Burton has displayed zero ball playing nous, Kikau is going to be Trex 2.0 outside him
Zero? Seems a bit extreme. All the stats sites have him in the top 20 for try assists.
He is 28th on NRL.com for line engaged runs, Reed is our only other player in 45th. Not bad in a team that struggled to get into attacking areas on the field. He is our top ranked player for linebreak assists, 27th, only Jakey was also in the top 50, 32nd. NRL.com has another stat called linebreak involvement. Burton is our top ranked player on that, at 17th, though our only other player on the list is Sexton at 46th with only 8 games.
Unsurprisingly he ranks very highly with his kicking game, ranked 9th for attacking kicks, 11th for kicking metres, 10th for total number of kicks. We are perhaps over reliant on him in this area, but it is hard not to be with a boot like his. I can't find any stats that break down try assists based on whether they were from a pass or off the boot, but I recall him kicking for tries quite a few times. One other stat of interest for a different reason, he did the most short drop outs, that is more a comment on our poor defense last season, but I don't recall him getting too many of them wrong, unlike someone like Latrell Mitchell, who seemed to miss quite a few of them. Even if we want to dismiss his passing game (which is at the least mildly unfair), he is clearly valuable for his kicking game. The only stat I could find that he isn't in the top 50 for is set restarts (Reed and Toby are), and perhaps he can work on that, though I'd put that down more to his attacking mindset, when he has the ball in the red zone he is looking for tries.
So I disagree that he has zero ball playing nous. Is he Cooper Cronk? No. And we should never ask him to be, but just because he isn't Cooper Cronk doesn't mean he is entirely without any ball playing nous.
