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Will Cronulla win the premiership? Should we anticipate Harold Holt turning up on someone’s porch any time soon?
It’s safe to say the answer to the second question is no, since there has been no sign of the former Prime Minister since he disappeared, assumed drowned, off Cheviot beach, near Portsea, in 1967.
Holt is, of course, mentioned in one of the late Jack Gibson’s most famous quotes.
Gibson won five premierships as a coach – three with Parramatta and two at Eastern Suburbs – but even he, like every coach before him at the club and since – couldn’t win one with the Sharks.
“Waiting for Cronulla to win a premiership is like leaving the porch lamp on for Harold Holt,” Gibson said.
We’re still waiting for the Sharks – and Holt.
The answer to the first question is a matter of opinion, but in my opinion it’s also no. There are several other teams I don’t think Cronulla will get past in the finals series.
Even if the Sharks were to beat one of them, I reckon one of the others would eventually stop their run.
But there is a third question and that is this – can Cronulla win the premiership? The answer to that, in a relatively even competition like the NRL, has got to be yes.
The Sharks are competing for a place in the top four and if you finish that high you are guaranteed to at least get through to the second week of the finals even if you lose in week one.
And if you win in week one you’re through to week three and suddenly you’re only one win away from a place in the grand final.
So you have to take each top-four team seriously.
My original plan was to come up with five reasons why the Sharks can win the premiership and another five reasons why they can’t.
But I found it wasn’t working out very well because I was struggling to come up with five reasons why they could win it at the same time as I comfortably reached double figures for reasons why they couldn’t.
The main reason why they can’t is because the club has never won anything. OK, Cronulla won the 1979 version of the great old midweek competition, but let’s be serious – Western Division won one of those.
The Sharks have never won a premiership and until you do – particularly since you’ve been trying since 1967 – it’s hard to believe that a club actually has the ability to take that final step until it does.
There are other reasons. The halves partnership of Jack Bird and Jeff Robson – a first-year rookie and a 33-year-old veteran who has never been called upon to play representative football and doesn’t have a contract at the club for next year.
Can such a duo really get the business done in the finals – all the way through to winning the grand final?
The Sharks are currently in fifth place, outside of the top four only via an inferior points differential compared to fourth-placed South Sydney (both teams are on 28 points).
But that inferior points differential is not a minor thing. Cronulla is minus six. First-placed Brisbane is plus 143, second-placed North Queensland plus 90, third-placed Sydney Roosters plus 213 and the Rabbitohs plus 64.
Cronulla’s differential, compared to those four, is hard to ignore.
I could go on with the negatives, but let’s look at the positives and the biggest in Cronulla’s favour is that their recent form has been very good.
The Sharks have won five games in a row and eight out of their last nine. They are fighting hard, as their record in the close games shows, but the fact many of those recent wins have been narrow creates a nagging doubt in my view.
Cronulla beat the Warriors by four points, Canterbury by two, Canberra by one and Newcastle by two.
Granted, they are all wins, but what I’m wondering is whether that is good as it gets for the Sharks and they’re not going to be able to take a bigger step in the finals.
I won’t mind being proved wrong.
I’m not a Sharks fan, but as a 14-year-old I was at the SCG in all its former glory when the Sharks played in their first grand final, in 1973. It was the first GF I’d ever been to and I sat with my mates on the hill as one of the most brutal games you could imagine was played out in front of my eyes.
In the end, the brilliance of Bob Fulton, with two tries for Manly, made the difference.
Cronulla should have won a premiership long before now. Who knows, they might finally win one this year, but when you’ve been waiting this long for it to happen it does make you wonder if it ever will.
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