NRL Power Rankings: Raiders staring into abyss, a new team at top and are Dragons actually any good?

Sometimes, as Werner Herzog was wont to say, you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back.

This might be the first time that Adam O’Brien has enjoyed the literary company of the Bavarian auteur, but after a weekend where the Knights copped a second thrashing in succession in front of the hard-earned dispensing Hunter public, it’s an apt comparison.

This was a week for embracing the chaos. The good lost, the bad won. Super Saturday saw three games go against the favourites and if you think I’ve shoehorned that in so that I can tell you that I got 40/1 from a high street bookmaker on such things, you’d be absolutely right.

These rankings have been easy of late, as the league settled down into a rhythm. No more. Let’s get stuck in.

1- Melbourne Storm (+1)

The Storm are top! It’s taken a while, but Melbourne have finally overtaken Penrith on the back of dishing out a second shellacking in seven days, this time with Newcastle the unfortunate recipients.

In truth, their elevation is more a result of the Panthers not being at their best against similarly weak opposition on Friday teamtime, but still: Melbourne are ominous.

There’s not much else to go into, other than to say that the Saturday night clash at Magic Round is going to be great.

2 – Penrith Panthers (-1)

The Panthers drop, but as mentioned above, it’s more due to the manner of the win being less crushing than expected.

You can’t dish out floggings every week and sometimes you have to win ugly, so perhaps it’s harsh, but The Roar Power Rankings is a performance-measure and not a results-based business. The NRL posts this thing called a league ladder if you want to know what the results are.

We judge off performances and this week, the Panthers dropped and Melbourne elevated. It’s still fresh air down to third, so Ivan Cleary will forgive us.

3 – Cronulla Sharks (-)

Losing to Brisbane is bad, because in recent years, the Broncos have been bad. But bring the lens back a little bit: losing to Brisbane in Brisbane was totally fine for decades and will likely be the case again.

The toys shouldn’t be thrown from the pram just yet. Put that drawing board away. The Sharks are a good footy side, didn’t play too badly on Thursday and you’d back them to win most weeks.

Perhaps a kick up the jacksie is what they needed to keep on improving. They’ll be fine, as they say.

(Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

4 – North Queensland Cowboys (+1)

The real deal Cowboys are up as high as third after a Darwin destruction of Parramatta.

There’s an element of luck in their position: the Cowboys have had a very, very soft trot so far, with wins over the Raiders (twice), Titans, Broncos and now Parramatta, interspersed with losses to the Bulldogs, Warriors and Roosters.

The performance aspect comes into it here. The manner with which North Queensland have picked up their wins is great, and they dismantled Parra on the weekend. Kudos for that.

Scott Drinkwater at the back looks superb – amazing what not making any tackles can do for you – and Jason Taumalolo is back to something approximating his best.

But let’s be real: this was a rubbish Eels team that they beat, with many injuries, so I’ll not be reading too much into it. The Cowboys have faced two teams in the top 8 and gone 1-1. They didn’t get close to a poor Roosters team. The cold hard regression will come.

5 – Parramatta Eels (-1)

“The current injury situation has Dylan Brown playing centre and Jakob Arthur playing in the 6 jersey – 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”.

So read last week’s power rankings, ever the perceptive insight into the NRL. Found out it was, and thus Parra drop below the Cowboys.

The coach’s son being given a jersey in the halves when your best 5/8 is fit and available isn’t a great idea, because it’s much harder to find a good half than it is to find a passable centre, and if you don’t believe me on that, go look at the numbers published in the SMH last week on how much players get paid by position.

Parramatta currently sit in fourth in NSW Cup, where Samuel Loizou has scored five tries in eight games while playing centre, and I’m going to throw out that he might be a decent option to look at if at all possible.

(Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

6 – South Sydney Rabbitohs (+1)

Where do you rank Souths and the Sea Eagles when they just played each other, but Souths had a man extra for most of the game.

First things first: it’s not on Souths if their opponent gets sent off. Don’t do spear tackles if you like playing 13-a-side.

South Sydney were exactly as good as they had to be to win against Manly, and win well in the end. Things might have been different if Karl Lawton had stayed on, but he didn’t and they weren’t.

The Bunnies are in a learning phase, especially with Lachlan Ilias and Blake Taaffe as half of the spine, but every week the play in top grade is a chance to get better. The same goes for Jason Demetriou.

Come the end of the year, or more important, come next year, you expect that to pay off.

7 – Manly Sea Eagles (-1)

Manly will take a lot from their defeat on Friday night. The club has experience in bucketloads and DCE is having his best year in ages, as evidenced by their ability to negate a man disadvantage and come very close to beating Souths.

Josh Schuster looked a bit roly-poly in his first week back, and you wonder if he might have been kept out a bit longer if they had other options, but the class never leaves you and he looked great.

Next week, with Tom Trbojevic and Haumole Olakau’atu back on deck, we might finally see the best version of the Sea Eagles. Spoiler alert: it won’t include Jason Saab. He’s toast and feel free to tweet me at 4pm on Tuesday.

8 – Sydney Roosters (-)

The power rankings, and their author, remain a Trent Robinson stan account and thus continually place the Roosters above where most would have them.

Here’s some reasoning. On Saturday night, they lost in the last seconds to a Bulldogs team that has been criminally underrated (on performance measures) and for whom basically everything had to go right.

The attack is a massive problem, but I can’t imagine a team coached by Robbo that has Sam Walker and Luke Keary chucking footballs to James Tedesco and Joey Manu will stay bad for too long.

The middle is losing though. The North Sydney Bears are second in NSW Cup and, sooner rather than later, we might see Renouf Atoni, Naufahu Whyte and Daniel Suluka-Fifita wondering what they have to do to make top grade.

The Roosters are not there at the moment, but they don’t have to be. They have to be there at the end of the season and for now, they can probably be happy that they have been able to jag a 4-4 record while misfiring.

They need that to be 5-4 this weekend and will be grateful that the Titans hove into view. After that, it goes Eels, Panthers, Sharks. They’ll need to find some form by then.

(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

9 – Brisbane Broncos (-)

The Broncos are like a reverse Dragons. I never really doubted the defence too much, because barring an off-afternoon against the Cowboys and a trip to Penrith – currently the rugby league equivalent of Helms Deep away – the Broncos have kept teams to reasonable scores.

On the other side of the ball, they’ve got the players there to make me believe that they will get better as the year goes on. I refuse to believe that a side with Adam Reynolds, Kotoni Staggs and Herbie Farnworth in it won’t score points, even if the hooker situation is bad and the five eighth even worse.

Ezra Mam is on three tries in five games of Q Cup and cannot be far away from getting a gig in top grade, but in the interim, Tyson Gamble had probably his best game of NRL on Thursday night, while Corey Paix is looking more threatening than Jake Turpin.

Back to back games with the Bunnies and Manly will give a better read on whether performances such as that on Thursday night are actually replicable, but I’m more confidence about the Broncos than at perhaps any point so far this season.

10 – St George Illawarra Dragons (-)

It’s a bit counterintuitive to have the Dragons behind the Roosters, given St George Illawarra beat them as recently as last week, but honestly: if they played tomorrow, I’d be tipping the Chooks every time.

The Dragons are proof positive of why this ranking is based on performance rather than results. When they lost four on the spin, they looked genuinely dreadful against teams above them in this list. Now they’ve won three on the spint against teams around or below them, what have we learned?

Griffin has the team defending quite well – at least, better than before – but I’m not sure that it isn’t a result of the opposition getting worse. The Roosters, as far as I’m concerned, are beating themselves at the moment.

Home wins against Newcastle (combined score since 89-4) and a Tigers who have won two games all year (by a combined two points) aren’t worth much: they prove that you’re marginally better than two of the worst teams in the league.

11 – Canterbury Bulldogs (+2)

As I sat watching the Warriors v Raiders game on Saturday afternoon in Accor Stadium, a thought came over me. Maybe it was the fact that I was surrounded by Bulldogs fans waiting for their game to start, but I got the impression that the Dogs would topple either team.

Canterbury have faced the hardest start of the season in terms of fixtures, so don’t read into their 2-6 record too hard: the six have been Penrith, Storm (away), Sea Eagles (away), Broncos (home and away), Rabbitohs (away, though of course, it’s the same stadium).

I hate rugby league’s obsession on ‘competing’, but the Dogs compete really, really hard and were always likely to jag a result sooner rather than later. They make themselves so hard to beat and eventually, they were going to run into a team that gave them enough rope.

The interesting bit will be when the Dogs face teams where they aren’t expected to get thrashed.

They go Raiders, Knights, Tigers, Dragons next, with the last two at Leichhardt and Belmore. Expect huge Winfield Cup vibes. Low scoring, attritional football, all guts and effort: it’s what you tell us you want.

(Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)

12 – Wests Tigers (-)

Speaking of teams that make themselves hard to beat and jags wins on the back of it, I give you the Wests Tigers.

Michael Maguire might not be a miracle worker, but he has got his team in a position where they can win football matches. That isn’t to say they will win, merely that they *can* win, which is better than they were a few weeks ago.

This Sunday was a perfect example. If they had scored late and took it to golden point, it would have been a fair enough result.

In the end, they didn’t, and might rue not having taken two points on offer several times in the first half when it was clear for all to see that the game was likely to be very low scoring.

Playing in a no-nonsense style will definitely assist in beating bad teams and closing the gap on better teams, allowing for variance to fall your way – which is exactly what happened against the Eels and Bunnies.

Performance-wise, they were in the fight and the chips fell their way. That didn’t happen against the Dragons, but compare with the Titans, Knights and Raiders: the ref would have stopped the contest.

13 – New Zealand Warriors (+1)

What do you say about the Warriors, other than that they are the jammiest gets in the league. For those not up to speed on Northern English slang: they’re lucky beyond belief.

The Warriors lucked out in having a very easy trot to star the year. They lucked out on playing the Broncos and Cowboys on days when they seemed intent on beating themselves.

Then this weekend, the coup de grace of fortune, they faced the Raiders in full gun-at-the-foot, hari-kari football mode. It was astounding to watch this game and I’ll thank you for never slagging off the Super League ever again.

On performance levels, they were minutely better than last week when they conceded a club record score…but it’s hard to say much more positive than that. That New Zealand have the same 4-4 record as South Sydney, Manly, Brisbane and the Roosters…wow.

14 – Gold Coast Titans (+2)

The Gold Coast were, whisper it quietly, good against the Panthers. The trouble in the NRL is that if you save your good performances for against the best teams, you often lose anyway, while if you come up big against crap teams, you invariably get the points.

The Titans have put in their best showings against Parramatta, twice, plus Manly and Penrith, for a grand total of zero competition points. The two wins that they have got were unearned.

There are massive structural flaws in this side, not least that they don’t give their million dollar player the ball. Interestingly, they have benched David Fifita, their best player, and yet maintain Kevin Proctor, who had one run for zero metres.

Justin Holbrook has some issues he can’t fix, such as a young spine learning to play in the top grade, but others that he can, like who he picks and how often they seek to get them involved.

15 – Newcastle Knights (-4)

Newcastle have lost their last two weeks 89-4. They have lost six games on the spin. These things are objectively bad.

But consider: those six games have come against the Storm, Panthers, Sea Eagles, Sharks, Eels and Dragons. It doesn’t get easier either, with a trip to Townsville this week. I feel like I write this a lot, but come on: it’s a tough trot.

Then throw in that they are missing their best winger, best centre, best hooker and all of their best back row. I get where Adam O’Brien is coming from when he says that marginal improvements were seen at the weekend.

Melbourne had 63% possession and Newcastle completed at 55%. That’s bad, obviously. The goal-line defence is horrendous at the moment.

There’s lessons in this from the likes of Canterbury and Wests Tigers, because if the Knights took their medicine and tried to play the most awkward, grinding footy possible, they might be able to bring the scores back in and eventually turn the ship around.

By the time the big hitters are back on deck, they might have stopped the rot. Certainly, the problems aren’t as deep as they are at, say, the Raiders.

(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

16 – Canberra Raiders (-1)

The Canberra Raiders are 4-4 with a backline scoring heavily and looking a cut above their opposition. Unfortunately, that’s their NSW Cup team, who returned to winning ways after tough trips to the first and second-placed teams in the league to defeat the fourth-placed Eels this weekend.

Numbers 1-7 for the Raiders in Cup this weekend had 433 NRL appearances between them, the bulk to Jarrod Croker and Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad, but also split across Matt Frawley, Seb Kris, Albert Hopoate and James Schiller.

At points last season, we saw this Wests Tigers: they were so happy to put the pen through their first grade team that the Wests Magpies were running around at Lidcombe Oval with half an NRL side.

It speaks to a coach that doesn’t know what to do anymore. Changing players is easy. It gives journos something to write about, both because players get dropped and others get elevated.

The gun kid (now Xavier Savage, then Jock Madden) gets a game in first grade and is hailed as the great hope, but in truth, throwing a new face into a rubbish structure rarely works and instead, the experienced player who might be able to contribute is cast aside.

Look, I’m not sending out the bat signal for Jarrod Croker, but Stuart has to quickly change a culture that has known loss for a long time, and I doubt more kids is the answer.

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