@jirskyr said in [Tigers should be heavyweights](/post/1236805) said:
Ramy Haidar is a flog, wannabe journalist. In reality he's a podcast / blogging enthusiast, as much as a punter as anyone on this forum. I appreciate his vigour for rugby league commentary, but I mostly find his arguments to be wafer-thin, and for someone who enthuses analysis, I find his conclusions to be extremely porous.
Case in point this article, his arguments are:
(a) Tigers should be a competition heavyweight because 1 million Sydney-siders reside in the junior catchments over 10 councils; and
(b) Tigers should be heavyweight because they have big social media presence
(c) Tigers should be heavyweight because they draw strong AWAY crowds, JUST LIKE ST GEORGE DOES
(d) 1900 caps is your ideal target for total team experience, based on average of premiers, and Tigers are over-experienced the past 3 years.
Now (a) is a silly population-based argument that says population size should be an indicator of success. Under that assumption, China are the world's best footballing nation and Melbourne Storm are a dominant side because they represent 5 million Melburnians.
Ramy doesn't even define whether he's counting the population strictly inside the junior district boundary, or the population of every council that touches the junior district area. In other words, is he including 100% of the Hills District LGA if 5% of the Hills District LGA falls inside a Tigers juniors boundary? I can't see how Ramy could possibly calculate the population strictly within a football junior boundary; I don't believe such data exists.
(b) Only tells you that people follow Tigers media. That may be an indicator of the strong engagement by the Tigers media department, or it may simply be a brand people like to follow. Ramy does not provide an argument as to how or why that should lead to on-field success. Social media following, for example, may or may not translate into actual crowd figures or funding or membership, but he doesn't present that argument.
In fact Ramy presents the counter-argument, that Tigers have 44% more social media followers than the NM Kangaroos. Well North Melbourne have 38K members and Tigers have 18K, so it shows clearly that social media really has no bearing whatsoever on people putting their money down, unless Ramy is suggesting Tigers should have 55K members (44% more than North Melbourne), which would be 25K more members than any other NRL club.
(c) Is a pretty dumb argument. Where is the home crowd data? Away crowds are fine but not as strong an indicator of home crowds. For example, away crowds might be good because Tigers often play in Sydney at neutral venues (i.e. Bankwest) and therefore an "away" game is as good as a "home" game. It might also be that Tigers are only 43% win rate and you might enjoy going to see your team have a good chance of beating Tigers.
What Ramy actually has not taken into account is Tigers typically pull a massive crowd for Easter Monday against Eels, regardless of who is actually the "home" side, and it has a very large bearing on the annual average crowd for Tigers.
St George apparently have the best away crowds and clearly that means diddly-squat for their output since 2010.
Argument (d) has to be possibly the dumbest one he provides. That you should aim for less experience because the average experience of the premiers is X. Ramy assumes that high # caps equates to retaining "big reputations" and losing juniors. But there is no reason why that should hold, because you may in fact retain your juniors and buy big reputations, because there is no limit on "experience" purchasing and there's no specific necessity to play inexperienced players.
You might assume that experience roughly equates to cost or age, so the roster should be rounded out with some young guys and some old guys, but it totally fails to take into account the more journeymen-type players who might have experience but be quite cheap (e.g. your Jeremy Latimore-type footballers, or even a 1-clubber like Aubusson). Or you may in fact be very good at retaining your juniors and they now have decent experience, such that you don't need to keep blooding young kids because your roster is so stable.
And I can quickly kill the (d) argument by one example - Melbourne Storm 2020. Their 2020 roster is 2,279 caps, which is about what Tigers carried in 2018 - and something Ramy specifically criticised. And this has a very clear explanation: because Cam Smith has 429. Take Smith out and the Storm are much closer to the "sweet spot", but obviously that would be the absolutely stupidest thing to do to the Storm in 2020.
In fact I have a better one - Roosters 2020 roster is carrying 3,309 caps right at this moment. This is because they already have highly experienced and stable stalwarts - Aubusson, JWH, Jake Friend all clocking 200 games, then a raft of 100+ proven players like Tedesco, Tupou and Keary. Then of course they astutely signed the Morris twins who have about 550 games just between them, and by Ramy's argument you don't want to sign the Morris boys because they are too experienced and you are paying for "their reputation" at the expense of rookies.
Newsflash Ramy, you don't need to worry about rookies if your third premiership tilt includes two of the smartest and most consistent club backline footballers going around. Especially if you brought in one of those footballers because of injury to your juniors, rather than the juniors being let go.
Roosters, the repeat and possibly tri-peat premiers, according to Ramy, have TOO MUCH EXPERIENCE. Not just by a small margin either, by 1400 games above average for a premiership side, including (I assume), their own premiership sides. Just such a dumb argument, I wanted to pick it to shreds.
Wests Tigers should be a force fundamentally because the idea is that every team is supposed to have a turn at being a top-level side eventually. Your turn is supposed to come around, but for Tigers it just hasn't. But there's no other specific reason why Tigers should out-perform Penrith or Parramatta or Bulldogs just based on geography and social media.
