The rise.... and RISE of Marc Pittonet

[LP]

With cripps, bam bam, cerra, hewett and walsh at your feet anyone would have good tap stats.

The ability of our rucks to nullify an opposing ruck is somewhat statistically biased.  You can only compare them to each other as a consequence, so if the stats are a bit all over the shop odds are it's because we have the best clearance player in the comp.

Personally, given we have Cripps, Walsh, Cerra and Hewett, I'd love my ruck to take a toll on the opposition Mids more than win the ruck tap. Win the tap the pill is still in a contest, at best it's 50/50 at that point when everybody is fresh and up and about.

Slow the opposition Mids, make them hesitant or indecisive, and we win the clearance anyway, and we also have a chance of braking opposition momentum. Winning more and more taps is just making more and more 50/50s, I don't like it being fair and square, I want our blokes in the midfield to get a easy ride, free of scragging. All this comes from the ruck work that happens after the tap is won or lost, when we had SpecialK up and about at his best winning the tap was largely irrelevant.

Cripps and Walsh don't need the pill predictably feed down their throat so they get slam tackled, they just needs a split second of hesitance in the opposition's contest and they have won the pill and moved it on before the opposition even can think about what is happening.

As an aside, all this ban the bump rubbish is going to give scraggers a free ride, they'll be attached to blokes like Cripps like limpets, even worse than before. The shepherds, blocks, bumps are a key tool for rucks to control what taggers and scraggers can do to your best players. It's going to diminish the worth of Mumford, Darcy type rucks and boost the value of Blicsav or TDK type rucks, which is a reason why I prefer two rucks, one like Pitto and one like TDK.

Fans do not give enough respect to momentum, they think you can run a pissweak ruck for 5 minutes here and there and just surrender mometum to win it back instantly when the 1st ruck returns, but it's never that simple.