Trbojevic, who was one of a handful of players to record a perfect score of 20 in Round 7 for his effort in Manly’s win over the Gold Coast Titans, leads Lomax by six votes, who managed a total of 18 against the New Zealand Warriors in a big win for the St George Illawarra Dragons.

Trbojevic was joined by Reece Walsh and Jahrome Hughes as the other other players to receive a perfect 20 in Round 7, but with Walsh recently going through injury, he is back in 18th spot, while Hughes’ effort moves him into the top ten.

Manly’s star fullback and the disgruntled Lomax have begun to put space into the leaderboard, with Patrick Carrigan sitting third but another 13 votes back, with a logjam of players – Scott Drinkwater, Viliame Kikau, Kalyn Ponga and Ronaldo Mulitalo – all separated by a single vote before Hughes, Daly Cherry-Evans and Ben Hunt round out the top ten.

To remind you how this works, each week, our panel – made up of Matt Clements (Zero Tackle founder), Dan Nichols and Ethan Lee Chalk (Zero Tackle writers) and myself as editor will cast votes on each game in a 5-4-3-2-1 scoring system.

The best player on-field receives five votes, the next four, and so on. That means a player could realistically gain 20 votes in a single game, although no one was on that level in the first half of Round 1.