I think James is dead on. This has been the recurring issue with Ponga too. I will say he’s incredibly dangerous on kick returns but that’s mostly just because he’s liable to make a clean break, but yeah otherwise he’s way more a guy who thrives in structure than an improvisational player. For me he’s almost a reverse Reece Walsh. Ben Hunt at 6 and Reece at 1 often looked clunky because Ben wanted to park on his inside and tee him up; Reece seems constrained by that sort of structure and thrived alongside Ezra, who’s also a very ad lib instinctual player.
I wouldn’t say “Ponga has no instinctual footy in him” (it’s there, but not consistently, and I think he is better at that stuff when the baseline stuff in his game is going well, gives him confidence). But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his periods of top top top tier form came playing outside a half parked inside him on his left who has good organisational ability. And he’s struggled when the half who most frequently posted up on the left has been someone like Kurt Mann or Fletcher, and he’s trying to do some thing where he’s alternating between first & second receiver with them. At best he seems to help their game totally at the expense of his own.
The issue is there are also problems if the guy on his inside presents no running threat or there’s nothing on the other side of the field for the defence to worry about (eg Dom Young leaving seeming to totally **** us up in 2024, Fletcher Sharpe’s pace on the right wing seeming to fix it). I thought that getting a dynamic runner like Fletcher inside Kalyn would help heaps but it didn’t because they couldn’t get in sync, Fletcher can’t read the defensive line and make good decisions in structure as it stands.
Cos yeah obviously if you build your attack around getting Kalyn into certain positions, it becomes predictable. But a team can have predictable, repeatable attack and still be really good in attack (eg Souths, a lot of Roosters teams), and a team can be very improvisational in attack but have bad attack (Canberra every year between 2017 and 2024). The difference is in execution.
You want to have success with Ponga, 1. Get good at teeing him up in his pet positions, where there may not be a single more dangerous player in the game, and 2. Figure out how to set up the side so there are other things to think about & the defence can’t cheat off of purely to shut down Kalyn.
The “not cheating off of” point is important - defences literally do their numbers “wrong” purely to stop Kalyn getting wide 3 on 3’s and 4 on 4’s. That kind of thing is why we’ve seen Joey say he wants us to find a super dynamic running 9: that kind of very different look for the offence which can take advantage of the kind of cheating defences do to contain KP.
