Left corner and right corner are two different jobs and we pretend otherwise

Almost every raider is right handed, so one corner faces the hard side of the mat all night.

A raider comes in and turns. Which way he turns is not random. Most raiders are right handed and right footed, most hand touches come off the right, and most escape routes bend the same way. So one corner spends the evening on the side the raider prefers to attack and the other spends it on the side the raider mostly uses to run away.

They are still listed under the same heading in every squad sheet and compared with the same tackle percentage. That is careless.

Think about what each man actually has to do. The corner on the raider's strong side is dealing with a player arriving at pace with a plan, whose first move is likely to be a kick or a hand touch aimed at exactly him. He needs reaction time, hip strength and the nerve to hold position while a teammate closes. The corner on the far side is more often the second phase. He is the man completing a chain, arriving late into a tackle already begun, needing timing and grip rather than a duel.

Different skills, different body types, different careers. The far side corner can survive on anticipation into his thirties. The strong side corner is in a collision every few minutes and ages accordingly.

My view is that squads should recruit for the two roles separately and stop treating a corner as a corner. The best evidence that they do not is how often a side loses one specialist and just slides the other across, as if the mat were symmetrical. It is not symmetrical, because the population of raiders is not symmetrical, and until left handed raiders make up something close to half the league it never will be.

There is an attacking version of this too. A left handed raider is worth a premium purely because defences have spent a season drilling against the other kind. He walks into a set of habits built for someone else. Corners shade the wrong way by a few inches, the chain forms a beat late, and a modest player looks sharper than he is.

That premium will not last forever. Once enough left handers arrive, defences will learn. Until then, if I ran a franchise, I would be shopping specifically for one, and I would tell nobody why.