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Parramatta needed this. In truth, they need every point they can get given their tough start to the year, but they needed to put a score on someone too.
Luckily, they ran into a very generous Knights side and duly thrashed them 43-12, with Clint Gutherson scoring a hat trick.
It’s easy to reimagine the season with a different draw, where Parra are allowed to ease themselves into the year rather than taking on the toughest possible games in the first two months.
Even accounting for the stiff schedule, however, they have underwhelmed: both the Tigers and Bulldogs gave them more trouble than they should have.
Newcastle at home on a Friday night is exactly what Brad Arthur would have liked to follow a chastening defeat to the Broncos last time out, and finally, his side showed what they can do.
Even without the injured Reagan Campbell-Gillard and the ill Ryan Matterson, they were far too good. Mitch Moses and Gutherson were their best, but the ever-improving Will Penisini and a resurgent Dylan Brown excelled too.
“I thought we played the power game the best we have all year,” said Brad Arthur.
“We probably left a bit out there. But I challenged the forwards about running hard off the back fence and I thought they did that and they paved the way for our speed and our spine.”
On the other side, Newcastle will need to flush this as soon as possible. They leaked early, threw balls into touch, missed one-on-one tackles and conceded a ridiculous 15 line breaks. Magic Round is their Bye, and they’ll be thankful to see it.
Kalyn Ponga, in particular, defended horribly and looked a liability in the front line. His record as a five eighth now includes a concussion sustained in defence and a whole heap of missed tackles.
“I’ve got to own my performance. I’m obviously disappointed with it,” he said after the game. “I’m going to look at it, learn from it. This move to six, while I want to be the best now, it’s a journey.
“I think in terms of my head and the concussion side of things, I’m all right. I just need to be better.”
His coach backed him. “It’s his third game this year,” said Adam O’Brien. “He hadn’t finished at six, he played 80 minutes at six, it’s his first time. I’m not stupid.”
It’s a shame that the Eels don’t think that Clint Gutherson has the requisite amount of X-factor.
It’s a barely-definable quality in the first place – people think Xavier Savage has it because his name starts with an X – and it’s also one that Parramatta don’t really need.
Dylan Brown is a charismatic, fast-stepping five eighth and Mitch Moses is a big moments, high skill halfback. Junior Paulo, too, is that kind of player in his own way, a prop with the hands of a half.
What Parra have is a huge gap between their best and their worst, the sort of characteristic that makes them experts at defeating Penrith but also the sort of team that lost to the Bulldogs and Tigers last year. They don’t need a Jayden Campbell, they need the Clint Gutherson they have.
Gutho has been their best this year by a mile, and he’s done it the way he always does it: effort, commitment and a team-first mentality. The fullback got two tries in the first half (and probably should have had a third) before completing his hat trick, They were all because he was always moving, always chasing and always there.
Beyond the attack, Gutherson was taking high balls above Dom Young with no concern for his own safety, swatting balls dead and organising his defence. Not every fullback can be Latrell Mitchell or James Tedesco, and when you pay your halves a million dollars each to be your stars, it’s unlikely that you’ll get a number one who is of that level.
Gutho is on the next tier down from the very elite, but that’s fine. In a team that is often variable in performance quality, having a guy who is 8/10 pretty much every week is exactly what they need.
Granted, they won’t play a team as accommodating as Newcastle every week, but Parramatta need to show this kind of enthusiasm more regularly. Gutherson does that, but the same can’t be said for everyone else quite yet.
Prior to the season, the talk surrounding Kalyn Ponga’s move to the halves wasn’t so much about his ability to influence the attack, rather his ability to withstand frontline defence.
Not just in terms of his health – though copping a multi-week concussion in a tackle against the Tigers didn’t help – but in terms of his effectiveness.
Tonight, Parramatta saw it coming and aimed up. Will Penisini made Ponga look very ordinary indeed, giving him a bath that resulted in Gutherson’s second try. In the end, the five eighth ended with ten misses and eleven hits, which is terrible work by anyone’s standards.
Realistically, it would be harsh to single Ponga out given how bad the Knights were across the board, but it was noticeable how Parra sought to get the five eighth isolated in the line. It’s something that other sides will certainly do again.
Every game now is a quasi-audition for the Maroons fullback role, with Reece Walsh starring at the Broncos, and currently, it’d be hard to pick Ponga.
Going into this one, you’d have been forgiven for having a sneaky feeling that the Knights might do something. They’d lost their last two, but had been very close – and arguably the better side – in two tough games against the Panthers and away in Townsville.
There had been green shoots of a Knights revival, a feeling that they were finally turning the ship around after years of underperformance.
Tonight was back to the bad old days. There were errors upon errors, simple missed tackles that underdo all the improvements of 2023 so far. With the bye next week, O’Brien will get plenty of time to stew on this and hope that his side come back better.
“I didn’t see it coming. It was a horrible performance, let’s be honest,” he said. “But they haven’t been horrible (in 2023) so I’m not going to kick them to death, either.”
It’s not terminal by any means, but the defensive lapses were right back to the bad old days. Like the Cowboys last night, it’s more of an individual failure than a system collapse, which should be theoretically easier to fix.
In attack, the service from dummy half was woeful and O’Brien’s experiment of Kurt Mann at 9 hooker lasted just half an hour. Phoenix Crossland, who did the rest of the game behind the ruck, wasn’t much better.
“I think it’s been a really big month on-field and off-field,” added O’Brien. “They’re going to sound like excuses but I don’t care if they sound like excuses. The team’s been working really hard for a month so there’s that part of me.
“I didn’t see it but I watched last night’s game (the Cowboys’ heavy loss to the Sharks) and I thought our last week’s opposition showed the same signs so that tells me it was a pretty hard game up there last week.
“We’ve had two golden points before that so I’ll give them a bit of an out there.
“We just started, our defence we were quite loose through the middle — that’s a sign. We’ve defending really well this year — we haven’t lost that ability in six days but we’ve lost the will or the gas in the tank clearly. We need this bye, it’s been a long campaign.”