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By half time, there was enough to have Penrith fans worried, and Parramatta fans frantically searching for a calculator.
The Eels were 22-4 to the good and midway through possibly their best showing of the year, while the Panthers were counting the cost of a dislocated shoulder to Jarome Luai that might well rule him out of the finals.
Parra won 32-18 in the end, but with the bye next week, it would still require a series of results to go their way and a huge swing of points to stop this being their last match of the year. They head to Mad Monday with a little more pride than before.
Penrith might well have handed the minor premiership to Brisbane, who will overtake them if they win on Saturday night in Canberra before a home tie to close out against Melbourne.
Luai was in serious discomfort as he left the field, having sustained the injury while reaching for the line, only to have Bryce Cartwright land on him and force his arm the wrong way. The way that the Eels defenders immediately stopped indicated just how bad it was.
The Panthers’ bench confirmed that it has been popped back in minutes after the incident, but Penrith must now wait on the severity of the injury with just two weeks until the finals begin.
“We’re going to have to wait until he gets scanned tomorrow,” said Ivan Cleary. “It’s obviously a decent injury but they were fairly positive about it.
“On the team front and for Romey personally, that’s the way it goes sometimes. There’s often a lot of injuries at this time of year around Finals, but we just have to wait for the results. Whatever happens, we’ll come up with a plan from there.”
It was clear from the start that Brad Arthur had his men playing like there was no tomorrow. They threw offloads with abandon, promoted the footy at every occasions and approached the league’s toughest away trip with no fear at all.
“I don’t know whether to cry or smile,” said the coach. “We’re going to miss out by a game. At least we fought to the end.
“We only had to find one more win. we’ve got to learn how important each game is and how important each moment is.
“At the start of the year, we were scoring the same amount of tries as the opposition and not finding the way to get that one win that we’ve now missed out on.
“But it’s better to finish the year this way, and the hurt will be there even more knowing that we just had to find one more.”
Maika Sivo broke his longest drought in the NRL – five games – with a first half hat trick and another late, while Clint Gutherson, on one leg with an obvious knee complaint, managed two of his own and was, as he is every week, Parra’s best player.
He limped off late with a knee complaint, but with the season done, it will only stop him sprinting to the bar.
Cleary will fret over the fitness of his five eighth. He lost son Nathan to a similar injury in the middle of the 2021 season, with the halfback missing six weeks – and that was on the easy end.
Tom Trbojevic in 2022 and Tom Gilbert in 2023 have had their season ended by dislocated shoulders after sustaining them in May. In Luai’s case, the Panthers will hope for the lower end, which would still be 3-6 weeks.
The performance, too, worried him slightly, though he thought it would do the Panthers good in the long run.
“I felt like it had been coming,” he said. “We’ve been drifting a bit, playing OK but there’s parts of our game that haven’t been up to scratch. They got found out tonight.
“I can’t be too harsh on the boys, they’ve been that consistent. Tonight was definitely an off night and I feel disappointed, but we’ll look back in a few weeks and not worry about this game. If anything, it might sharpen up our focus for the coming weeks.”
It’s easy to look at one team beating Penrith and wonder if they haven’t shown the way that everyone else can do it.
Firstly, it’s easier said than done. Lots of teams have had theories on how to turn the Panthers over and very few have.
Only Parra have consistently defeated Penrith, and they’ve largely done it in the same way: through a lot of offloads and a fair bit of chaos ball, with a decent whack of variance thrown in.
That was certainly the case tonight – the Eels managed 12-1 in the first half, when the bulk of their work was done, from which sprung a 5-1 advantage in line breaks.
Penrith do allow a lot of offloads, and Parra make the most in the comp, so perhaps this is something they are uniquely capable of doing.
But two weeks ago, Manly gave the Panthers a real fright by embracing the same expansive style, but didn’t get have the execution quite where it needed to be and eventually succumbed to the pressure.
Parramatta managed to hold on tonight and record a win, but are already out. The biggest question will be if anyone else was watching and taking notes.
The Panthers have largely been immune to the whims of the opposition. Their strength is that they always do the same thing and force everyone else to contend with how good they are at their Plan A.
Chaos footy can give that a shake, but nine times out of ten, that only works for so long and the Panthers win in the end.
With that in mind, there’s a few caveats that will give Ivan Cleary hope. He rested Dylan Edwards, bringing in debutant Jesse McLean to the centres and shifting Stephen Crichton to the back to cover.
That didn’t really work. McLean is a fullback and looked a little at sea in the centres, while Critta is always better in the centres and struggled to number up properly from the back. Sivo was able to get over very easily at times as the left edge was stripped bare.
Penrith lost their five eighth, too, which prompted another reshuffle, by which point the game began spiralling out of control. Oh, and Parramatta were fired up, had nothing to lose and played superbly.
It’s not something that should overly concern Penrith, but it will plant the smallest seed of doubt that the depth might not quite be what they thought it was. Losing Luai for the Finals will be one of the biggest tests of the back-ups yet.