Analysis: Solomona’s strengths and flaws
Our resident analyst breaks down what Sale winger Denny Solomona is doing right, and wrong, so far with his new club.
Ben Te’o has been making a name for himself in this year’s Six Nations, but he’s not the only rugby league convert who’s staking his claim for more attention.
Denny Solomona might have joined Sale Sharks, or at least left Castleford Tigers, acrimoniously but he’s been tearing through the Premiership ever since he’s arrived. He also revealed his intention to play for England in an interview with The Times on Wednesday.
The New Zealand-born winger was a revelation during his time at the Tigers, during the 2015 and 2016 seasons he scored 57 tries in just 41 appearances. In 2016 he broke the Super League try scoring record, previously held by fellow Union convert Lesley Vainikolo, by scoring 40 tries in a single season.
At Sale Sharks he’s continued his knack for finding the try line, wracking up 11 tries in 11 appearances in all competitions. He’s only once failed to score in consecutive games this season, against Saracens and Northampton, and he’s already got a hat-trick.
The response to Solomona’s try-scoring feats has varied between nailed-on Lion’s tourist to over-rated poacher. The truth, as with many things, is somewhere between those two points, and below will attempt to give a better understanding of the quality of player that Sale have.
Before we look at this in more depth, let’s have a look at what we do know; Solomona had a tackle success rate of 83.5 percent during his final season in rugby league.
That was up from a miserable 68 percent back in 2015 though. For rugby union though, his tackling looks much more like it did in 2015, in an admittedly small sample size, he’s missed 11 of 32 total tackles, for a 66 percent tackle success rating.
Finishing
When people talk about finishing being easy, I often think about modern art. Take most people to an art gallery and show them a discarded shoe on a plinth worth £10million and they’ll say, ‘I could’ve done that’. Unfortunately, they didn’t and as obvious as it appears at the time, it’s the foresight that makes you a millionaire artist.
People assume that finishing a try is easy in rugby when they see someone flopping over from five metres out, but just getting into that position is hard enough and actually scoring a try is extremely hard.
Especially when you consider that all 15 men on the other team train for roughly half the week to prevent you from crossing the try line.
In the picture below, we’ll see whether Solomona is more than just a goal-hanging poacher. The red arrows at the top of the pitch show all the tries he’s scored at home, from the point where he received the ball, and the black arrows at the bottom are the tries scored away from home – checked lines show where he received balls that had been kicked to him.
So, yes, Solomona does finish a lot of chances from short range but he’s far from only capable of doing that. In fact, as the season has progressed he’s begun to branch out and come off his wing to become a more complete finisher.
Even if he doesn’t continue to progress, he is a stunning finisher. The clip above is from his first try in professional rugby union and it is an incredible bit of balanced running that allows him to run through three desperate tackles.
His first try of the hat-trick against Wasps is a brilliant piece of opportunism and shows the largely free reign that he is being given at Sale. He’s followed the play around and takes advantage of Mike Phillips bit of blocking to scamper home.
Yes, there’s a bit of luck in his second try of that hat-trick. If Christian Wade doesn’t fall ove… If the ball is a little bit closer to Wade… but it’s still a fantastic chip, chase and gather and a fully deserved try.
The New Zealander can finish from five metres out, if given the ball, but he, crucially, can create his own chances and isn’t just a one-dimensional goal hanging poacher who is a wasted resource if his team can’t get him the ball with a clear run to the line.
Everything Else
So, Solomona is a legitimate weapon in attack, but, what about the 99 percent of the game which isn’t scoring tries? Well, it’s not great. Solomona averages five carries and 37.5 metres per game – that’s not particularly illuminating by itself though.
So, I’ve decided to do some more maths and compare him with whichever Sale winger he was playing alongside that day, a combination of Josh Charnley, Will Addison, and Byron McGuigan. I’ve then looked at passes, runs, clean breaks, defenders beaten and offloads and put them in a graph below.
Solomona has consistently been involved less in the game than whoever his fellow winger is. He averages around 11 actions a game compared to 15 by the left winger.
There’s potential for him to increase that though and it will likely develop through the end of this season and during the pre-season.
In this clip, for example, the number of dummy runners that Sale employ leaves Solomona isolated on the wing. As he gets more time you would expect him to read the game a little better and cut off his wing in this situation.
Defensively as well, he displays some weaknesses which are more likely linked to familiarity rather than a lack of ability. In this clip above he has men on the inside but he doesn’t drift on to the final attacker, Christian Day, and has to react late.
That’s less of an issue against a lock, but as you can see below, it’s a little more problematic when facing another winger. He still makes the tackle though and gets the turnover when Vereniki Goneva ends up in touch.
Both Solomona and the other winger have made exactly 32 tackles each in the games we’ve looked at; the New Zealander has missed 11 compared to just 5 by his team mates.
Although Solomona is strong enough and quick enough to make up for some positional naivety, it’s clear that the difficulty of each tackle is a little harder and so the miss rate crawls a little higher.
Finally though, despite all this talk off missed tackles and missed involvements, it’s important to remember that his job is to score tries and, secondarily, to create chances.
The above example only results in a small gain of yardage but it does show, along with all the clips, what a talent the New Zealander is with the ball in hand.
Conclusion
Denny Solomona won’t go on the Lions tour, and what’s more he shouldn’t. At the moment he doesn’t offer enough as an all-round winger to supplement his fantastic try scoring. All this means though, is that he’s not one of the best five wingers in Britain and Ireland, he’s still a fantastic player.
His try scoring record can’t be questioned and, as we’ve seen, he’s far from the one-dimensional poacher that some people have painted him as. However he’s still learning how to put his stamp on the rest of the game and once that happens he will be a seriously talented player.
At the moment, he’s carried his try scoring form over from the Castelford Tigers and his strength and natural ability is covering for a slightly shaky reading of the game. Add some extra experience and it’s hard to imagine the League convert not being a dominating force in the 15 man game as well.
Whether the New Zealand-born, Samoan representing, winger should be allowed to play for England is a topic for another article.