Quote ="Fully"I made this point to someone else. Clark and Roby are two different types of player.
Everything Saints do is off the back of Roby. He makes more dummy runs than any other hooker in the league and they play very much direct and then spread it out later on.
By comparison, Cas don't; look at their stats at hooker for any of our players - we barely register at dummy half because we like to play open rugby and spread the ball out across the line.
Allowing for this helps to understand the stats a bit more. Roby's defensive stats are excellent, no denying and he is clearly a benchmark in Super League. However, in attack it's easy to see why he clocks up so many carries and metres when taking into account the above. Not a criticism, just pointing it out that he's the pivot that makes Saints tick. Despite this, he's only made 60m more and he plays 80 minutes every week too (again, another point to consider when judging stats).
As for Hodgson, Clark beats him in attack and defence. He has 80 missed tackles compared to Clark's 31 or alike and he's only made more tackles because KR have had to do a lot more defending (again adding some context to the stats).'"
Stats are not your friend in this argument...
ignoring the Roby vs Clark argument (which should of been killed dead at the weekend) what you say about Hodgeson is false...
Hull Kr as a team have made LESS tackles than Castleford this season (8044 vs 7957) so as a percentage Hodgson is getting through a much greater proportion of work compared to Clark. In attack, Hodgson has only made around 100m less over the season, and a similar strike ratio (11:11 vs 13:10 try's:try assists) - there is little to choose between them statistically... At best Clark is marginally ahead, but it is far from clear cut...
Since you pull up one thing in particular in missed tackle, one of the major arguments I've seen made in favour of Clark is that he plays x minutes less than Roby so it's not fair to compare Roby's work (almost twice the number of tackles) to his. Surely the flip side of that argument is that his tackle percentages should be up because he's doing far less work?
