MATTY Nicholson proved to be Warrington Wolves’ match-winner against Leigh Leopards thanks to his superbly-taken late try.

However, a look at the game’s stats reveals the extent of his eye-watering defensive contribution to the win.

Here’s a look at a few things we noticed from the player stats available on the Super League website from the Round Eight clash…

Nicholson’s staggering shift

The back-rower’s effort to score the winning try gets even more impressive when you consider the work he had to do in defence in this game.

He made an incredible 53 tackles in the game – the highest individual figure for a Wire player this season – including 17 from marker with just three misses.

It was a tough shift in defence all-round for the Wire forwards, with Danny Walker successfully completing 42 tackles as part of his 80-minute effort at hooker.

James Harrison (34), Paul Vaughan (30), Sam Powell (26), Lachlan Fitzgibbon (25) and Jordy Crowther (24) all got through a plethora of work off the ball.

By contrast, Leigh’s top tackler was back-rower Frankie Halton with 34.

Were Wire forced into a change of approach?

The aforementioned shift in defence Wire’s forwards were forced into meant the outside backs had to step up in terms of carrying the ball.

A lot of those came from dummy-half carries, of which Warrington made 20 on Saturday – more than they have made in any game this season.

Toby King was responsible for six of those, with his 19 carries in total yielding 132 metres of gain while Danny Walker (5), Matty Ashton (4) and Stefan Ratchford (3) were all frequent dummy-half runners.

With the forwards struggling to make inroads – none in a Wire shirt passed the 100m mark – it was the quicker men responsible for most of the ground gained.

Matt Dufty was once again the leading metre-maker with 180 while there were also three-figure efforts from King, Ashton (115m) and George Williams (109).

Six Leigh players managed 100m or more with the ball, with Matt Moylan (179m) leading their charts.

Second-phase helps Leigh

An area that was proving damaging for Warrington was the second-phase game Leigh were able to get going.

While there is no publicly available figure for the number of metres the Leopards were able to gain off the back of offloads, Wire’s tackle control certainly left plenty to be desired.

Leigh managed twice the number of offloads – 14 compared to just six from the home side – with many of them contributing to pressure releases and adding to the heavy load of defensive work Wire had to do.

On another day, they would have been punished on the scoreboard so it will no doubt be an area of focus for Sam Burgess and his coaches in terms of lessons learnt from the game.