I’m going to throw out there that maybe he was never that good and could run around looking good whilst Hooker protected his man, mopped up when he didn’t mark, takes intercepts to protect him in 1v1s.
Last year he sucked until Hooker went back, then appeared to come good. Now Hooker is out he sux again.
He’s never been a really good one on one defender but he has been a very good play maker from the backline. The problem now is that we leave our backline so open he can’t possibly zone off anymore & instead is left having to compete against multiple forwards when the oppositions mids get clear & settled inside 50’s.
Whoever decided that he should drop size and be a hbf instead of a key position backmen should be fired and left in the gutter.
He got beaten clearly by okeefe…OKEEFE!!!
He is not a leader down there, anytime anything goes wrong he drops his head. Hooker on the other hand leads from the front, head up, shouts instructions.
imo I don’t think he even picked up a weight during his ban year. He looked so thin when they came back in for the pre season in 2017. Then we tried to turn him into an attacking HBF for some moronic reason
My theory is that his body is caput we know he has had issues with his wrists and his back(?) a combo of the two chronic conditions would make it very hard to do much strength work. He clearly isn’t as strong as he used be and that affects his 1-on-1 work, which dents his confidence, it would also explain why the coaches tried to cut him down to a running rebounding tall
Tend to disagree, he’s first game if I remember correctly he held he’s own with tredrea in the one on ones, he was super strong. He’s a shell of he’s former self sadly, the confidence off the bloke is shot after being beaten in the contest
He’s had some stand out games against top opponents scattered across a decade but he’s never been able to consistently do that over an extended period & post his wrist issues he’s never going to be able to be that dour defender who shuts down the key forwards week after week especially with the way we allow easy entry.
Personally I’d say multiple seasons not part of one then some here & there but consistently being reliable.
Its hard to say which injury has restricted him more but he certainly has lost his marking & spoiling abilities which at least appears to be closer related to his wrists. He doesn’t appear to be greatly restricted in his general movement & agility.
He never moved to defence until 2014, in which he was in AA contention by the end of the year, was the clear AA by the next. Then, at the absolute peak of his career, the suspensions happened.
Prior to that… The only thing he brought to the table as a forward was his one-on-one and body work, it certainly was never his marking. Plus, he’d regularly get moved back, and not because we needed somebody to get 30 loose touches, but because a big forward had got out of hand and Hurley had to stop them.
Prior to 2017, his entire career was built on being a consistent one-on-one player, and a damn strong one.
As for which injury hurt him the most… Who knows? But his wrists were cooked about 5 years before he suddenly couldn’t defend anymore.