2026 Selection table: Back-rowers
The Warriors' back-row ranks contain some of 2025's highest performers and the NRL's most talented tyros...and some off-contract veterans in an intriguing area of the team sheet.
Completing our pre-season positional preview series, the Warriors’ burgeoning contingent of second-rowers and locks.
The club is flush with some of the most eye-watering back-row talent in the NRL, as well as the reigning Dally M Lock of the Year, a current Queensland Origin rep and a former Kiwi in the veteran class, and a versatile young Super League import looking to squeeze his way into the Warriors’ line-up.
Erin Clark was widely regarded as the NRL’s unofficial buy of the year in 2025. He earned a spot in the Dally M Team of the Year, finished a vote outside the top 20 in the Dally M Medal count and was surprisingly overlooked for the Simon Mannering Medal. The nuggetty hooker-turned-lock was, however, the 2025 TWL Kingz Container Crew Player of the Year, which rewards season-long excellence.
Thrown in the deep end following Tohu Harris’ January medical retirement and Dylan Walker’s return to Sydney just three rounds into the season, Clark ensured the Warriors still had a commanding presence in the No.13 jersey.
Very rarely was he not among the Warriors’ best two or three players on the paddock and the ex-Titan smashed his previous career-best averages with 147 metres and 34.3 tackles per game. Clark doesn’t possess the ball-playing game that Harris and Walker offered in the position – and it’s something the Warriors’ mid-level, often predictable attack missed – but he did introduce that facet more as the season wore on.
Kurt Capewell has been a second-row mainstay (when not required to plug a gap at centre) since arriving in 2024. The 32-year-old is not the most dynamic or robust forward getting around, his work-rate on the attacking side of the ball often underwhelms and he’s at the wrong end of the NRL’s missed tackles stats category.
