It’s official: whichever way you look at it, Greg Eden is on track to break the Super League try-scoring record set by his predecessor on Castleford’s left-wing 12 months ago.
Eden has been a revelation on Castleford’s left-hand side since returning from the NRL. Originally pencilled in to replace Luke Dorn at fullback, the arrival of Zak Hardaker nudged Eden out to the wing – but he hasn’t looked back since then.
And with Eden already standing on 24 tries, people are already starting to ask whether he can do the impossible and break the 40-try barrier reached by Denny Solomona last season in Super League. Well, we’ve done the number crunching and the comparisons, and all the signs are promising to say the least.
After 16 games of the season this year, the former Huddersfield and Brisbane man has 24 tries to his name. After the same amount last season, Solomona had only 20 tries on the board by that stage. So in that regard, Eden is comfortably ahead in the race to become a record-breaker.
Eden’s record of 24 tries in 16 games has him going at 1.5 tries per game on average – so even if he was to play the same amount of games as Solomona did last year, which was 27, he would get to the magic 40-try barrier. Essentially, they’re going not too dissimilar from like-for-like over the course of a season – but Eden is ahead on where Solomona was.
There’s also the added possibility that Eden may have at least two extra games to break the record this season. Castleford’s season – and Solomona’s Super League career – ended at the conclusion of the Super 8s in 2016. Meanwhile, it’s possible that Eden will have a play-off semi-final, and possibly a Grand Final too, to try and beat Solomona’s record.
Of course, there’s the possibility of Eden picking up an injury which may rule him out for long enough to prevent him from breaking the record.
But as things stand, if he continues on this arc of form, it seems inevitable that we will have a new record-holder when it comes to most tries in a Super League season.
And who would have thought that at the end of last season after Solomona became the first player to reach 40?
