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Penrith Panthers season review: 'Injurypocalypse 2015'

Dallin Watene-Zelezniak will make is debut for the Kiwis. (Photo: Nrlphotos.com.au)
Roar Guru
16th August, 2015
10

For Panthers fans this season 2015 will be remembered as ‘Injurypocalypse 2015’. The team suffered setback after setback on the way to a lost season.

While the Knights and Titans have both actually used more players than the Panthers 29 this season, it is hard to deny the profound impact the Panthers injuries have had on their season given the quality of players missing significant time.

None of the Panthers first choice spine of James Segeyaro, Peter Wallace, Jamie Soward and Matt Moylan have played more than 13 games and other first choice players like Josh Mansour and Dean Whare have also missed significant time.

With so many injuries the club was never really able to get going, with their attack in particular suffering from the absence of those critical playmakers.

Twenty three rounds into the season and the club is dead last in points scored and even that doesn’t really convey how dire their attack was at times.

Season highlight
Its seems a long way to go back but two rounds into the season the Panthers were sitting on the top of the table after crushing the Titans 40-0.

After a surprising run to the preliminary final in 2014 the first two games of the season seemed to confirm that 2014 was no fluke and that the Panthers would once again be a strong contender. Sadly the wheels rapidly fell off as the injuries and poor form for key players began to pile up.

Season lowlight
With their finals hopes evaporating quickly the Panthers visited Melbourne on the Friday night of Round 19. Despite entering the game with a reasonably healthy line-up for once, the Panthers conceded a soft try to Cooper Cronk inside five minutes and things didn’t improve from there.

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As if copping a 52-10 hiding wasn’t enough, the misery was compounded by the fact that this match was the delayed telecast into Sydney with Channel Nine preferring to air the Bulldogs versus Eels game instead. It’s hard to know which is worse, following along live online as the Storm piled on try after try or avoiding the score only to watch the flogging on delay with a million rubbish commercials.

Best player – Reagan Campbell-Gillard
Its not often that a player can be named a team’s best in his rookie season but it is even rarer for that player to be a hard-working prop who the broader rugby league public probably couldn’t pick out of a line-up. Heck I’m not sure I could pick him out of a line-up.

But Campbell-Gillard is absolutely a worthy nomination as player of the year for the Panthers. Not only was he the Panthers’ leading metre-maker in the forwards with 106m per game while also averaging 22 tackles per game from a respectable 39 minutes, he did so with remarkable consistency for a young player in a position that traditionally favours older men. He even scored the Panthers first front row try over the weekend.

Moreover in a team beset on all sides by injuries Campbell-Gillard was one of only three players to play all 20 games so far this season Campbell-Gillard. The other two? His fellow props Sam McKendry and Jeremy Latimore.

Even with Brent Kite and hard man Nigel Plum (its compulsory to use the phrase hard man whenever referring to Nigel Plum) retiring the Panthers remain remarkably well-stocked in the front row. Now if only they could get that sort of endurance from every other position on the roster.

Roster management
Despite being several seasons into the Phil Gould-Ivan Clearly era, the Panthers are far from a settled squad. They have four first grade players leaving at the end of this season – including two retirees Nigel Plum and Brent Kite, along with Lewis Brown and Apisai Koroisau who will both join the Sea Eagles.

Coming the other way is a coterie of young talent including highly rated halves Te Maire Martin and Zach Dockar-Clay – along with one of the best acquisitions by any club in Trent Merrin. At 103kgs and 181cm or thereabouts and with tremendous skill at that size plus a virtually unlimited motor, Merrin is a top-shelf, custom-made middle unit player for the new eight interchange era and will help to plug the gap left by the departures of Plum and Kite.

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Prognosis
While the slump from preliminary finalists to eliminated with four rounds remaining is understandable in the context of the awful injury toll the club has suffered, the risk is that the club doesn’t bounce back in 2016.

Simply getting all the troops back on deck doesn’t guarantee a return to the success of 2014. In a perverse way the opportunities provided to young players this season may actually make it harder to settle on a top 17 next year as more and more vie for a position.

There is an old saying in the NFL that if you have two good quarterbacks you actually have none, and that burden of riches may become a challenge for coach Ivan Clearly in 2016.

That being said, the talent on the roster at the Panthers is truly remarkable with the club fielding a NSW Cup side littered with legitimate first grade talent and a NYC team that has scored boatloads of points. Moreover in Clearly the team has one of the most astute coaches in the game.

As such it is hard to imagine that the Panthers don’t bounce back in 2016.

Predicted finish: bottom half of the eight

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