Harry Grant is one of the smartest players in the NRL and with a rapid Sua Fa’alogo hanging off his hip, turned those smarts into points on Saturday night.

Presented with a scrum start out of yardage, the Storm worked to their points on the field and moved the Sharks line.

It’s a set that doesn’t seem to be for anything more than getting up the field and completing, but Grant and company weren’t going to miss an opportunity against 12 men.

Defending with 12 men in good ball, Will Kennedy was forced to defend in the line. He had to at least act like a defender at A to give the Sharks five from the middle of the field. If he hung back in a more typical fullback position, the Storm would look to skin four defenders in half the field, and likely have succeeded.

It’s a planned action. Fa’alogo is flat and ready to time his run off Grant’s boot. Kennedy has to honour Fa’alogo as a ball-carrier around the ruck here so takes a few steps forward to close the space between himself and the second marker.

Those steps and turning for the ball against Fa’alogo and his timed start are enough to see the Storm fullback win the race.

We so often hear demands of ‘letting the ball sing’ and shifting on shifts against teams down a defender, but the opportunity is often elsewhere. Defensive teams would like nothing more than to slide across the field on shifts for ten minutes. On this occasion, the Storm took advantage of the one spot on the field the Sharks couldn’t cover.

It’s a round half of the competition will barely review themselves. For those playing on, they won’t get much out of watching Round 27 matches of their finals opponents to preview. The big takeaway from the weekend, and a genuine positive out of there being so many dead rubber games is the trial of the kickoff rule.

Plenty of players and coaches made their thoughts well known on the proposed kickoff rule last week. Harry Grant, in particular, didn’t miss the opportunity to highlight the fact this proposed change is being introduced to repair the results of a different changes.

He doubled down again following his last game of the NRL season, too.

“I think everyone in the game's getting quite frustrated with it. I know I am and I've talked to other players in the game. You don't know what constitutes a quick play, what constitutes a slow play-the-ball. We're playing rugby league. We're not playing touch out there, and sometimes it just feels like we are.

No wonder why we get so many people on report, all these penalties. It's because the game is getting to a pace where players are just doing their best and, you know, for me, I worry about the welfare of all players across the across the board. I think we need to collectively look at what that is and what we really want. Do we want to play touch football or rugby league?

There's certainly a lot of frustration throughout the whole game at the minute.”

To their credit, the NRL is completing a decent trial of this proposed changed. But how will they measure it? Will it come down to how often teams used it, or how effective those decisions to use it were?

The Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs hadn’t “apparently forgot about it” when declining the rule to receive the ball when playing against a 12-man Brisbane Broncos. They were making the decision to pin the Broncos in their own end without their best metre-eater, and play into territory to make the best use of the extra man. It shouldn’t be a shock that the Bulldogs, of all teams, wanted to take a patient and grinding approach to their attempted comeback.

In winning the set defensively and forcing a slow play-the-ball on one of Broncos last play kickers, the Bulldogs were able to rush Ben Hunt into a shanked kick from inside his own 40-metre line, winning a penalty and the opportunity to attack themselves.

It took an infringement and six more tackles to get there, but the Bulldogs eventually got to a point where they could fire a shot against a depleted defensive line, and Lachlan Galvin took it.

Directly following the claim from the commentary box that the Bulldogs were “not causing any headaches for the Broncos defence at the moment,” it played out as the attacked planned.

The headache?

It’s in the mind of the defensive fullback trying to set numbers to cover both sides of the ruck. Here, Hayze Perham is late to flip to the shortside. Galvin sees the numbers and pushes Jaemon Salmon in front of him to run a lead and hold up the defender four-in. It’s that space between three and four he runs through to score.

Like early in the season when coaches misused the 19-man bench, we’re seeing some work through this kickoff change in real time. Sure, a few teams rolled the dice and elected to receive the ball when given the chance, but we didn’t often see the benefit.

The St George Illawarra Dragons played from behind and asked to receive the ball following a Parramatta Eels try. They proceeded to kick from inside their own half, lost the territory battle on the following set, and failed to defuse an Eels attacking kick.

When you’re chasing points, it’s easier to do so on the back of a strong defensive set and the field position that comes from it, than when starting a set with two tackles inside the 20-metre line against a set and ready defensive line.

The proposed change would work at some point in a match. There is a use case for it late in games when chasing points, but not at the expense of the fabric of the game and introducing one bad rule to paper over an earlier one.

It has to be Coby Black under the spotlight following an excellent NRL debut.

Premium members knew what was to come from his kicking game: It will be his lethal floating bombs that make the highlight reel after the match. They’re a cheat code at New South Wales Cup level, routinely turning average yardage sets into kick chase opportunities at a bouncing ball, or forcing error and repeat set in good ball.

How he moved the ball against a jamming North Queensland Cowboys edge ended up as the most impressive element of his performance, though. Black repeatedly made the right reads on the edges, getting the Raiders up the field as the Cowboys defence tried to take Kaeo Weekes, in particular, out of the game.

Black kicked a lot of goals to score a lot of points. It’s going to be mentioned as the key memory of his NRL debut. However, if we’re to read into his complete performance with an eye for his future as a long-term first grader, he displayed the traits you want to see in a young half. His kicking game is NRL-ready and he didn’t looked rushed with the ball.

Expect Ethan Sanders to start the preseason as the assumed halfback for 2027, but Black is breathing down his neck. A good summer and some size to help him defensively could see Black run out in the #7 jersey for Round 1.