A couple of years ago, all but one member of the NSW Blues squad sat on the team bus outside Perth’s Optus Stadium after training, waiting to return to the team hotel.
The one player yet to board: Nathan Cleary.
Is Nathan Cleary’s approach to training doing more harm than good?Credit: Getty
Back inside the stadium, he was walking around the ground and trying to visualise all the angles of a rectangular rugby league field on an oval stadium. It can be trickier than you think. He was assessing the wind and how it liked to swirl. He would practise some general play kicks and then work on his goalkicking. He kept going through every last detail, over and over again.
After about an hour on the bus, the message came through that we had better leave. He still wasn’t ready to finish training.
The moral of the story? Nathan’s greatest asset, which has made him the game’s best player, is also making him one of the most susceptible to injury.
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His work ethic is absolutely relentless and the reason why he could be on a path to being a future Immortal.
But after a while, there’s only so much your body can take. The stories of him being out on the field longer than all of his Penrith teammates – most often kicking – are legendary. Yet, it might be time for a rethink.
I would estimate from the age of about 13, Cleary would have been practising almost every day. So, let’s say for the past 12 or 13 years, he’s kicked probably 500 balls a week. That’s around 300,000 kicks all told.
Can you imagine the imbalance he might have from one side of his body to the other?
It was around his age, 26, that I started having my own problems. It comes from an accumulation of all the work you do and the overtraining. Brad Fittler started having problems with his groin at a similar age, and you can see even Cameron Munster is going through a tricky period in his career right now.
Where Nathan has had his advantage for so long might also be part of the problem.
Read Andrew Johns’ full column here.
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