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Opinion
Preliminary final week is the most anxious one of the year, even more than when you make the Grand Final.
Everyone wants to get to the last game and we now know which four teams have a chance but even though Penrith and Brisbane are red-hot favourites, anything can happen.
The Warriors have momentum after their fabulous 40-10 victory over Newcastle on Saturday while Melbourne know how to win finals games even though they weren’t quite at their best in beating the Roosters on Friday.
Jahrome Hughes looks like he’s a fair chance to come back into the Storm side and they need him to have any hope against the Panthers – you can’t win preliminary finals or GFs without your first-choice halfback.
You can be travelling quite well all season and you get to the final hurdle before the GF and the wheels can fall off.
Whether it’s an injury or a refereeing decision, you can’t play the victim and you’ve just got to get on with it otherwise, before you know it, your season’s over.
I remember the 2000 Knights side leading the Roosters 16-2 at half-time in their prelim before Freddie Fittler took over and got his team into the Grand Final.
That Newcastle team was arguably more talented than the one which went all the way the year after.
Penrith and Melbourne have both had that mindset of rolling with the punches and focusing on the mission ahead in the past few years and that’s why they’re among the last four standing yet again.
The Storm haven’t done as well in the past few years since the end of the era of Cameron Smith, Billy Slater and Cooper Cronk.
They got beaten by Penrith in this corresponding game a couple of years ago and went straight out last year so after getting towelled up by Brisbane in week one of the playoffs it was a huge relief for them to get past the Roosters 18-13 on Friday night.
Young Tyran Wishart did well at half with Hughes out but whether he’s fit this Friday and also Jarome Luai for Penrith will have a large bearing on this match.
(Photo by Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
Melbourne were a touch lucky to score their first try against the Roosters when Harry Grant knocked on and the referee missed it but Trent Robinson said after the game that his team needed to be better in defence after Ashley Klein’s error to prevent the Storm crossing the stripe.
The other decision that Klein got wrong at the end when he didn’t think Sam Walker tackled Grant high would have been a much bigger deal if Cameron Munster didn’t lay on the match-winning try for Will Warbrick’s leap in the corner.
Craig Bellamy asked in the press conference after the game if the refs are going to be officiating the game differently in the finals to let them know because that was definitely worth a penalty.
Klein tends to let the odd thing go through to the keeper because he likes the game to flow, more like how Origins are refereed, but you leave yourself wide open if you start using discretion in finals versus what you’ve done previously in club games.
It was a tremendous play for them to win but I think Bellamy’s demeanour would have been very different if that refereeing call brought down the curtain on their season.
Refs have got to get the obvious ones right. Fans, coaches and players can accept the marginal calls – even the try-scoring ones when in all probability the ball’s probably been grounded but because there’s no conclusive evidence you can’t award it.
The bunker really should be adjudicating on tries and all the other stuff should be ruled upon by the three officials on the field.
The Warriors have the right ingredients to put the Broncos off their game at Suncorp Stadium next Saturday night.
They’re actually a similar team to Brisbane in that they’ve got a strong back five, they rely on two of their main forwards in Addin Fonua-Blake and Tohu Harris to win the middle third and their halfback Shaun Johnson combines with their fullback, Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad off the back of that in attack with the trick shots and sweeps around the back.
For the Broncos it’s Payne Haas and Patrick Carrigan with Adam Reynolds calling the shots and Reece Walsh adding the touch of class from fullback with his blinding acceleration.
There’s a danger the Warriors will have a slight emotional letdown after all the hype of their first finals match on home soil for a long time.
But I think that won’t be a factor because they’ve got a lot of guys who have played finals footy at other clubs in key positions like Te Maire Martin, Harris, Johnson and Nicoll-Klokstad or a lot of international matches like Fonua-Blake, Jazz Tevaga and Dallin Watene-Zelezniak.
They might even have the edge in playoff experience against Brisbane because the Broncos haven’t been in the finals the past few years and even though many of their players have Origin and Test experience, these games can do funny things to even the stars of our game.
Playing in the first week of the playoffs is one thing but matches like a prelim final when everything is on the line is a different kettle of fish.
Three members of their spine – Walsh, Ezra Mam and Billy Walters – are in their first finals campaign but the good thing for them is with Kevin Walters, Allan Langer, Matt Ballin and John Cartwright on the coaching staff, those guys have plenty of experience of what it takes to win at this time of year from their careers.
(Photo by Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
If the Warriors’ ball control and kicking game is as good as it was against the Knights, that’s the blueprint that can put the wind up Brisbane but I give the Broncos the slight edge.
The Warriors nailed their execution in good-ball territory against Newcastle, they were clinical.
They’re different to the successful Warriors teams of old in that they play with a lot more structure to set up their attack and then go for the jugular.
Johnson is the crucial part of that – now that he’s in the veteran phase of his career he well and truly understands when to pull the trigger and when not to.
Nathan Cleary is the exception at 25 but a lot of the best playmakers in the NRL are in their 30s – Daly Cherry-Evans has been enormous for Manly and Queensland this year, Cody Walker’s the other side of 30, Johnson looks like he’s going to win the Dally M and Reynolds has been central to Brisbane’s surge up the standings.
And the Warriors were defensively very strong with their numbering up. They didn’t give Kalyn Ponga any time or space and the Knights didn’t execute their plays well, often throwing passes a fraction behind or in front of where they should have gone.
I thought before the game that the one thing the Knights couldn’t do was let the Warriors skip out to a big lead early and that’s precisely what happened with them being 16-0 down at worse than a point per minute.
They did well to get back in the contest for it to be 16-10 early in the second half but that effort took a lot of petrol out of their tank and the Warriors ran away with it in the last 20 minutes.
The bubble did burst for Newcastle after 10 straight wins – Adam O’Brien said they didn’t handle the occasion well and missing Jackson Hastings with his ankle injury along with quality players including Lachlan Fitzgibbon and Daniel Safiti (and coming off a highly emotional and physical 90 minutes against the Raiders) proved too much for them to overcome.
They weren’t shooting with the same bullets they were the week before and were not allowed to find their fluency in attack because of the Warriors’ excellent defensive effort.
Michael Hagan is a former dual-premiership winning first grade player and current assistant coach of Australia's Kangaroos team. Hagan played 183 games for Canterbury and Newcastle and represented Queensland five times. He transitioned into a successful coach and took the Knights to a premiership in his first year in charge back in 2001. He went onto coach 205 NRL games and six times for Queensland in Origin.