NRL: Warriors roller coaster ride

Lock Micheal Luck says the Warriors need to go forward first before trying to offload. Photo / Getty Images

Being a Warriors fan has been likened to riding a rollercoaster - up and down and all around. Andrew Alderson looks at why this is.

"It's frustrating to be so powerless. I'm not a good watcher and sitting high up in the grandstand, you can see so much more than on the field."

Judging by that comment, Micheal Luck now has a much better idea of what coach Ivan Cleary is going through every time the Warriors play this season ... or any season.

Luck makes his return as lock and captain tonight in one of the most anticipated matches in NRL history, albeit because of the Storm's unprecedented punishment for rorting the salary cap.

Put in perspective, the Warriors' problems seem much simpler. But those problems have been around for much of the time since the team's inception in 1995.

In one word, it is inconsistency.

It is not that the team is playing badly - far from it. They have won three, lost three and were planted right in the middle of the table at the start of this weekend's round seven.

But for every patch of brilliance, like the 48-16 destruction of Brisbane, there is a match like the 40-12 capitulation to Penrith last week. To be fair, it was the only time the Warriors have looked completely out of a match all season and they trailed 22-0 at halftime.

Since the start of 2008, the Warriors have achieved just one streak of more than two wins in a row in the regular season.

That came from round 16 that year, when they beat Wests Tigers in Ruben Wiki's 300th first-grade match.

They won four straight following that game and repeated the dose at the end of the season when two wins came in the finals.

This is not to suggest the team needs a similar motivation like Wiki's valedictory, which saw the players start growing beards for the rest of the season.

Surely there must be a simpler catalyst to get momentum. Yes, it is a tough competition, policed by what seems to be a Clayton's salary cap, but the urge to strive for better can't be compromised.

The key trend you keep hearing around the Warriors' gym is that too often, they force the pass. Certainly it is part of the team philosophy to throw the ball around and it's one of the factors which make the Warriors worth parking up on the sofa for.

When it works, it's breath-taking. When it doesn't, it's painful. Luck says they need to earn the right to throw those passes.

"We did against Canterbury the week before," he says. "We went forward well and created space out wide. You don't have to throw a speculator. Just pass with two hands to a bloke in good position.

"You can't come out and do that from the whistle, though. You've got to go forward hard first to tire out their defenders so you can give your little men space. We get too loose at times."

Last week's captain Brent Tate is far from an apologist on the issue. He oozes a hard-but-fair attitude but says you've got to let young players in key positions settle, like halfback James Maloney.

"They're still learning their footy and sometimes you need to learn the hard way like last weekend," he says. "It's an extremely tight competition and the injuries have meant we've had to put up a lot of young kids who are playing first grade earlier than expected."

That leads to another area that has come in for scrutiny - a lack of decent territory.

The ball is either coughed up during an incomplete set of six in the Warriors' half, or a poor kicking game means it doesn't penetrate deep into the defence.

That can be a fault of a cute grubber, chip or even when the ball is held on the last tackle. The result is not necessarily immediate but it puts pressure on the defence when the ball goes in the air on the fifth tackle near the line and tired players mill around aimlessly underneath it.

Maloney agrees they've been vulnerable. He cites an example from last week.

"Our forwards were defending well and then the first three tries were suffered from kicks. We are always talking about protecting the kick by getting numbers around the ball but we don't do it well enough.

"You've got to contest it and, while the odd one might go against you, having all of them do that means we're doing it wrong."

The team certainly appears fitter than the previous couple of seasons but defensive demands of more than 300 tackles in lost matches are causing exhaustion.

"It's extremely frustrating," Tate says. "We often show for 10-15 minutes what we are capable of and then slip away. When you turn over too much ball in the first half, it leaves you exhausted.

"If you make 50 more tackles than you should, it's going to come back to get you at the end of the game."

It'll be a few more weeks yet before fans know whether this season's Warriors are top eight contenders or pretenders. But sometimes that's half the fun.