As the players and staff hit the training track on Tuesday, a few of them let me know that it was a big session coming up. They weren’t wrong.

Given that there were only around a dozen players out on the field, with others in the gym, the individual load was heavy.

As noted yesterday, a number of experienced players were due back today (Wednesday), and photos posted by Eels media confirmed the likes of Luca Moretti and Kelma Tuilagi will be amongst that group.

As for the drills themselves, they seemed to come in rapid fire, with the players moved around the various stations set up across two fields. Not only was it rapid fire, it was also seamless in transition, and if I had allowed myself to become distracted for a few minutes, I reckon I might have missed an entire drill.

After the warm ups and a basic passing drill, Nathan Brown led the ball players and support runners through an interesting sequence of skills development.

Firstly, he had the ball players running at defender mannequins and deciding whether they would throw the pass to a runner hitting the inside shoulder or the outside shoulder.

Jezaiah Funa-Iuta

From there the focus looked to change to the ball player digging deeper and engaging the defenders, and technically how to better execute it. I was listening as best I could for the pearls of wisdom, and from what I could pick up Brown was explaining how particular choices might make defenders look in a certain direction and how some spots might be difficult for opponents to see and defend.

There was more physicality in the following drill which required some of the coaching staff to pick up bump pads. Each of the dummy halves led a sequence of play the balls, getting the receiver onto the front for the hit up with the goal of winning the collision.

Let’s just say that there were more than a couple of times when I was glad that I wasn’t holding the bump pad with Sam Tuivaiti running at me like he did at a certain staff member. Sam had such an impressive rookie year. If he follows that up with aggression and confidence, he could be primed for a massive season.

Overall, during this drill I was impressed with the speed of the play, the accuracy of the passes, and the overall sharpness of the group. I had to remind myself of the age of most of this group.

Simultaneously, Scott Wisemantel took a few outside backs and worked on attacking kicks, which meant supporting kicks with a chase, or adding a kick to their repertoire. Basically, for the outside backs it involved kicking to them and kicking by them.

Outside backs Araz Nanva and Moe Alameddine

At this point, the pace of the session went up a notch. There were attacking/defending drills featuring six on three, then snappy three on two stuff. No time for standing around with hands on hips.

It looked as if they wanted to introduce fatigue as the squad completed sets of straight line running between the drills.

No prizes for guessing that Ryley Smith was never headed in any run, with notable efforts from Lachie Coinakis, Mo Alameddine and Teancum Brown.

During this time Joash Papalii and Tallyn Da Silva were working with Lorenzo Talataina on dummy half passing. Lorenzo was linking them, not throwing dummy half passes. And if you’re concerned about Joash practising that skill, I reckon it doesn’t hurt for anyone with a hint of utility value, and especially halves, to be able to snap passes off the ground.

The opposed drills continued one after the other, 6 vs 5, 4 vs 6, then 5 on 5. There were drills to advantage the attackers, then the defenders and even the introduction of defenders hitting the ground. Some of the play was unstructured, whilst at other times it looked to be standard shapes around the ruck.

A bit more skills work and straight line running finished the major part of the session and I departed with the team moving into extras.

There’ll be no field session on Wednesday so my next report should land on Thursday evening.

Eels forever!

Sixties

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