Opinion
The Melbourne Storm will have the Victorian capital to themselves when they face the Sydney Roosters in another pre-finals showdown at AAMI Park this Friday night.
Last weekend saw the highest scoring round in NRL history, with 466 points scored across the eight matches, as the Storm and Roosters racked up 60 and 72 points in their respective wins over the Broncos and Wests Tigers.
A week after blanking the Panthers at the foot of the mountains, Craig Bellamy’s side ran riot in Brisbane as they recorded their 12th straight win against the men from Red Hill on their home turf, scoring ten tries as they win 60-12.
The win was masterminded by Queensland hooker Harry Grant, who set up two tries and made 32 tackles in a clear best-on-ground performance.
(Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
It was the Storm’s 18th victory from 21 meetings against the Broncos at Suncorp Stadium and their dominant record at the ground has led them to unofficially be called Queensland’s fourth team.
As dominant as the Storm were, the Sydney Roosters were even better on Saturday night as they put the hapless Wests Tigers to the sword with a record 72-6 humiliation in their final regular season match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
The Chooks led 30-0 at halftime and piled on another 42 after the break, easily surpassing the 56-0 thrashing they handed to the Tigers at Campbelltown Stadium back in 2004.
Nat Butcher scored four tries, while mid-season recruit Matthew Lodge scored at the death after Tigers captain James Tamou was sent off for verbally abusing referee Ben Cummins seconds earlier.
Sam Walker was deadly with the boot, kicking 12 conversions from as many attempts for a personal haul of 24 points.
The only low point for the Chooks was that they conceded their only try on an error when Brent Naden plucked out a pass and ran over 50 metres to score.
The Roosters outscored six AFL clubs over the weekend: the Brisbane Lions (57), GWS Giants (69), North Melbourne (47), West Coast Eagles (46), Adelaide Crows (55) and Hawthorn (64).
If it wasn’t for two disallowed tries in the first ten minutes, nor two errors while on the attack in the second half, they could so easily have threatened the greatest scoreline in Australian rugby league history, which remains the Dragons’ 91-6 win over the Bulldogs in 1935.
But if you converted that scoreline to today’s scoring, they wouldn’t have got close to 110 points.
As a side note, the Roosters’ wasn’t the biggest scoreline over the weekend, with Leigh Centurions living up to their name in the RFL Championship in England with a 100-4 thrashing of York City Knights.
Whether we’ll see an attacking flair of that nature remains to be seen when the Storm host the Roosters, the home side looking to make it a double over the Chooks, having claimed a 26-18 win at the SCG in Round 14, during which Trent Robinson’s men were in the midst of a four-match losing streak which put their finals hopes into jeopardy.
But since the Round 17 bye, by which point they hadn’t won a match for over a month, the Roosters have won six on the trot, racking up big scores against the Dragons, Knights and Tigers to move up to sixth place on the ladder.
Now they face a huge test of their premiership credentials in the Storm before they return home to the brand new Allianz Stadium to host the South Sydney Rabbitohs in the final round.
A win for Easts could see them move up to fifth on the ladder, if the Parramatta Eels are beaten by the Brisbane Broncos the previous day, due to a superior percentage, while a loss could see them drop to seventh if the Rabbitohs beat the Cowboys on Saturday night.
On the flipside, a win for the Storm (plus an Eels loss to the Broncos) will see them lock up a top-four spot, but if they are beaten on Friday night and the Eels beat the Broncos, both Parra and Melbourne would face off for the double chance in the final round.
There are so many permutations that will play out in the final round, most of which will be detailed next week.
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