need to though. He’s about the same size as Billy Slater, and there are downsides to increased size, just as there are advantages. He’s more than big enough for an NRL fullback.
And look at how he turned out. If you're good enough size doesn't matter.
100% correct. They all said Thurston and Langer were too small. It doesn’t mean shit. Slater wasn’t massive, didn’t mean shit. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it, end of story.
I don't know how Langer would go now. He would be such a liability in defense they would maybe need to try to play him at fullback. The small guys are useless at wrestling and try line defense.
The good players just manage. Langer managed. He used his whole body to bring down the big boys.
Langer played when you were allowed to trip merkins.
Banning the shoulder charge was the end of Sandow. Langer was lucky they banned tripping after he became entrenched as a legend of the game.
Being too small has cost a heap of players/people a career in the NRL where if they were 15kgs heavier they would have been very good. People whose names we don't even know.
Sandow made a bunch of "great" bootlace type tackles on big guys that in 80s, 90s would have been great defense but just led to fast play the balls unfortunately. He could not wrestle and would just be shrugged off. In another era he could have been anything.
Sterling was small too. Another great player.
There's a lot more decoys these days, which ties up those edge forwards and helps isolate the halves.
Back then, ankle tackles were the epitome of great defence. Nowadays it's considered poor technique to make first contact below the ball. The exception is cover defence.
Back then locks still played wider than second rowers in defence. Or more accurately, when teams split their back row left-middle-right, number 13 was generally one of the edge forwards. Glenn Stewart was one of these, and we saw when he went to Souths he switched to jersey 11, even though he was already playing out wide at Manly. Nathan Hindmarsh started as an edge player but by 2005 he was firmly entrenched as a middle forward. However he kept the number 11 jersey because why not. Wagon and Morrison (and Widders) were the edge forwards that year.
Totally agree. I am only writing off Hopgood at this point.
