Despite his stunning season, Reece Walsh still has his haters, but even they will have to concede he is the best player on the planet if he leads the Kangaroos to an Ashes series clinching win.
If Walsh has another strong game in the second Test to lead Australia to victory, he is a shoe in for the 2025 Golden Boot, which would cap a remarkable season for the Broncos fullback.
Walsh torched the Poms in the series opener with 196 run metres, seven tackle busts, a linebreak, two linebreak assists, two tries and a try-saver in a man-of-the-match display.
It came on the back of his special finals series, which led the Broncos to three comeback victories in a row and was capped with a Clive Churchill Medal winning performance for the ages to lead Brisbane to a drought-breaking first title in 19 years.
And it is easy to forget he did all this with a knee injury that disrupted his regular season and robbed him of the chance to play in the State of Origin series for Queensland, but he will likely be the first player picked by Billy Slater next year.
Granted, Walsh still has errors in his game, but that pales in significance when he produces match winning plays again and again and his rocks and diamonds approach seems to be producing far more of the latter of late.
In fact the way he plays on the edge and his risk vs reward approach only adds to his unpredictability and brilliance and anyone pointing to his three errors in the first Test victory is just nitpicking at this stage.
The mercurial fullback is one big performance at Everton away from being crowned the best international player in the world for 2025.
And when you add that to his superb season for the Broncos, it is hard to put anyone in front of him as the best rugby league player in the world this year.
