Opinion
Still undecided as to who you should be supporting come this weekend’s NRL grand final?
That’s okay, it’s never easy to come to a decision regarding which one of two teams, both of which you spend the vast majority of your existence despising, you are going to applaud on a day when they are chasing the trophy you want your actual team to claim.
But your team – and my team, no stones thrown here – weren’t good enough.
So here we are.
Yesterday I offered three compelling reasons to cheer or jeer the underdogs in the 2022 decider.
Today, here are your reasons to barrack or boo the favourites and defending champions, the Penrith Panthers.
(There are only two this time because it’s really, really hard to find reasons to support a team that has gone about just dismantling the competition for three seasons.)
Cheers: Jason Demetriou was right, you have to respect Penrith
Following his side’s loss to the Panthers last weekend, Souths coach Jason Demetriou spoke with composure and class at the post-match presser, saying of his conquerors, “The coach in me is so respectful of what they do”,
JD hit the nail on the head.
The Panthers have got a trick shot in them if they need it, but it’s rare that they resort to it because their game is about relentlessness.
They are the fittest team in the comp and at around about the 60-minute mark of most games, when fatigue really sets in, Ivan Cleary’s boys instead seem to find another gear.
Most impressive is that they do it week after week after week, year after year.
It’s a level of excellence they first reached in 2020 and have sustained for almost three full seasons, during which time they have built a win-draw-loss record of 66-1-10 for a winning record of 86 per cent.
It’s freakish and it deserves our respect.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
Jeers: Jason Demetriou was right, you want to hate Penrith
Of course the above quote from Demetriou was the back half of what he said – the Bunnies mentor began by saying, “The competitor in me wants to hate Penrith, I really do”.
That’s the good stuff right there.
An 86 per cent winning record? You can piss right off. Who wins that often? And they don’t even have the decency to have accumulated a team of imports and ringers, instead building from within so that their success has been sustained for the very simple reason that it is sustainable.
So while the club will miss Viliame Kikau and Api Koroisau when they depart the NRL’s greenest pasture in pursuit of more green, they’ll miss them in the same way they missed Matt Burton and Kurt Capewell – it sure would be nice to have them, but they more than managed in these Origin representatives’ absence.
In Australian rugby league, there is no taller poppy. My goodness, that’s easy to hate.
Cheers: Seems like they’re playing a different game
In June my infant daughter and I headed along to McDonald Jones Stadium, where the two of us had decidedly contrasting afternoons.
As I slipped into deeper and deeper dismay as Nathan Cleary dismantled my team, my daughter enjoyed the light, colour, sound and movement, celebrating as the Panthers scored try after try – the girl loves a chance to scream “Raaaay!”.
It was just the two of us because while I can usually count on a handful of fellow masochists to join me at the footy, that day it was just me and someone who can’t comprehend it – most others knew watching the Knights against the premiers was going to be too much.
(Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
But as the visitors continued absolutely belting their hosts, I eventually just sat back in amazement at how clinical the men in black were.
Granted, Newcastle were the rough equivalent of witches hats that day, but Penrith were just so slick it looked like a training run.
It’s not just the wins that you have to admire, it’s the way they go about them.
Jeers: Seems like they’re playing by different rules
I didn’t touch this one when it happened because, frankly, I was too angry.
But Taylan May being allowed to serve his NRL-imposed suspension for assaulting a member of the public at the start of next season is disgusting.
No, there was no conviction recorded. Yes, the justice system takes time and his actual offence occurred long before the finals.
But to create a brand-new off-field policy – that you can commit a crime and then pay the price at a time most convenient for you and your club – for a Panthers player? It’s the kind of bullshit that Ben Pobjie summed up a few months ago thusly: “This is the people who run the game telling us to our faces: ‘You are idiots, and we will treat you like idiots, because we can.”.
(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
(For the record, Ben was talking about a different matter and I don’t know his opinion on this one – I just liked the way he summed it up.)
Then, just to rub our faces in it a little more, former Panthers boss Phil Gould weighed in on the issue on Twitter, writing, in part, “May should be congratulated”.
A registered club official – who may now be at the Bulldogs but clearly still feels he has skin in the game at the foot of the mountains – took to a platform that he knows is scrutinised by the media and publicly congratulated a man for committing assault.
Gould’s punishment? Nothing.
Days later, Knights NRLW player Caitlin Moran said something a bit crook about the Queen on her personal Instagram account – and I can’t stress just how different that is from Gould’s blue-tick Twitter, let alone how different it is to assault.
Moran was publicly shamed, suspended from playing for a week and fined 25 per cent of her entire salary (granted, that was suspended, but it still leaves a quarter of her pay up for grabs for 12 whole months).
All three are off-field issues. In terms of seriousness, the least is the Indigenous woman saying something disrespectful about a deceased British monarch, escalating to Gould congratulating someone for committing a violent crime, then May actually committing said violent crime.
Yet in terms of relative punishment, it went Gould (nothing), May (two games out at his convenience and a $7500 fine, which is less than ten per cent of his salary, with half suspended), then Moran (a quarter of her pay on the line and a fifth of her season sat out).
Sure, it’s the NRL’s fault for being shamefully, embarrassingly, arguably intentionally inconsistent with their off-field penalties. But given the inconsistency heavily favours the reigning premiers, perhaps Peter V’landys got it wrong (I mean, he definitely did) when he said May’s suspended suspension was about appeasing “the fans”.
“Why penalise the Penrith fans for an indiscretion the player did?” the ARLC chair asked.
The Panthers are getting more than enough favours from HQ. Do they really need the added bonus of your support?
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