Opinion
Another eight games spread across five days and you can get used to this ‘footy every day’ lark. The ANZAC Round is always a highlight of the year, and it didn’t disappoint.
So much football has been played that it’s hard to remember that as recently as Thursday we saw one of the greatest ever individual 40-minute performances – it feels like a lifetime ago.
There was the Saturday night field goal thriller in Parramatta, the record-setting Panthers on Sunday, a massive boilover in the Anzac Cup and another record set in the final fixture as the Warriors copped their biggest-ever defeat.
With all that to cover, let’s crack on with the Rankings.
The Panthers keep on Panthering along, and this week might have been the most Pantherish performance yet. They took a moment to get going, but once they did, it was suffocating stuff for Canberra.
The draw has been somewhat kind to Penrith, but they way they are travelling at the moment, you don’t really see them losing to anyone. The Titans, who they face on Friday night, are $9 to win that game. The next week, when Penrith face Parramatta, might be a little closer.
The Storm are a really, really good football team. The Warriors helped them out by being absolutely useless, but they still put on a show regardless.
In fact, it’s difficult to see how anyone stops them in the mood that they are currently in, and with a trip to the depleted Knights this weekend and a visit from the Dragons the week after, the good times will likely keep rolling.
There are a few things that they can work on. If they’re going to play Nick Meaney, for example, then let the lad kick the goals because their current options are terrible.
Cronulla continue to go up, up at speed. They disposed of Manly with relative comfort, though Craig Fitzgibbon was understandably upset at the second half showing when his men put the cue in the rack and almost allowed the Sea Eagles back in.
You can’t complain about being 32-0 up at home to one of last year’s top four, however. The Sharkies look like the real deal and now run into the Broncos, Warriors, Raiders and Titans in succession. Expect them to win all four.
It was back to winning ways for the Eels this week, albeit with a hefty assistance from a very poor Newcastle team. You can only beat what is in front of you, however, and Parra did that with aplomb.
It already looks like the Tigers defeat was an aberration, and while Brad Arthur will worry about the ever-depleting stocks of outside backs, he must be happy that his team could put the loss out of their mind so comprehensively.
The only cloud might be that current injury situation has Dylan Brown playing centre and Jakob Arthur playing in the 6 jumper – the fourth son of a coach playing in the halves in this round – which seems faintly ridiculous and the sort of thing that will get found out sooner rather than later.
North Queensland might not be the mirage that some, myself top of the list, expected. I simply did not believe that their collection of youngsters, journeymen and Jason Taumalolo was going to work, but here we are.
They’re 4-3, have the second-best defence in the competition and seem to have found the secret to playing Scott Drinkwater. (Hint: it’s don’t have him have to make any tackles.) That’s why they jump five places in this week’s list.
(Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)
At what point do we start nailing them into the finals? Well, a win against Parramatta would help and they’ll get a chance at it on Saturday night in Darwin.
Manly might have lost to Cronulla, but it wasn’t actually that bad a performance. Sure, Morgan Harper might be looking at a spell in reserve grade after being hooked at half-time, but if you take out Siosifa Talakai’s big day out running over him, the game was actually quite close.
Here in the power rankings, we like performances almost as much as results, and even Craig Fitzgibbon admitted that Manly hadn’t been as bad as the scoreline suggested. Away at Cronulla is one of the toughest tasks in the NRL at the moment, so there’s that too.
The big read on the Sea Eagles might come this weekend. They face a Souths team that is also at something of a crossroads and will probably define whether this is a genuinely good team in a bad trot, or an overrated team that is about where they should be.
Speaking of Souths, they roll around again. They lost to the Wests Tigers, which means…very little.
It wasn’t a great night to be a Bunnies fan, but they did basically everything wrong on Saturday night and still only lost by a point.
They’ve had the two unluckiest games of the season and lost to the Broncos and Tigers as a result, as well as having the unluckiest draw to open the year.
Expect the reversion to the mean to happen soon, and probably as soon as this Friday night when they run into a wounded Manly.
The Roosters are fast becoming the hardest team to read in the comp. That might be because the Raiders, the previous holders of that crown, are genuinely rubbish now, but still: whither the Roosters?
The roster is stacked. They do score points. They don’t concede that many. But yet, they still look like they should be a lot, lot better. The defeat to the Dragons had been on the cards, because the performances have lagged behind the results for a while now.
Trent Robinson couldn’t be happier that his team will now get two gimmes, in the Bulldogs and Titans, so they can tune up for the Eels at Magic Round. That said, the Chooks made very heavy weather of the Broncos and the Warriors, so anything is possible.
Brisbane are back in the winner’s circle, though they made heavy weather of it for a long period. A win against the Bulldogs isn’t worth much at this stage, but the contributions of Adam Reynolds, Selwyn Cobbo and, amazingly, Te Maire Martin all bode very well.
The Sharks are next up in Brisbane and the potential for a Kotoni Staggs versus Siosifa Talakai centre showdown is already too good to resist. Staggs was quiet again on Friday but is generally looking up for it, and his one-on-one with the form centre in the competition at the moment will go a long way towards deciding the result.
He needs to be huge for Kevin Walters, because the team don’t really have a creative five-eighth and are so dependent on either Staggs or Farnworth to make things happen.
It’s weird being a coach. One week you’re a moron, the next week you’re a genius. Anthony Griffin is neither a moron nor a genius, but such are the vagaries of the results business.
Last week, his side were somewhat lucky to beat a depleted Newcastle, but this week they were bang up for the ANZAC clash with the Roosters and deserved everything that they got.
They’ll count the losses, however. Jack Bird and Jaydn Su’A look likely to be outs for the clash with the Tigers, in what might have looked like a Spoonbowl two weeks ago but now looks like a blockbuster Sunday arvo in the Gong. Remember Zac Cini? Bring him back, I say.
Newcastle have serious mitigating factors to explain their current five-game losing streak.
They have a lot of players out. They have played Penrith, Parramatta, Cronulla and Manly, plus the Dragons in Wollongong. They will play the Storm and then up in North Queensland. It’s tough.
There was the whole saga that dominated every presser, in which Adam O’Brien and Kalyn Ponga had to sit next to each other and pretend like there wasn’t a massive contract elephant in the room.
(Photo by Ashley Feder/Getty Images)
The word “spoonbowl” gets bandied about a lot, particularly by me, but their meeting with the Bulldogs at Magic Round could well be last against second last by the time we all depart for Brisbane. Let’s hope the Knights have a few bodies on deck by then.
Jackson Hastings is a miracle worker, a walking culture, a stat-generating machine. He has his hands in everything that the Tigers do well at the moment, from touching the ball four times a set to getting a tune out of Luke Brooks.
Wests Tigers have been superb in the last two weeks – aided by huge flaws from their opponents, mind – and have manifested the luck that has come their way. They completed 42/43 on Saturday night and you’ll not lose many football games like that.
The problem has long been consistency, however, and after getting to the mountaintop to depose Parramatta and South Sydney, they now have to do it on the more mundane occasion of St George Illawarra away.
Hastings is big-time though, so don’t worry about it. He’ll be up for it. It’s the other 16 blokes who have to go with him.
The Dogs lost, but gained some credit for the manner of their loss. Trent Barrett’s boys can never be accused of throwing the towel in, and ran their blood to water on Friday night in Brisbane.
It was a COVID-curtailed squad. Jacob Kiraz, in his first game of NRL, looked good but got cramp after 50 minutes. He wasn’t the only one who looked goosed.
Aaron Schoupp and Kyle Flanagan also looked decent, making it all the more baffling that neither were considered in the earlier rounds, especially in a team where Jayden Okunbor was picked.
The Dogs have had the consistently most difficult draw so far and it doesn’t get any easier now, with the Roosters tipping up at Homebush on Saturday evening on the back of a disappointing ANZAC Day defeat.
Canterbury can’t catch a break, but they are certainly not the worst team in the NRL – even if they are bottom.
The Warriors were fool’s gold. There was a school of thought that they were properly crap, around the time of their first two defeats, and then that they were good, when they won three on the bounce.
Now we have learned that victories over the Tigers (which was incredibly fortunate in the Kiwis’ favour) and the Broncos aren’t worth much, plus that their golden point triumph over the Cowboys – when they trailed by 12 points – was something of an aberration too.
The manner in which the Warriors folded in the second stanza in Melbourne was embarrassing and earns them a spot right at the bottom of this list, because their mitigating factors aren’t as strong as the Bulldogs – hardest draw – and the Raiders, who didn’t get thrashed by 60 at Penrith.
That could all change this Saturday though, with a 3pm Spoonbowl against Canberra.
Oh, Ricky. The legendary halfback turned beleaguered coach was fuming at fulltime on Saturday after their defeat to the Panthers and ended the press conference early after a series of questions about clapping or something. Go look it up, it was weird.
Sticky looked like he’d rather be anywhere else than chatting about another defeat, his team’s fourth on the spin.
Even the one that they won, against the Titans, was a miracle comeback that they should have lost, as was the victory over Cronulla. They both feel a lifetime ago now.
A fixture double of the Warriors and the Titans couldn’t have come at a better time for Canberra, who need something, anything to fall their way. If it doesn’t, Ricky might not be doing press conferences for much longer.
The Gold Coast are really bad at football, and they’re in bad form to boot. They have key position players learning in first grade, which doesn’t usually end well, plus an ongoing inability to make tackles that has been with them for a few seasons now.
Last year it was masked somewhat because they, and everyone else in the league, scored so many points that poor defence didn’t matter as much. Now, it looks like a really big problem.
They have good players, but always appear to be less than the sum of their parts, which is really the opposite of what coaching is meant to do.
With the Panthers and Roosters next, you can’t see things getting much better any time soon and that could cause major headaches for Justin Holbrook, who is fast overtaking Michael Maguire in the sack race.
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