And the NRL's 2018 top eight will be...

And so! Fresh from last week’s nothing-short-of-triumphant column, here we are again.

Last week’s column was so lauded and completely agreed with by everyone, which tipped South Sydney for the wooden spoon, Saints for second-last, and Brisbane for ninth and which stirred up such very typical ‘passion’ among rugby league fandom that one fellow wrote me, “You must have to be the worst journalist ever”, that we best do it again and make a big fat educated guess upon who’s going to make the top eight in this dear sweet season of our lord Rocket Reddy, 2018.

And breathe.

And read.

8. Parramatta Eels
Jarryd Hayne, they say, has never trained. Not hard, anyway. He’s just been so good on the back of his natural freak ability that he’s just turned up and looked like a bored teenage cool girl.

Jarryd used to run about as a kid with Israel Folau in Minto, and big Israel, who played for Melbourne Storm aged 17, said it was Jarryd who was the freak, not him.

And lo did we not marvel at Hayne Plane’s man magic in 2009 when he was like Ellery Hanley in 1988 except heaps better, hot-pronking about carving up this man’s NRL on the way to a grand final out of eighth. They were heady days indeed.

But not the now, baby. Not the now.

Now the Eels need Jarryd Hayne to be fit and firing and running about because, well, now he’s very old. Sure, he’s only just 30 – indeed yesterday; happy birthday Hayne Plane – but he’s old in footy player years. This is his 12th season. After this, they shoot you.

(Grant Trouville © nrlphotos.com)

And he’s not alone. The Eels have lots of old players with calves and hamstrings like fat rubber bands in the sun, like Michael Jennings, a gun, but old; Tim Mannah, Beau Scott and David Gower, all hard men all but all old; and Brad Arthur, who is very old.

Admittedly Brad Arthur’s the coach and won’t play for Parramatta Eels, but last time the Eels went for a training run Brad Arthur, 43, beat Jarryd Hayne, 30, home. True story.

The Eels do have some super-hot players, though, and Mitchell Moses and Corey Norman feeding Clint Gutherson and Bevan French wide is all to the good.

You like watching Parra for no reason other than seeing Kenny Edwards get all crazy-eyed and chippy and charging into packs of his opponents celebrating his own team’s tries. That is high freakin’ comedy.

But there’s no more semi-trailer rah-rah-rah, and that’ll be all she wrote for Parra, who’ll limp out of the semis in September at the hands of Cronulla Sharks. I foresee it.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

7. Melbourne Storm
Yes! The Storm! Curse your eyes, Melbourne Storm, who will make the eight but won’t win the competition. Because it’s over. Because everything eventually is. No man is an island. And Cooper Cronk is a Rooster.

And though Craig Bellamy’s overall winning record with Storm is something like 62 per cent, his winning record when coaching teams without two of this Big Three in the XVII is something like 25 per cent. I asked stats man David Middleton about it.

Hell yes, he’s a cracking coach, the Bellyache, and there’s something in the Yarra River water for sure. But – and Bellyache will tell you this also – it is great players who make coaches great, not the other way around. Now he’s lost one of his guns and the other two are 35 on the same day in June this year.

And it’s over, baby. It’s over.

(AAP Image/Paul Miller)

6. Manly Sea Eagles
Now, I live up Manly way, not a 15-minute walk from the Brookvale Hotel – I mean Oval or Blottoland or whatever they’ve christened dear sweet Brookie. I’ll never call it after the gambling company. The pokies are worse than heroin for addiction and are root cause of more ills in our society than all the drugs.

But outside of making them illegal and/or putting them in the casino only, as they do in Perth, which doesn’t need filthy poker machine money from clubs to sponsor its footy clubs, it appears we must have to put up with them and their harm – and their renaming of Brookie.

Woah, a bit of a tangent there, wot? I can get off on one for Australia talking about pokies, the horrible insidious blinking bastards. They could root Australia for Australia.

Anyway, yes – I live quite close to Brookvale Oval and there are several fellows from golf who I count as chums and who support the local seabirds, and so I’ll choose my words very carefully when describing Manly’s premiership aspirations in 2018.

They have none.

Don’t bother.

It’s over.

N. O. N. E.

None.

Well, they have aspirations. Everyone has aspirations. I’d like to be paid more to pump out this jibber jabber, for one. But that won’t happen, will it? And sort of similarly Manly won’t win season 2018 because Manly, well – how does one couch this? – sucks. That’s right. They suck.

Actually, no, they don’t. They’re good. But they’ll only run sixth.

5. Cronulla Sharks
The Sharks are so old they make the Eels look like Justin Bieber’s unborn children from the future. So old they voted on the right of women to vote. So old they remember where they were when Jesus landed on the moon.

Maybe not that old. And that may not have even happened. But still, these Sharks are very old people.

That Paul Gallen continues to walk without a frame, much less cart the Steeden into the meat of NRL meat-mashing land, is almost cute. Bully for him, the mad old bastard. The Gal’s like Cliffy Young powering down to Westfields.

Watch him, the Gal, carting it up three times a set.

The Gal, tackled with the pill on the sixth after a typical head-down barge and Valentine Holmes un-marked out wide.

The Gal, milking penalties that don’t arrive.

(AAP Image/Craig Golding)

If Ray Price was Mr Perpetual Motion, the Gal is a Mr Crash and Burn Dummy. A head for radio. And boxing. And boxing radio.

And Luke Lewis is older again. He’s Winston Churchill old. He was in the Boer War. He’s 110 years old.

However, the Sharks do have Andrew Fifita, and he can play. He’s eely and big, our Andrew, and makes many metres.

They also have Josh Dugan, Wade Graham, and Trent Hodkinson. And Matt Moylan. And Chad Townsend. And Valentine Holmes is really good. Actually, they’re a bit tasty, the Sharks.

What have I got ’em? Fifth? Probably right.

For if 2016 was one small step for man, one giant leap for Harold Holt’s electricity bill, then 2017 was a bridge too far on the boulevard of broken dreams, and metaphors like that.

And so the Sharkies were rumbled out in the first week of the finals by Cows, who would rumble Roosters and Eels, no disgrace in it.

No-one’s defended a premiership since the Broncos of 1993 – not even Melbourne Storm, who’ve had some teams you could scarcely believe.

(AAP Image/Dean Lewins)

4. Penrith Panthers
Fourth? These Penny Panthers? These Blue Mountains cougars who’ve lost Matt Moylan and Bryce Cartwright? With Tyrone Peachey signed to Gold Coast?

Yes. These Penny Panthers.

And not because of the game’s gun young halfback Nathan Cleary, who should play Origin in 2018 – he’s really, really good.

And not because their forward pack sports such big mobile brutes as James Tamou, Trent Merrin, Reagan Campbell-Gillard and Isaah Yeo. There’s another double-barrelled one I can’t be arsed Googling. Someone Fisher.

And not because of a back division sporting such flying black-bearded stallions as Josh Mansour, Dallin Watene-Zelezniak, Dean Whare and Waqa Blake.

And not even because Peter Wallace continues to play fringe Origin footy and touch the ball more than anyone and deliver quality pill to big men and small.

No. Though they are all quality reasons, these Penny Panthers slide into the T4 of this Telstra premiership because they’ve signed one man: James Maloney. Winner.

He was at Storm and learnt from Bellamy. At the Roosters, he won the premiership. He won it at Cronulla, too. He’s won Origin games.

He just wins, Jimmy. And he talks straight talk to boy-men. And they like him. And they listen. And that’s why they signed him. And that’s why they’ll run fourth.

(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)

3. Sydney Roosters
Cooper Cronk? Tick.

James Tedesco? Tick.

Pack full of meat-eating madmen who love to dominate their enemies and hear the lamentations of their women? Tick, tick, tick, boom.

Plenty of ticks for the Bondi Chooks, and they’ll win puh-lenty in 2018 on the back of the game’s superstar seven, and superstar one, and outside backs – Blake Ferguson, Latrell Mitchell, Daniel Tupou – who can leap and plant and score for Australia.

And yet, while you do like Jake Friend in the nine – he’ll tackle a pack a day, and run nifty metres out of dummy-half – you feel that the Roosters are lacking that final golden vertebra in their spinal column. To wit, an all-running ball-playing star number six.

Will that be Lachlan Lam and Ryan Matterson? Maybe. But it hasn’t been yet.

So. You like the Chooks. But not enough. Not quite enough.

(Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

2. North Queensland Cowboys
Yes, they could run off with the whole thing for sure. They’re magnificent, the Cows, and they possess the game’s greatest player arguably ever – I’m still a Wally Man, and others are Joey Men, and those of Luke Lewis’ vintage still talk in hushed tones about Clive Churchill, who they called the ‘Little Master’, a conversation for another time.

For now, it’s the magnificent Cows, whose run in the finals last year was so good they almost pulled off the whole thing without the game’s best prop and halfback.

And now they’ve added Jordan McLean to a stellar forward pack led by superhuman rampaging ruckman Jason Taumalolo and reborn Matt Scott.

The back division sports the ever-dangerous Lachlan Coote in the one and Cool Hand Luke in the six, the brilliant Michael Morgan.

And of course, there’s the champion, Johnathan Thurston, in the seven – a man who’ll play and play and play and then play some more and won’t stop playing for so long after the final whistle that ground officials are forced to use tasers to immobilise him. Champion.

And these are your probable champions. And yet…

(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)

Premiers: Canberra Raiders
Because it’s my column.

And that’s all she wrote.