Throughout history, the greatest military victories haven't always belonged to the strongest armies.
They've often belonged to those who were best at convincing their opponents to look in the wrong place.
In the months leading up to D-Day in 1944, the Allies created an entire phantom army. Inflatable Sherman tanks, wooden aircraft, fake landing craft and even bogus radio traffic convinced the Germans that the invasion would come at Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy. Hitler kept valuable Panzer divisions waiting for an attack that never came.
Twenty years later in Vietnam, technology met deception once again. American forces deployed sophisticated electronic sensors to detect enemy movement and activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The North Vietnamese responded with remarkable ingenuity, using everything from buckets of human and animal waste to recordings and other decoys to trigger the sensors, sending bombs costing millions crashing into empty jungle while the real troops slipped through elsewhere.
The lesson was the same in both wars: sometimes the easiest way to beat your opponent isn't to overpower them - it's to manipulate them into seeing something else.
Rugby league is no different.
Watch any game of rugby league and you'll hear the same phrase repeated over and over again.
"They created an overlap” the commentator will shout, making it all sound so simple.
A team shifts the ball, the defence runs out of numbers and a winger dives over in the corner.
Overlap created. Try scored. But here's the reality. Overlaps don't just happen. The best teams manufacture them.
In fact, one of the biggest myths in rugby league is that attacking opportunities magically appear if you move the football quickly enough.
They don't.
The best attacking sides spend 80 minutes creating the conditions that eventually produce those opportunities. That's why some teams consistently create space while others spend entire games looking for it.
As the business end of the NRL season approaches, this distinction becomes increasingly important.
Because the teams still playing deep into September aren't waiting for space, they're actively creating it.
The mathematics of rugby league are actually quite simple. You've got 13 defenders attempting to cover approximately 68 metres of width. Take the two markers and the fullback out, that's ten defenders to manipulate.
Every shape, movement, lead runner, pass and off the ball player should be forcing defenders to make decisions.
The objective isn't necessarily to beat the defence immediately, it is to keep the opposition on their haunches, keep them guessing and to gradually move defenders into positions they don't want to be in.
Good attack is often less about what happens on the final pass and more about what happened in the previous five plays.
The best teams understand this.
The Penrith Panthers are absolute masters at it.
For years, opposition coaches have tried to copy their attacking structures but they see the shape, but don't always see all the other processes.
Penrith don't create opportunities because they run clever plays. They create them because every player understands how their role influences the defenders in front of them and how it influences the upcoming play overall, even if it is happening on the other side of the field.
The Panthers rarely appear rushed. They don't force opportunities. They patiently build pressure until the defence eventually breaks.
That's what elite attack looks like. Its systematic.
The same applied to the Melbourne Storm for so many years before this one. Year after year, different players arrived in Melbourne and somehow the attack continued to function.
The personnel changed, but the core principles didn't.
The reason is that elite attacking systems aren't built around individual moments of brilliance, but instead around footballers immersed in the importance of creating repeated decision-making pressure.
Every time a defender is forced to make a difficult decision with plenty of variables, the attack gains a small advantage.
One difficult decision becomes two. Two becomes three and so on. Eventually somebody in the defence gets it wrong and that's when the overlap appears. The try wasn't created on that play. The try was created minutes earlier.
One of the biggest coaching mistakes I see is teams expecting the halfback to solve every attacking problem.
The halfback is important because every team needs organisers but rugby league has become far too complex for one player to see everything.
Think about who actually has a better, clearer view of the space.
Centres, wingers, second-rowers and fullbacks are in the ‘back line' of attack, they have clearer perspectives than halves who have to split their vision with organisation of bodies or hookers who are almost in the face of the opposition when the ball is played.
The ‘back line' is looking directly at the compressed or spread defence. They're seeing tired forwards caught on edges or identifying disconnected defensive lines.
They're often recognising patterns and opportunities before anyone else.
Yet many teams train these players to remain silent. To wait for instructions and the calls. In other words, waiting for somebody else to identify the opportunity.
The best teams operate differently. They share the information. The attack becomes a collective problem-solving exercise rather than a one-man responsibility.
When players start feeding information back into the system, decision-making improves dramatically. Because the biggest myth in rugby league is that overlaps just happen. They execute deception. The reality is that great teams manufacture them.
And the teams that do it best are usually the ones still playing when September arrives.
Just like the inflatable tanks sitting in fields before D-Day weren't designed to destroy the enemy but to manipulate their thinking, every lead runner, decoy line and support player in rugby league exists to influence what defenders believe is about to happen.
And just as the North Vietnamese found ways to fool some of the world's most sophisticated military technology into striking empty jungle, the best attacking teams in rugby league understand that even elite defensive systems can be manipulated if you can control what defenders see.
Because whether it's on a battlefield or a football field, the greatest victories don't always belong to those with the biggest weapons. They often belong to those who can convince their opponent to defend the wrong things.
Lee Addison is a former club coach at Sea Eagles and Panthers and the founder of rugbyleaguecoach.com.au. He is a Coach Mentor and his programmes for coaches and clubs can be found HERE.
