The Rugby League Kicking Game Explained: Bombs to 40/20s
Rugby league kicking explained — the bomb, grubber, chip, cross-field kick, 40/20 and 20/40, drop-outs, field goals and how NRL halves use each one.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Tactics19 min read
- The 40/20 was introduced in
- 1997
- The 20/40 was adopted by the NRL in
- 2020
- Where a 40/20 must be kicked from
- Behind the kicker's own 40 metre line
- Where a 40/20 must find touch
- Past the opponents' 20 metre line
- Distance a drop-out must travel
- Over the 10 metre line
- Two-point field goal distance
- Beyond 40 metres in Australian domestic matches
- Most kick metres in the 2025 NRL regular season
- Nathan Cleary with 10907
- Most 40/20 kicks in the 2025 NRL regular season
- Three kicks shared by five players
Rugby league kicking is the part of the game where a set of six tackles is converted into something worth having. Possession in rugby league is temporary by design — after six tackles it changes hands — so the question is never whether to give the ball up but how much to charge the opposition for it. A kick is the invoice.
The direct answer to what the kicking game is for: it turns possession that is about to expire into territory, into a contest for the ball in the air or on the ground, or into points. A team that kicks well starts every defensive set eighty metres from its own line and every attacking set inside the opposition half. A team that kicks poorly spends the night defending its own twenty, and that shows up in the points-against column of the NRL ladder long before it shows up in a highlights package.
This page covers each kick in the Australian game — the bomb, the grubber, the chip, the cross-field kick, the 40/20, the 20/40, the drop-out, the kick-off and the field goal — what the laws require of each, what each is trying to achieve, and how the 2026 rule changes touch them. It sits alongside NRL defensive systems explained, because every kick in the game is aimed at a weakness a defensive structure cannot avoid creating.
The economics of the sixth tackle
Every set of six ends in one of three ways: a try, a handover, or a kick. The handover is the worst of the three because it gives the opposition the ball exactly where your set ended, with none of the compensation.
That is why the fifth-tackle kick is close to automatic in professional rugby league. A kick from your own forty puts the opposition back on their own ten. A kick from the opposition's thirty either forces a drop-out, produces a contest, or at worst gives up a return run that a set chase can contain. The maths favours kicking in almost every position on the field, which is why an NRL side that reaches tackle five without kicking is usually signalling that something has gone wrong with its set.
- 6Tackles before possession changes
- 4040/20 kick line for the kicker
- 2040/20 landing zone for touch
- 10Distance a drop-out must travel
- 40Field goal distance for two points
Structural figures taken from the laws of the game as applied in Australian domestic rugby league. The two-point field goal distance applies to Australian domestic competitions.
The bomb
The bomb, or up-and-under, is a high kick sent almost vertically. Distance is not the aim; hang time is. The kicker is buying enough seconds for two or three chasers to arrive underneath the ball at the same moment it does.
A well-struck bomb lands between ten and fifteen metres from the try line, deep enough that the catcher cannot simply take it and step forward, shallow enough that the chasers are still on their feet rather than committed. The catcher — usually a fullback or a winger — has to judge flight, hold position against a chaser also allowed to contest, and secure the ball while being tackled the instant he lands.
The bomb is the single highest-percentage attacking kick in rugby league because it creates a genuine fifty-fifty from a situation where the attack had no numbers. It is also the reason NRL fullbacks are selected partly on their work under the high ball, and why a fullback who drops one early in a match will see three more inside ten minutes.
The grubber
A grubber travels along the ground, bouncing end over end. It is unpredictable by design: a ball on its point can sit up, skid, or check completely, and a defender turning to cover one is dealing with a bounce he cannot read.
Its tactical purpose is to attack the space behind a defensive line that has come forward. When a defence is using aggressive line speed, the grubber is the direct counter — the ball goes underneath the rushing defenders into ground nobody is covering.
Near the try line the grubber becomes a scoring kick. Rolled into the in-goal, it either gets grounded by a chaser for a try or forces a defender to make it dead, which under the current laws produces a goal-line drop-out. Both outcomes are good; only one of them is on the scoreboard.
The chip and chase
The chip is a short kick over the top of the defensive line, usually taken while running, with the kicker himself the intended chaser. It requires the defence to be flat and forward, and it requires the kicker to have enough footwork to be a genuine running threat first, otherwise the defence simply stands off and catches it.
Chips are a low-volume, high-variance option. Executed well they are the most spectacular try-scoring play in the game. Executed poorly they are a free catch and a counter-attack from a position where the attacking side has committed its runners forward.
The cross-field kick
The cross-field kick is flatter and angled, aimed at the far corner for a winger to jump for. It targets the structural weakness of any defensive system: the winger on the far side has to be involved in line defence, and once he has come in, he cannot recover twenty metres of width in the four seconds the ball is in the air.
Most Australian clubs run it as a called set play with a designated jumper rather than as an improvisation, because the margins are unforgiving. Under-hit and it is a comfortable catch; over-hit and it goes dead over the sideline or the dead-ball line, handing possession back for nothing.
The 40/20
The 40/20 is the most valuable single kick in rugby league because it wins territory and possession at the same time.
Three conditions must be met. The kicker must be behind his own 40 metre line when he kicks. The ball must first hit the ground inside the field of play. It must then go into touch beyond the opposition's 20 metre line. If all three hold, the kicking side restarts with a tap where the ball went out — typically inside the opposition quarter, with a fresh set of six.
It was introduced in 1997 to reward accurate long kicking rather than sheer distance, and it worked: the kick is a genuine skill, executed on the run, usually against a chasing defence, with a target zone perhaps fifteen metres deep and only reachable with the right spin and bounce.
It is also rare. In the 2025 NRL regular season the competition leaders managed three each — Reece Walsh, Jahrome Hughes, Adam Reynolds, Braydon Trindall and Daly Cherry-Evans all finished on three. Across a twenty-four-round season, that is how difficult the kick is.
The 20/40
The 20/40 is the mirror image and was adopted by the NRL in 2020. The kicker must be behind his own 20 metre line, the ball must bounce in the field of play, and it must find touch beyond the opposition's 40 metre line.
The purpose was different from the 40/20. A team pinned deep inside its own quarter has almost no good options: it is defending, its kicker is under pressure, and a long clearing kick simply hands the opposition a return run with numbers. The 20/40 gives that side a skill-based escape hatch. It is harder than it sounds, because the kicker is executing under a defensive line that is fifteen metres away and coming.
| Kick | Where it is kicked from | What it is aimed at | Best outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bomb | Anywhere in the opposition half, usually tackle five | High and short, ten to fifteen metres out | Chasers regather or force a spilled catch |
| Grubber | Close to the opposition line | Along the ground behind the defensive line | Try, or a defender forced to concede a drop-out |
| Chip | On the run against a flat, forward line | Over the top into open ground | Kicker regathers behind the defence |
| Cross-field | Inside the opposition twenty | The far corner, in the air | Winger takes it and grounds it in the corner |
| 40/20 | Behind the kicker's own 40 metre line | Touch, beyond the opposition 20 | Tap restart deep in the opposition half |
| 20/40 | Behind the kicker's own 20 metre line | Touch, beyond the opposition 40 | Possession retained and the pressure released |
| Field goal | Anywhere within range | Between the posts, drop kick | One point, or two from beyond 40 metres |
Drop-outs and restarts
A drop-out is a drop kick taken by the defending side from its own goal line, and it must travel over the 10 metre line before it is touched by either team. It follows when a defender grounds the ball in his own in-goal after an attacking kick, when a defending player is tackled behind his own line, and in the other circumstances the laws set out.
The drop-out is where the attacking kicking game pays off structurally rather than on the scoreboard. Forcing one means the opposition restarts from its own goal line rather than twenty metres out, and the kicking side gets the ball back in the opposition half with a full set. Two forced drop-outs in a row is how NRL sides build the pressure that eventually produces a try.
The tactical wrinkle is that a drop-out is itself a kick, and a badly struck one is a catastrophe. A drop-out that fails to travel ten metres, or that finds touch on the full, hands the attack a restart in front of the posts.
The kick-off and the restart after points
The match begins with a kick from the centre of the field, and play restarts the same way after points are scored, with the conceding side kicking off. A proposal to let the side that concedes choose whether to kick off or receive was considered for 2026 but was scrapped after club feedback, with a trial flagged for end-of-season matches carrying no finals implications.
Kick-offs are their own small tactical world. A long, high kick forces the receiving side to bring the ball back from deep and lets the chasers set the tone of the following set. A short kick-off aimed just past the ten-metre line is a gamble for possession, usually reserved for the last minutes of a match a side is losing.
The field goal, and the two-point rule
A field goal is a drop kick taken in general play. Inside 40 metres it is worth one point. Since 2021, in Australian domestic rugby league, a field goal kicked from beyond 40 metres has been worth two.
The one-pointer is the traditional way to break a deadlock: get inside range on the fourth or fifth tackle, set the kicker with a forward each side, and take the point. The two-pointer changed the endgame arithmetic. A side trailing by two no longer needs a try, and a side leading by one is no longer safe. In golden point, where the first score of any kind ends the match, the long-range attempt has become a live option rather than a curiosity.
Who kicks, and when
The halfback is the primary kicker at almost every Australian club, taking the long territorial kicks and most last-tackle work. The five-eighth shares the load, usually kicking to the opposite side of the field so the attack can threaten both edges without a personnel change.
The hooker kicks from dummy-half. It is a specific and underrated weapon: a marker standing flat and square cannot retreat, so a hooker who spots a hole behind the ruck can put a grubber through it before the defensive line has any chance to turn.
Fullbacks kick when they enter the line as an extra man, which is the hardest kick in the game to defend because the defensive back three has been drawn forward by the fullback's running threat.
Goal kicking is a separate specialisation altogether. It may sit with the halfback, the five-eighth, a centre or the fullback, and it is often the deciding factor in matches that finish within a converted try — which, in a competition as tight as the NRL, is a large share of them.
The chase
A kick without a chase is a gift. The chase line is the group of players who run forward with the kick, and its shape determines whether the kick achieves anything.
Chasers have to stay onside — a player in front of the kicker at the moment of the kick is offside and cannot interfere with play — which means the chase starts from behind the ball and has to make up ground. The chase also has to arrive together and in a line, because a single chaser sprinting ahead of the rest can be beaten with one step and leaves the runners behind him defending an open field.
The best-drilled Australian sides treat the kick and the chase as one unit and practise them together. A kick placed perfectly with three chasers arriving at different times produces less pressure than an average kick with three chasers arriving as one.
- Set the platformThe attacking side wins a quick play-the-ball on tackle four so the kicker has time and forward momentum.
- Read the back threeThe kicker checks where the defending fullback and wingers are standing and picks the space they cannot cover.
- Strike the kickThe kick is struck for hang time if it is a bomb, for the ground if it is a grubber, or for touch beyond the 20 if it is a 40/20.
- Chase in a lineChasers start from behind the kicker, stay onside and arrive together rather than singly.
- Contest or pressureEither a chaser contests the ball in the air or on the ground, or the catcher is tackled immediately and gains nothing.
- Convert the outcomeThe result is a regather, a forced error, a goal-line drop-out, or at worst a return run the chase line can contain.
A description of the sequence rather than a measurement. Which branch occurs depends on field position, the quality of the kick and the state of the defending back three.
How the defence answers each kick
Every kick exists because of a defensive weakness that cannot be removed.
The bomb exists because a defensive back three cannot be everywhere and a contested high ball is genuinely fifty-fifty. The grubber exists because a defensive line with fast line speed has to vacate the ground behind it. The cross-field kick exists because a winger who defends the line cannot also stand in the corner. The 40/20 exists because a defensive team's wingers have to choose between covering touch and covering depth.
Defences respond with positioning rather than elimination. The back three adjusts continuously against the kicker's position, the winger on the short side drops as soon as the kicker sets his feet, and clubs designate a catcher on every kick to avoid the two-players-one-ball collision that produces knock-ons. The full picture of how a defensive line is organised, and what it necessarily gives up, sits in NRL defensive systems explained.
What the 2026 rules change
Two of the confirmed 2026 changes touch the kicking game indirectly.
The first removes the seven-tackle set that previously followed a knock-on in the in-goal by the attacking team. Under the old arrangement a speculative attacking kick that a chaser fumbled over the line still produced a favourable restart. Removing that reduces the free option on low-percentage kicks into the in-goal and marginally raises the cost of a poorly judged grubber or chip close to the line.
The second moved the set-restart boundary to the 20 metre line, so ruck infringements across a wider band of the field restart the tackle count rather than producing a penalty. That matters for the kicking game because a set restart keeps play alive and denies the defending side the stoppage it would have used to reset its back three, which in turn makes a following kick more likely to catch the defence out of position.
The proposed change to kick-offs — letting the conceding side choose to receive — was rejected for 2026 after club consultation, so restarts after points continue as they were.
Kicking in Australian conditions
Kicking is a weather skill as much as a technical one. An NRL season runs from March through to early October, which in Australia means a kicker deals with humid Brisbane nights early in the year, dry Sydney evenings in winter and, at the southern grounds, wind that swirls inside a closed stadium.
Roofed and part-roofed venues change the calculation for a bomb. A high kick under a closed roof holds a truer line; the same kick in an open bowl in a crosswind can drift ten metres. Kickers at grounds like Suncorp Stadium and Accor Stadium adjust the height and the side of the field they attack accordingly, and the difference is visible if you know to look for it.
Ball condition matters too. A wet ball skids further on a grubber and holds less on a bomb, which is why sides in heavy rain shift towards low kicks and away from contestable high ones.
The most common kicking errors
The kick that goes dead. An attacking kick that crosses the dead-ball line without being touched surrenders the pressure entirely and usually gives the defending side a restart. It is the most punished error in the kicking game because it converts a good position into nothing.
The charged-down kick. A kicker who takes too long, or whose forwards fail to hold the defenders in front of him, gets the ball blocked. A charge-down inside your own half is one of the highest-value turnovers in rugby league.
The 40/20 that goes out on the full. If the ball does not bounce in the field of play first, the attempt fails and the defending side gets a scrum or a tap depending on where the kick was taken.
The bomb that is too long. A high kick that carries past the try line into the in-goal removes the contest entirely, because there is no room for the chasers to work.
Kicking in the community game
Below the NRL, kicking is where the gap between levels is most visible. Junior and community sides in Australia often kick on the fourth rather than the fifth because their sets break down earlier, and the 40/20 is close to non-existent at grassroots level because the accuracy required takes years to build.
What is coachable at every level is decision-making rather than technique: knowing when to kick, choosing the correct kick for the field position, and chasing in a line. Those three things account for most of the difference between a set that ends well and one that ends with a return run.
The kicking game in Origin and in September
Representative and finals football compresses the kicking game rather than changing it. Defensive lines are faster, sets are completed at a higher rate, and the space behind the line that a grubber or chip needs is smaller and closes sooner. The consequence is that the percentage kicks — the long bomb, the kick for touch, the clearing kick from your own quarter — take over, and the improvised ones largely disappear.
State of Origin is the clearest example. In a series where three matches are frequently decided by a single score, halves kick early in the count more often than they would in a club match, aiming for touch and territory rather than a contest. The value of a 40/20 rises accordingly, because a single successful one can be the only genuine field-position swing in a half of football.
The same is true of the finals series. Sides that reach September are usually well drilled defensively, which lowers the return on ambitious attacking kicks and raises the return on relentless territorial pressure. Coaches describe this as taking what the game gives you, and in practice it means fewer cross-field kicks, more bombs aimed at the same fifteen-metre band of ground, and a willingness to accept a forced drop-out as a satisfactory outcome for a set rather than a consolation.
There is also a goal-kicking dimension. In a competition where the ladder is settled by points differential as well as competition points, a goal kicker converting from the sideline is worth more across a season than the two points suggests, and in a final he is frequently the difference. That relationship between points scored, points conceded and ladder position is set out in the NRL ladder and points system.
How kicking statistics are recorded
The published NRL statistics that relate to kicking fall into three groups, and they measure quite different things.
Volume measures include kicks in general play and kick metres. They tell you who does the kicking and roughly how far, and they are heavily shaped by possession and field position rather than by skill. A side that trails all season and clears from its own end repeatedly will produce a kick-metre leader.
Outcome measures include forced drop-outs, try assists from kicks, and 40/20 counts. These are closer to a quality signal because they record something that actually happened as a result of the kick, but the samples are small — a competition-leading 40/20 tally in 2025 was three for the season.
Negative measures include kicks that go dead, charge-downs conceded and errors from kicks. These are the least reported and arguably the most informative, because a kicking game is judged as much by what it avoids as by what it produces.
The practical advice for reading any kicking statistic is to check the denominator. Kick metres without kicks attempted is meaningless, and forced drop-outs without field position tells you where a team played rather than how well it kicked.
A short glossary
Up-and-under — another name for the bomb, a high kick contested by chasers.
Hang time — how long a kick stays in the air, the main variable a bomb is judged on.
Chase line — the group of players advancing with the kick, who must start from behind the kicker.
Drop-out — a drop kick restart taken by the defending side from its own goal line.
Forced drop-out — a statistic crediting the kicker or chaser whose kick made the opposition concede one.
Kick metres — the cumulative distance of general-play kicks, a volume measure rather than a quality one.
Field goal — a drop kick in general play, worth one point or two from beyond 40 metres in Australia.
Charge-down — a kick blocked by a defender, which puts the ball live for either side.
Why the kicking game decides Australian seasons
Rugby league in Australia is a field-position game played by teams of very similar physical quality. The gap between the best and worst defensive lines in the NRL is real but narrow. The gap between the best and worst kicking games is much wider, and it compounds: every set that starts on your own ten instead of your own forty is thirty metres of extra work, repeated twenty times a match.
That is why halfbacks with elite kicking games are the most expensive players on an NRL list, and why the salary cap conversation covered in the NRL salary cap explained so often comes down to what a club is willing to pay for a number seven. It is also why the kicking game is the first thing a coach fixes at a struggling club, ahead of defence and well ahead of attacking structure.
More on the Australian rugby league landscape, its clubs and its calendar sits in the Australia hub and across the rugby section of this site, with the wider sport index at sports.