Sounds poor. Thought lots of players were off their game from the outset from both sides last night despite the tremendous intensity and commitment obviously.
How does Luai rank defensively for missed tackles as a half through year throughout the competition?
Don't have stat's but would think he is above average as a defender in his position.
The most underrated part of luai's game. People think he's a poor defender somehow, or look at a stats sheet of missed tackles and avoid tackles going for a hit rather than wrapping the ball up, and some 'falling off' tackles which are intentional.
Here's a fact. In regular season and finals this year, the left side of penrith is the best defensive edge in the NRL conceding only 21 tries all season. That is less than 1 try a game on average. Now we look at who is on that left edge for penrith. Turuva/To'o throughout the year (turuva's defence on the right was shocking. At centre: Taylan May for the first half of the year, then Alamoti, then he gets injured and young rookie Casey Maclean comes in, then Alamoti returns. At second row, sorenson is in and out of the team all year with a niggling hamstring injury, garner develops his game to a new level, and mav geyer fills in. But the constant? Luai.
Another area of his game this year was the stepping back in that looks repetitive and annoying to watch, but it fractures defences and is unpredictable no matter how many times he does it. He did some of it in origin at 5/8 and for penrith, but when he was halfback he was much straighter. In the last few years before this one, he was known as probably the best half at giving early ball and setting up his outside men, because he's had some guns in Crichton, Kikau, Burton, To'o, Tago and others. However this year, he had to adapt to sorenson being out for a big part of the year, Taylan May who was more of a winger than centre, as well as rookie centres in alamoti and maclean, with turuva not known as a prolific try scorer. This stepping motion was mainly when he was first receiver on the latter part of the tackle counts. Watch the GF, instead of going right, Luai loops a 20 metre left-to-right pass to Cleary after identifying a haunched over Shawn Blore and nathan puts martin through for a key try just before half-time.
