It’s an ongoing debate in stadiums, lounge rooms and pubs around Australia – who is the most injury prone player in the NRL?
Now it’s very easy to bag from the sideline. Most of us are has-beens who never really amounted to much more than fourth grade trundlers, but being fantasy players, well it’s just our prerogative.
So last week I put it to you, the NRLCEOs, to put forward your nominations and from there I did what only a stats geek would do. I dived into the stats to find out the result!
Now… there is a massive preface to this blog.
The stats below reflect how many games each of the players have missed from their NRL side since their debut. Sure, some of those games may have been missed due to taking a few weeks to crack the top grade side regularly or weeks dropped due to bad form. So it doesn’t give us an exact reflection to how many weeks each of these players has sat on the pine with injury, but it gives us a pretty good indication.
So without further adieu, let’s delve into it…
So there you go – number one is Edrick Lee!
Poor old Edrick Lee. It’s funny how people get frustrated with Josh Dugan, Steve Matai, Michael Gordon and Paul Gallen, but no one seems to get frustrated with Eddie.
The reason?
It’s not that Eddie misses the odd week due to niggles, the poor bloke has just had two season ending injuries.
The Stanley brothers on the other hand. They have been both soft and unlucky. Between them they have missed a total of 168 games of NRL already. It must be tough to be Mr and Mrs Stanley.
The biggest surprise for me was three players whose names constantly get dragged around in the mud; Chris Lawrence, Steve Matai and Benji Marshall. All three of them have actually played over 75% of games since their debuts. Very impressive performances, despite Matai limping around like a wet flower in 183 of those 189 games.
Be sure to check out more work from Jamie at NRL CEO by clicking here: http://www.nrlceo.com/
