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Melbourne have survived throwing away a 14-point lead to defeat South Sydney 15-14 in golden point extra time.
Despite the win, Craig Bellamy’s 500th game was more deserving of one of his famous sprays rather than celebration, such was the manner in which his team nearly lost.
The Storm had led 14-0 after just 26 minutes following a disastrous South start, but failed to score from that point on until Ryan Papenhuyzen’s 83rd minute field goal.
Souths, who had failed to make any attacking combinations stick all night, suddenly found their form in attack with ten minutes to play as Cody Walker, Lachlan Ilias and Latrell Mitchell manage to square the defensive line and find space on the outside.
Mitchell was both hero and villain: he took the game to golden point via a spectacular, barely-believable two-point field goal, but missed all three kicks off the tee that could have won the game in regular time. Similarly, Harry Grant missed two attempts early on that would have made a big difference down the line.
Souths coach Jason Demetriou made a serious impact on the game, too. His decision to hook Damien Cook after 70 minutes and shift Siliva Haivili to dummy half preempted a change in the Bunnies’ attacking emphasis away from the run-first mentality of Cook to moving the ball more readily to the wings.
Initially the word was that Cook was injured, but it was later revealed that he had simply been withdrawn.
South were assisted by a near-total Melbourne collapse: they got caught in a cycle of cynical defending that resulted in Justin Olam being sent to the bin. The combination of the more expansive Souths style with the extra man created the conditions for Alex Johnston, Jaxson Paulo and Campbell Graham to get Souths within touching distance.
The last 60 seconds of regular time were pure chaos. Melbourne kicked off, with the ball going dead in goal. The Souths short dropout bounced well within the ten, only for a fortuitous bounce to send it straight into the arms of Ilias.
The Bunnies took the ball to 40m, cut it back and Mitchell did the rest to force extra time – only for Ryan Papenhuyzen, dormant for nearly an hour, to seal the victory.
“We just couldn’t seem to get any decent ball or do much with it,” Bellamy said of a second half in which Tepai Moeroa and Justin Olam were sin-binned and his team missed 40 tackles.
“I think we only completed one set in the last 20 minutes of the game so we were under pressure and then for 20 minutes we were a man short. I’m not quite sure how we got there at the end; got lucky I guess.”
Rabbitohs coach Jason Demetriou was heartened by team being able to bounce back after such a poor start.
“I’m pretty proud of them. At 14-0 down and with a 50 per cent completion rate in the first half that game could have gone anywhere,” he said.
“The players were keen at half-time to get out and right a few wrongs and we did that.”
We probably should have seen the start coming. Souths are 0-17 in Melbourne. The Storm are celebrating Craig Bellamy’s 500th game.
Few would have expected the sort of one way traffic that defined the first half at AAMI Park, however. Melbourne went to the sheds 14-0 to the good, but it could have been anything.
Ther were early scores for Xavier Coates and Ryan Papenhuyzen, but it was the third try, in which Harry Grant raced 60m untouched from dummy half before putting Cameron Munster in, was emblematic of the Rabbitohs’ lacklustre early performance.
“Embarrassing for South Sydney, their middle defence decimated,” shouted Andrew Voss on commentary, and it’s hard to disagree.
The numbers made for terrible reading for Jason Demetriou: in the first half, his team had a 50% completion rate and 10 errors, hardly the sort of ball control on which wins against the Storm are built.
There were other moments, too. Lachlan Ilias missed touch from a penalty, but was reprieved by the Melbourne player being unable to bat it back in. Nelson Asofa-Solomona managed two ball steals. Cameron Murray threw the ball straight past Taane Milne into touch.
It was dispiriting stuff from South Sydney, perhaps more so than that scoreboard itself.
“South Sydney look rattled,” said Cooper Cronk on Fox League. “They look like they can’t handle the ability of Melbourne Storm to spread it wide, or the tenacity and power through the middle. Harry Grant is having a field day.”
“It doesn’t matter where on the field, Melbourne Storm look like a threat.”