A decade ago Jason Taumalolo was arguably the most feared forward in rugby league.<\/p>\n
The Kiwi and Tongan international was an NRL powerhouse in a star-studded Cowboys<\/a> side that also featured Matt Scott, Jonathan Thurston and Michael Morgan, becoming a grand final winner in 2015 and runner up in 2017.<\/p>\n For five consecutive seasons between 2014 and 2018 Taumalolo finished in the NRL top-three for total run metres, including being No.1 in 2016 and again in 2017 when he accumulated over 5,000 metres for the season, the most ever by a forward in the NRL, at a herculean average of more than 200 meters a game.<\/p>\n Then everything changed.\u00a0<\/p>\n MORE:\u00a0Tallis ragdoll Origin moment immortalised at Coachella – \u2018Brett Hodgson would be loving this\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n Increasingly shackled by knee cartilage problems, his explosive playing style was severely curbed and Taumalolo\u2019s on-field influence fell off a cliff that many felt he would never be able to recover from.<\/p>\n After dominating forward battles for almost a decade, official NRL stats show Taumalolo wasn\u2019t even in the top 50 for run metres in 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2025, and finished just 39th in 2024.<\/p>\n It seemed the game had passed him by, except that it hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Now, after half a decade in the NRL wilderness, multiple surgeries and modified training programs, the 32-year-old from Auckland is firing again and NRL opponents are on notice.<\/p>\n The knees are good, the mojo is back and so are the imposing stats.<\/p>\n After Round 6, Taumalolo leads the NRL for post-contact metres<\/a> (445 metres), just ahead of Warriors<\/a> prop Jackson Ford (443 metres) and significantly ahead of third-placed Luciano Leilua (395 metres).<\/p>\n While his minutes are a little down from a decade ago, he\u2019s still averaging a very healthy 156 run metres a game from 13.8 hit-ups\u2014and it\u2019s making a difference as the Cowboys continue to surge up the NRL ladder off the back of four consecutive wins.<\/p>\n Taumalolo is a six-time winner of Paul Bowman Medal for the Cowboy\u2019s best player and has played 291 NRL matches since debuting in 2010. He\u2019s contracted to North Queensland until the end of the 2027 season.<\/p>\n The fourth-placed Cowboys host Manly in Townsville on Thursday night to kick-off NRL Round 7.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A decade ago Jason Taumalolo was arguably the most feared forward in rugby league. The Kiwi and Tongan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-607572","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nrl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-national-rugby-league","11":"tag-nationalrugbyleague","12":"tag-nrl","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607572","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=607572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}