Billy Slater believes that the only way Reece Walsh or Ryan Papenhuyzen can set the grand final alight is if their teammates build a “foundation” early in the game.<\/p>\n
The star fullbacks will have all eyes on them once the game kicks off on Sunday night, but Slater – arguably the best No.1 in history – explained what it will take for them to shine.<\/p>\n
“This is probably the match-up that everyone is looking forward to,” he said on Nine’s The Billy Slater Podcast.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I’ve worked with both of these guys and I’ve got a great relationship with both. I think the team that actually builds their foundation better will give their fullback the advantage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The team that doesn’t build their foundation and makes a few errors early in the game and puts themselves under pressure and do a lot of defence, it’s gonna be hard for that fullback to get into the game.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Both of these fullbacks are electric, they are two of the players that will want to try something and pull something out and often, it actually works.”<\/p>\n
Slater also gave praise to Walsh for the way he has handled pressure moments late in the season, especially when halfback Adam Reynolds was sidelined.<\/p>\n
“Reece Walsh is probably the form player in the competition over the last two months and the most dangerous player,” he said.<\/p>\n
“He’s just got to get the footy in his hands and get in the right positions, which is what he’s been doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I think the maturity in Reece Walsh has been evident over the last couple of months. He has really stood up into that leadership role within the footy team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“He’s playing as confident as I’ve seen him play and he’s the one who is really contributing to the points in the footy team.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billy Slater believes that the only way Reece Walsh or Ryan Papenhuyzen can set the grand final alight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-190405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}