Official Sione Katoa

bort

Jaws
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Didn't know you were implying it was immediate or I would have questioned it a bit more haha

We wouldn't drag Miller trade on for months to get Bradbury to then just let an even more valuable back walk to a random club two weeks later.
 

Rob

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Katoa has a massive weakness under the high ball and has been extremely lucky the past 2 years teams haven’t exploited it on us, but it’s only a matter of time till he is exposed again.
He has great kick returns and the best finisher in the NRL, but his defence still has huge question marks on it and if Fitz doesn’t think he can fix it and happy for him to leave so am I.
 

bort

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Katoa has a massive weakness under the high ball and has been extremely lucky the past 2 years teams haven’t exploited it on us, but it’s only a matter of time till he is exposed again.
He has great kick returns and the best finisher in the NRL, but his defence still has huge question marks on it and if Fitz doesn’t think he can fix it and happy for him to leave so am I.
Think this is a bit inflated.

I don't think he has a 'massive' weakness. He's only okay and not a tall winger, but it's not like he's regularly spilling balls. Ronnie just as capable of a random **** up from a kick, but has much higher ceiling as a kick threat. There are definitely opportunities to exploit like if a Tupou or someone is matched on him but Roosters try that a lot not just vs Sione. Kick for centre with a tap back is becoming more common now.

Also how bad his/Ronnies defence is I'm also not sure. They often rush in but I don't know if they are being coached to do that or not.
Often when a winger scores it is not his opposite number who created that space, often has come from further in field. If they shoot and don't make the tackle that's bad, but if they come in because they needed to that isn't their fault.

Question also about reads, does Ramien need help with tackling that centre or not?
How are they positioned against him, how good a one-on-one are they are a runner. Difficult decisions to make and we see a lot of wingers get it wrong in the split second.

Neither Ronnie nor Katoa are exception defenders for sure, but we had the third best defence end of last regular season. We've gotten by okay.

Subjective and statistic (whole story etc) but he sits 67th for wingers* average try causes, Ronnie 77th.
*quite a few aren't wingers or don't have large number of games, although plenty of highly rated names above our guys
 
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