I had a look at the Wikipedia article for 300 game players and I was kind of surprised that Sutton is the first Souths player on the list. The other players on it, strangely, never played for Souths at all.
Digging into it, there are only 13 other players who have 300 games for a single club, and just about everyone on the list reached the milestone in the last 30 years, most in the last 10 or so.
Clearly, all the extra games in the modern game plays a part.
Anyway, congrats to him. A far more durable career than many would have guessed at when he was younger with errors galore in him.
Not only all the extra games but also the more modern methods of dealing with injury. If you think back as little as 15 - 20 years ago for example, if you ruptured your ACL that was a career ending injury. Nowadays, players are back in around 8 months or so. It's conceivable that if a player ruptured an ACL in the last game of the season, they could well be back and ready for the first game of the next season. GI did his in game one last year and if we'd have made the finals, I'm reliably informed that he would have played in them.
The fact that we haven't had one or two more 300 gamers is probably testament to how poor we were in the years following reinstatement. Any young bloke with a bit of talent went elsewhere and we really struggled to attract any marquee players for 20 years or so.
In a lot of ways, Sutto is an anomaly. He really should have played rep footy at some point but he never did, mainly because he stuck with Souths and our overall shitness for many of those years affected his ability to be picked in rep sides. However, on the flip side of that, I think he spent a fair bit of his NRL career in cruise control as well. Happy to bob along as a big fish in the small pond. On top of this, I don't think being moved around to 5/8 and even centre in the early days, helped him either. He is and always has been a back rower.
I guess the prime example of what Sutto could have achieved would be someone like Braith Anasta. Braith was never as talented as John but he chased premierships and always went to competitive teams and as a result he made a few rep teams as well.
When Sutto really puts in, he is a great footballer. If you look at him this year, he's probably one of the top three back rowers in the competition and he's absolutely killing it. Last three years however... Not so much.
Anyway, it's an amazing achievement and well deserved. I hope we can get a win for him on the weekend.
