NRL Odds: Slater Feeling The Strain
December 18th, 2014 by TJ DilferThere’s no sense denying that Rugby League is an incredibly physical game – just have a look at the footage from the first minutes of the Grand Final and you’ll see all you need to see to convince you of that. The guys who run out week after week for their NRL franchises are astonishingly brave, and they repeatedly put their bodies on the line – there are always going to be injuries. The wear-and-tear that every NRL side suffers over the course of the season can be a real factor, in fact, in the NRL odds that you’ll see at the end of the link there.
But whether that’s a good thing or not depends on who you ask. Whilst the armchair warriors (and we’d include a few pundits in there…) like to tell us the big hits are a crucial part of the game, you can understand plenty of others (team physios included!) disagreeing. In fairness, you don’t often hear players complaining about the big impacts, but you do sometimes hear them, and the coaches, talking about the difficulties of a long season. And we were interested this week to see Billy Slater adding his thoughts on the subject: he could live with a shorter season, he says.
The 30-week season could live with being shortened when the renewal of the current TV rights deal comes up in 2018, says Slater, but there’s another issue for elite players: when you throw in the Auckland Nines, an All-Star match, State of Origin and international duty, you get what adds up to a gruelling physical and mental endurance test that no modern player can pass unscathed. It’s got to the stage where Slater considers his recent shoulder surgery a ‘blessing’, as it excused him from international duty and gave him a chance to prepare properly for the 2015 season. And he almost went so far as to pinpoint the problem as we see it: is the NRL about the game or about profit for the companies involved? It’s difficult to deny that in recent years a few decisions have leant too far towards the latter, and the extra games are part of that process. That being said, we won’t be judging you for looking to make a little bit of money off a bet on the NRL in 2015 – in fact, we’ve got so far as to point you towards a few futures and markets that you might like the look of, if you follow this link: NRL odds…
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