SuperCoach classic match: Meli mauls the Dogs

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The New Zealand Warriors last week committed to staying in Australia to ensure the competition runs as per program for the time being.

It’s outstanding news for rugby league fans in both countries, so we thought we’d track back through the archives to crunch the SuperCoach stats from a classic match of theirs.

It was hard to go past the 2003 qualifying final where they belted the heavily favoured Canterbury Bulldogs 48-22 in Sydney.

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The star attraction was blockbusting winger Francis Meli, who scored a club record five tries in the demolition.

While a couple of his pies were typically simple winger finishes, he got his hands dirty on numerous occasions in the middle of the park, leaving a path of hapless Dogs lying in his wake.

So how many SuperCoach points would he have scored on the day?

We only had extended highlights to go off, so we had to do a bit of guesswork in the calculations.

What we know for a fact is the following.

Meli scored five tries, had five linebreaks and assisted another try which included a linebreak assist in the process.

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Here’s what we had to estimate.

Meli had 15 runs, 10 of which were over 8m (2 points), and five were under 8m (1 point).

We also added a pair of offloads, five tackles and five tackle breaks (conservative considering he had seven in two of his tries alone).

His stats combined for a monstrous 217 SuperCoach points.

Doing it against the rampant Bulldogs outfit in a finals game on their home turf is even more incredible.

See the breakdown below:

Stat	Actual	Estimated	Total
Try	5		85
Try-assist	1		12
Linebreak	5		50
Linebreak assist	1		8
Offload	1	2	12
Tackle break	7	5	24
Hit ups		15 (10 over 8m, 5 under 8m)	25
Tackles		5	5
Errors		1	-2
Missed tackle		2	-2
Total			= 217 points