NRL = Not Really Likely

Speculation of AFL clubs enticing top NRL players is rife at the moment. Anyone on an NRL roster, it seems, is fair game for speculation. Israel Folau, Billy Slater, Greg Inglis — it just goes on and on, with Karmichael Hunt already on the books for GC17.

 

Let’s look at the problems these athletes would encounter transferring to AFL:

• Kicking
  Rugby League players don’t have a need to kick with precision in the same way as AFL players in the modern era. And not everyone on an NRL roster has licence to kick. Kicking is perhaps the most difficult, and most fundamentally-required of the Aussie rules skills.
• Stamina
  Rugby League players require acceleration and hitting power, even the runners like Slater. It’s rare for them to run more than perhaps twenty metres in one effort. Modern AFL requires the stamina of a marathoner and the speed of a sprinter.
• 360º pressure
  Rugby league pits one team in a line across the field against the other team in a line across the ground. Pressure and tackling is anticipated front on, or perhaps to the side. Aussie rules is a full 360º sport, 100% of the time. 360º awareness will take considerable time to acquire.
• Body shape
  NRL players carry a great deal more ‘condition’ than their AFL counterparts because momentum is such a crucial part of NRL. Mass × velocity = momentum. A heavier player hits the defensive live with more momentum, tiring out opponents and potentially opening up opportunities for breakouts.
  
  As Bombers fans, AussieRulesBlog recalls a season when the great James Hird overdosed on the weights during preseason and began the season looking like someone had surgically implanted a professional wrestler’s shoulders and chest onto his relatively slight frame. Hird wasn’t worth a drink of water for many weeks until he’d sloughed off that extra ‘condition’. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that NRL types losing their ‘condition’ will be different athletes than their former selves.
  
  In recent times, only Mal Michael comes to mind as a genuinely big, heavily muscled player who succeeded at the elite level (and it’s questionable whether he could be as effective in the game as it’s being played in 2010).
  

There’s no doubt that Hunt has been a valuable PR tool, but we’re yet to see any athletic contribution other than a very nice advertisement that may or may not have been shot somewhere in the vicinity of Paris and may or may not have required two days worth of takes to get the ball handling looking vaguely right.

 

From our uninformed position down here in “Mexico”, we get the distinct impression that NRL players often have difficulty in transferring to rugby union and having a major impact and those two codes clearly have much more in common that do NRL and Aussie rules.

 

Will Hunt, Slater, Inglis, Folau or someone of similar ilk be the next big thing in AFL? NRL = Not Really Likely.