In all seriousness, I reckon Klemmer has dropped around 10 KGs from those days and that has had a significant impact on his performances....It started to become noticeable last year and has regressed further this year.
Although he still eats out metres, his physical presence isn't there at first contact and that has really detracted from his impact at the line in defence and attack.
I have been taking notice and if you watch nearly every first tackler now on Klemmer, they tend to go for a 2 arm grab to wrap the ball up, which has nullified his off loading and the rest then go high/low bring him to ground and tend to get an extended go at removing the arms and slowing the game down by the referees...I think Klemmer also doesn't do himself any favours by complaining and giving the referees a gob full when it happens because the refs seems to 'switch off' to it because he complains all the time in the tackle.
It does make it seem that he is 'only going through the motions' but I think the intentional change in body mass for the modern game by the coaching staff has been the main reason the player in those videos isn't as effective as he was
Yeah really good analysis mate. They’ve had him drop weight I think to help with his mobility & fitness, particularly to help shore up the defence through the middle I think, and he’s still yet to be at fault for any line breaks, but he has just lost any physical dominance he once had. But his game was always based on size and momentum, he’s not one of these guys who can win the ruck with a bit of late footwork, so yeah he’s basically just a body, albeit one that gets through a lot of works and rarely makes errors.
It’s easy for us to sit here and say the coaching staff messed up, but one could argue with our injuries we’ve needed a guy who can play 65-75 minutes in the middle without dropping off (and, going by the eye test, I think he’s underrated as a clean up/dirty work guy through the middle third - I feel we lose more rucks defensively, give up more offloads etc in tackles he’s not involved with) and if he was still a 120kg+ monster we might have conceded even more points.
Very worrying that his offload has been contained, but even more worrying is that last year he added a bit of passing in our shifts through the middle third and now that’s gone. I feel like he understood last year that if he catches an offload he should pass it straight away, yet he bombed a try on the weekend by stupidly going himself. He needs to get that back. Part of why the Roosters, Panthers etc move the ball down the field so easily is because players like Radley & Yeo especially, but also to some extent JFH, Liu, Taukeiaho etc will throw that extra pass going to the line in yardage sets. All of a sudden you can’t compress the line too much with four men on one player - if you over commit on Klemmer or Barnett, you’ve got Saifiti, Frizell etc one on one with a smaller defender or pushing between two players in the line easily winning a quick play the ball. What these teams do is easier said than done - if it was easy, everyone would do it instead of play it safe with one out hit ups - and it was way clunkier in early 2018 (for the Chooks) and early 2020 (for the Panthers) when they really started bringing this extra bit of adventurousness and subtlety to their work, but we have players capable of doing it I think.