The rise.... and RISE of Marc Pittonet

[kruddler]

By what measure is our "team balance" as you call it better with just Pittonet? That's all I want to know.

How many times do i need to say the same thing?

Go have a look at how much time they spend on the bench when there is 2 of them playing. The first 3 games they played together, they averaged about 60-65% game time each. So that means that we have 1 ruck on the bench for 70-80% of the game.
Essentially meaning we are playing 1 down on the bench for 3/4's of a game.
So because we have basically 1 spot on the bench held up by a resting ruck, all our other players are having to play more game time than we'd like to cover.

What has been our issues most of the year? Largely its been (a lack of) run, chase, pressure and tackling. Now its clear our rucks are not going to improve that area of the game, but our already tired midfield were lacking in that area too. If we gave them another player to rotate through (in place of that 2nd ruck chilling out on the bench) then we have 1 more player to provide that pressure and at the same time give fresher legs to the other mids.
We could rest them deep forward, but once the ball hits the deck, with our 3 talls, we lack the run, chase, pressure and tackling and the balls gets swept away very easily.

So for team balance, we are able to get more run, chase, pressure and tackling by not playing 2 rucks because we generally have 1 of them sitting on the bench for 3/4s of a game.
In turn, we miss a ruck for 1/4 of the game (at most) which we can fill from a variety of other areas, be that SOJ, Young, Harry, Cripps...

If we didn't have Harry then TDK could line up at FF/CHF and give Pittonet a chop out when required and there isn't an issue.
But Harry up forward is better than TDK there.