Was it a try or a miracle?

There's a famous try that gets played over and over again when State of Origin comes along. 

You know the one, Mark Coyne, Queensland, and the famous words uttered by Ray Warren:

“that's not a try, it's a miracle!”  

Fast forward to 2025, and a try that went viral on socials in no time was also placed in the ‘phenomenal' category. 

The Canberra Raiders were 20-18 down with a little over two minutes to play against the Cronulla Sharks. 

They were near the halfway line, when Channel 9 commentator Matthew Thompson predicted that the half back, Jamal Fogarty, was going to put the ball on the boot.  

You see, that's what normally happens on the last play of the set. The ball often goes to one of the halves ready for a kick of some sort. In anticipation, the opposition drop their wings back, with the full-back and wings forming a back three defensive ‘pendulum'.  

What also happens, is defenders near the ruck - often the ‘C' defender (third one from each side of the play the ball) - ‘rush' the halves, to try and pressure the kick. 

On this occasion - in the 79th minute of this Round 5 clash in the nation's capital - the Sharks' ‘C'' defender was nowhere to be seen, and instead, the ‘A' and ‘B' defenders (one and two away from the ruck) made a piecemeal attempt to pressure Fogarty from his inside. 

At this juncture, the Canberra left-sided players have decent attacking shape – namely, they are spread across the left of the field, and they have ‘eyes up,' meaning they are (in theory!), taking in what is happening on the Sharks defensive line. 

Either they or Fogarty (or a combination of both) will have noticed that, from the place where Fogarty had the ball in his hands (approximately right down the halfway mark of the field in line with the centre circle) Cronulla only had four defenders in their defensive line to Fogarty's left. They also likely predicted this because it's what happens on last-tackle plays all the time!  

Wings drop back for kicks, remember.

So why is the fact Cronulla had four defenders in the defensive line important?  

Our game is thirteen v thirteen.

In attack, thirteen players are allowed to attack.

In defence, there are often two players at marker and one fullback. That leaves ten players in the defensive line.  

So, for a play-the-ball in line with the midway mark of the field as we look up and down it from posts to posts, a well-organised defence would have five defenders on each side of the play the ball. It's a very common tactic at high levels of the game for attackers to wait for that moment when there are only four defenders where there really should be five.  

On this occasion, the play-the-ball wasn't on the midway mark, Fogarty had received the ball there, so Cronulla's defence was essentially caught even more out of position.  Fogarty caught the ball with two hands clean off his chest, and had his own ‘eyes up' along with his left-sided teammates.  

So, instead of doing what the conventional wisdom of our game suggests he should have done on the last tackle (kick it!) Forgarty passed it to his left-edge back-rower, Hudson Young, who - to confirm he had been looking at the defensive line - made an incisive run which was hard for the Sharks defenders to stop.

Refusing to die with the ball, throwing caution to the wind, Young offloads the ball back on the inside to a supporting teammate who passed it straight on to another, who in turn passed it straight on to Xavier Savage, who, by this time, had found himself in midfield. So essentially, the ball was back where it started, except about 18 metres further advanced down the field.  

Savage, himself a man of pace, vision, skill - and, importantly - match-winning quality, rolled a grubbing kick through to the right, and the on-rushing right-side attack nearly overran the natural flight of the ball. Matthew Timoko, the Raiders centre, re-adjusted and pulled off an audacious flick pass behind to Simi Sasangi, who charged towards the line and offloaded to Sebastien Kris, who went over to score.

The Raiders scored 25% of their points for the evening in that one play and the kick that followed. 

The commentator, Thompson, called it an ‘absolute miracle'.

Hyperbolic? Sure. Yet, this kind of play is so rarely seen in our game these days that he can be forgiven for his excitement, particularly due to his role in the game and also the late, match-clinching drama that this ‘miracle' provided.  

But all the Canberra Raiders were doing in that moment was what they would have done as children when playing in the local park or backyard. With no coaches in sight, or, if they were, they certainly didn't try and change their techniques.  

The Raiders players were simply supporting each other and looking for space. Sometimes they would run forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes sideways... and one decided to kick! If they got caught with the ball in the process, they turned to offload to that supporting player.

The players ran in support because they knew there was a chance they would receive the ball. A far higher than normal chance, actually.

The kind of set described above seemed to happen throughout every game when Ben and Shane Walker coached the 2015 Ipswich Jets in the Queensland Cup.  

Coaching a team that had players earning less than half that of all their opponents, the Walker boys said at the time that they were coaching in a way to “emphasise playing to our players' strengths”.

It would see their players do what the Raiders did in that 78th minute, throughout an entire game! 

“If you've got someone who kicks a good 40-20, then you're going to get yourself into a position to kick 40-20s. If you have a player who naturally has an offload or step, you're not going to discourage them from using them,” Shane Walker told Fox Sports in August 2015. 

A few weeks later, the Ipswich Jets won their first (and only), Queensland Cup Premiership, and followed up by winning the National State Championship, too. 

A Queensland team would not win that particular title for another decade.  

“In the immediate term, you've got to deal with the players you've got and develop a game plan around their strengths”.

Walker went on to describe how sets completed in the conventional ‘North-South' manner often take approximately 30 seconds to complete, but the brothers were actually more concerned with realtime spent with the ball (seconds and minutes) in possession, and also encouraged minimal ‘wrestling' in defence, to ensure the opposition didn't have the ball for long, either. 

“You can do five hit-ups and the defence doesn't have to work or think. You're challenged physically but not mentally or often at times laterally.

“We try and challenge the defence on each play where they haven't moved up,” he said.

“The whole defensive line has to come up and (is) forced into make a decision about what we're doing.”

The Walker boys are essentially lost to the coaching business now. No NRL team requested their services, as a lot of the commentary went in the general direction of ‘this won't work in the NRL'. 

Rugby league's tactical leanings towards the cautious, won the day yet again. 

But did the Canberra Raiders not prove that it can work in the NRL? The Sharks certainly didn't have an answer to it!

On every play-the-ball, the game (if you do things right) is essentially ‘13 v 10' because, remember, take two markers and a fullback out, and there is only ten defenders left in the front line.  Throw in the principles of 'passing the ball to someone in a better position than you', props and back rowers running in order to gain ‘little wins' in creating space for the next play, and everyone aiming for quick play-the-balls, the 13 should ‘win' the play the majority of the time, getting at least a passive tackle, or at best, a partial or full line break. 

Of course, during any game of football, there are ‘phases' of the game: times when teams can attack in a full on, frantic way, and other times where they are under pressure, and have to sit in possession, grind out a set, and get the ball down to the opposite end of the field.

Not for one moment am I suggesting every team should play exactly like the 2015 Jets on every single set, but I sure wish we'd see a lot more of it!  

It is hugely important that offensively, teams don't become too readable because opposition coaches study each attack forensically before a contest, and, during it, players and teams subconsciously react to patterns and trends on the field. If a team is regularly taking the ball directly in for two or three tackles before the halves touch it, then a smart coach in the opposition dugout and the smart defensive teams will pick up very quickly what's going on.  

In the same round as the Raiders' miracle, Souths were trying to manipulate the Roosters to expose their right edge (Souths left) defense, in order to bring a returning Lattrell Mitchell into the fray during the first half. But they ran the predictable plays, the two or three carries first, and the Roosters read this like a kids' novel, and Souths ran out of room to play.   

I see this happen regularly in the NRL and Super League, and yes, it frustrates me!

When it comes down to this kind of play, the team that can overpower the other tends to win the day in the first half an hour, and the team behind on the scoreboard tends to throw some caution to the wind and try to play some more free-flowing football to claw back some initiative. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

But a lot of that depends on how much the players' skills - the ones they learned as kids in the park - continue to be harnessed by their coaches all along the development - and into the elite - pathways.  

We'd all love to see more of the ‘miracle' type play, though, wouldn't we? 

Lee Addison is a former Sea Eagles and Panthers coach and the founder of rugbyleaguecoach.com.au. His recently published book ‘Rugby League Coach' is available now on Amazon.