Came here to say this. Roosters 02 through to halfway through 04. They perfected the hit and drive back defense, arguably did it better than Penriff have the last two seasons. When we played them halfway through 04 and Folkes had Pricey, O'Meley, and Mason passing the ball wide of the ruck half the time, and we belted them, was when that changed.
You need a combination of things going right in order to do this defense:
1. A confident team that trusts each other.
2. Some guys who really know how to hit and sting. Tim Grant, young prop at the time, was asked who in the NRL hits the hardest, he nominated Craig Fitzgibbon, who regularly topped the chooks tackle count at the time along with Ricketson. Morley could hit pretty hard too. Once you stop a guy in his tracks, and keep him on his feet, another two blokes pile in to push them back.
3. A backline that can run for lots of metres. This gives the forwards a break so they can keep putting in in defense, and do so with the opposition deep in their own half. Edwards and To'o rack up 200m on a regular basis each. They both did 230 last night, and Crichton did 200 as well. When your forwards have to make less than half the run meters (the 5 backs and 2 halves for Penriff did 1027 out of Penriffs 1800 run metres), they can do more of the hard work in defense. Think about how many sets last night that Penriff did and 4 out of the 5 hit ups were done by backs.
Our 02-04 team was pretty good at it too, but we picked our moments. We had good help with Utai doing hard run metres, and Hazem and Vagana could make some handy metres as well, usually by beating the first man rather than Utai's brute force.