The Try-Minute Bingo Board: what 80 minutes of NRL actually looks like

By FootyNRLScore — 2026-07-14

On our Weird Stats page there is an 80-square grid we call the Try-Minute Bingo Board. One square per minute of a game. If a try has been scored in that minute anywhere in the tracked season, the square lights up. If not, it stays dark and waits.

It started as a bit of fun. It turns out to be a surprisingly honest map of how rugby league is actually played.

## The quiet minutes

The opening minutes are almost always the last squares to light up. Nobody wants to throw the ball around inside their own twenty in the first set, so the opening exchanges are kick tennis and one-out carries while both teams feel for field position. Tries in minutes one to five usually mean a horror error on play two or a kick return gone wildly right.

## Where tries cluster

Two windows light up fastest, and any coach could have told you which. The five minutes either side of half-time, when tired middles are defending their eighth set of the half and attacking teams get greedy before the break. And the final ten, when the bench rotations have run out, the game opens up, and one missed tackle becomes seven points. If you only track one pattern on the board, watch how heavily the back end of each half fills in compared to the start.

## The 81st square

Golden point gets its own square. Some seasons it never lights up at all, because extra time is usually settled by a field goal rather than a try, which tells its own story about how coaches play those five minutes: two points will do, thanks.

## Using the board

Click any lit square and the board shows you every try scored in that minute this season: who scored it, in which game, with a link to the full match page and every player rating from that night. Dark squares are the season's open questions. Somewhere out there is a bench forward who is going to score in minute 43 for the first time all year, and the board will be waiting for him.

Coverage grows as more matches are tracked, and the board updates live during rounds. It sits alongside the rest of the odd numbers on our Weird Stats page: the workhorses racking up tackles in losing sides, the one-sided rivalries, and the players who only score when their team is behind.