Everyone we have is a workhorse?
These are middle forwards we are talking about. They are the busiest blokes on the field.
Being somewhere in the upper-right box means the player has a high work-rate in both attack and defence. The closer you are to the far right corner makes you more of an overall workhorse.
One way to understand the quadrant would be...
- Paul Gallen would be jammed in the top right corner (heaps of metres and tackles)
- Andrew McCullough would be jammed in the top left corner (heaps of tackles, bugger all metres)
- Talakai v Manly would be jammed in the bottom right corner (heaps of metres, not many tackles)
- A player who wasn't involved at all would be jammed in the bottom left corner (didn't run or tackle)
- Most second rowers would probably fall somewhere well above the horizontal line, but very few would be towards the right (more tackling than running)
A middle who plays 20 minutes, runs 30-35 metres, and makes 6-8 tackles would land right on the crosshairs... because at 80-minutes pace that is 120-14 metres and 25-30 tackles. Decent without being outstanding.
20 minutes on the filed is 10 minutes with the ball, so maybe 7-8 sets of six for each team If you have an 8 metre run half in half your team's sets, and make 1 tackle in each of the opposition's sets while you are on the field, that's pretty much a bog-standard stint for a bench middle - so you land on the bullseye.
In saying all of that, the purpose of that quadrant is to show the player's defensive output versus their attacking output. It's not meant for comparing players. If you want to see who actually gets through the most work on the field by comparison, that's a different quadrant, because it needs to consider minutes played. That one is coming once I've done the other 3 guys (Kaufusi, Colquhoun, Hazelton).
