Josh King is a completely different player and used completely different, He's used like a 3rd prop because they have so much creativity in the halves but also need him to get them metres because they don't play like us. That's for Tino, Moe and the others in our team right now. Yeah he was rolling his sleeves up because it was fresh into the season and we'd lost Fermor and Jolliffe and were figuring out the gameplan and subs still, He was asked to do more running those games.The 3 players named yes are at the top of the tree. I could have mentioned Josh King who is an honest toiler at the NRL level who is averaging 13.4 runs per game and 124 meters gained per game and does this consistently every game. Lui stats are well down on even at this level.
I could go on with the majority of locks in all the clubs but it is clear Lui is not sharing the workload and his stats are reflective of this. Remember he is one of the higher paid players in the club and as such he should be consistently putting in the effort each week in attack as well. There is a large gap between his good and bad performances in terms of effort in attack which needs to be corrected.
Lui has shown in the past he can do the workload and in fact the 1st 2 rounds he was rolling up his sleeve and doing the hard yards. Since then he has fallen off the perch
I think a lot of the reason we're using him like this is because Verrills is out as well, We're losing his creativity there so we've asked Liu to be that other guy for now behind the main 3.
The stat I'd counter with is receipts and passes to say he's been involved, He was off against Broncos no denying but if you look at every locks minutes and compared them to Liu over the season, He's getting the ball and passing it as much as those guys in his playing time or more as a first receiver, He's being heavily involved because those passes are going to Tannah or Foran.
A lot of stats like that need to be in context to be taken seriously for me, Eg: with tackles breaks, Munster had 12 the other week but the reason he had them is because he was shutting down all the plays and other guys finished off his first contact. Every try and assist on our left side should be counted to Fifita but everyone else gets them. It all needs context.
I don't think he's one of the highest paid players at the club either, He's mid tier around 600k at most. We can talk about this game but I thought last week was a huge reason why we won, especially his play in the last 10.
I've learnt since the start of the season that 80% of stats are crap and the rest important. There needs to be a whole bunch of new categories to make them contextual.