You keep bringing up stats, wanting to compare players off of stats. The end of your post is precisely why you shouldn’t. It’s a cheap way to compare/judge players as you’re only getting a portion of the picture. That’s why I said going off of the eye ball test, Ponga has shown more ability than Edwards and is actually proving to be one of the games best talents. You only need to watch him.
You read a stat sheet after the game and only see numbers. Says nothing about his freakish talent/ability. Doesn’t show the half chances he creates. Doesn’t show his elite footwork. Doesn’t show him single handily creating something out of nothing in attack and making those around him better. Doesn’t show his positional play. Doesn’t show him putting his body on the line, getting smashed and still not making an error. Lots of things don’t show up on the stat sheet.
In this day and age with fantasy football so popular, I think fans judge players off of that and off of stats. It makes a LOT of fans who don’t consistently watch games misinformed. For example, Aaron Woods has always put up elite numbers for a prop. When you watch him but, he makes no impact, is slow, forces offloads, gets turtled and worked in tackles, has slow play the balls, has poor lateral agility in defence, can be lazy, etc. None of that shows up on the stat sheet, only his 30 tackles, 15 hitups and 150 metres. Looks like he’s all-world when in reality he made little impact on the game and actually has a lot of negatives.
The only reason I used stats was because you brought it up and said Ponga doesn’t dominate Edwards statistically in attack. Looking at his playmaking stats (try assists and line break assists) and actually watching him and seeing most of it is created out of nothing and off the back of his own natural ability – he does dominate Edwards in attack. Stats allude to it and the eye ball test show it tenfold.