Phil Clarke: The kick has become the most important skill in rugby league

Phil Clarke analyses the importance of attacking kicks in the modern game...

What’s the most important skill in a game of rugby league? The late, great Jack Gibson (the father of the modern day game) would probably say the tackle. If your opponents don’t score you can’t lose.

Learning the skills to stop the man and the ball requires tenacity and technique, and most players have these now. As each season moves on the defensive awareness of players and teams increases and it becomes even harder to score.

More significantly, it’s the outcome of the attacking kicks that matter, and it’s becoming so important that a team’s season and a coach’s career can depend on it.

Most teams attempt to break through the opposition in a similar manner. The rules of the sport and the nature of the game limit the ways in which teams can strike, and as a result we’re starting to see a similarity in the way that teams attack. I know that some take more risks than others but if you put one team in all white and the other all blue, you’d struggle to tell one team from another.

Some sides offload the ball more often and more effectively than others, and some players have perfected the art of a short pass, delivered so late that the defenders can’t readjust. A few teams have players who are more accurate at long passes, stretching their opponents and looking to exploit the gaps, but these skills are becoming less important as the game evolves.

Important

Nowadays, the most important skill is the kick. Whether you like it or not, kicking the ball has the biggest effect on the outcome of the game. When a team gets towards the end of their six tackles, more often than not they choose to put boot to ball. Sometimes this is to simply put as much distance as possible from their own tryline.

More significantly, it’s the outcome of the attacking kicks that matter, and it’s becoming so important that a team’s season and a coach’s career can depend on it. The improvement by teams in reading the attacking plays of their opponents means that they’re declining more running plays. However, defending against kicks is a bit harder to do.

Live First Utility Super League

Surprisingly, for some who felt it was much higher, only 10 per cent of the tries in Super League this year came from kicks, but you can double that figure if you look at a kick being involved in the play that sets up the try.

Whenever I speak to a coach whose team are not playing well, they invariably say that their attacking game hasn’t been good enough. Well that hasn’t been the case for Hull KR or Salford this season.

The Robins have scored 14 of their 30 tries with kicks involved in creating the points (45 per cent), while the Reds – with Michael Dobson and Rangi Chase doing most of the kicking – have crossed the line nine times due to the effect of a kick.

Neither of these teams were fancied by the experts to be in the top four this season, but the four points that they keep picking up from their kicks keeps sending them up the Super League ladder.