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As far as 2017 is concerned, no team intrigues me quite like the Panthers. Few teams had such a tumultuous season this year.
It’s hard to believe that this was an outfit that counted Jamie Soward and James Segeyaro among its finest assets at the beginning of the year.
With Sowie retired and Segeyaro in the midst of disputes with the Leeds Rhinos, their time with the Mountain Men seems like a distant memory.
At that point, I don’t think that anybody could have predicted just how well the Penrith young guns would step up, nor how they would manage to gel with the old guard.
In some ways, the team try that culminated with Peter Wallace in the first week of the finals against the Bulldogs said it all. Here was an outfit peaking at just the right time.
It was Josh Mansour’s Panther howl, however, that was the enduring image of the night.
I can’t think of a more emphatic or iconic summary of how the Panthers managed to find their feet over the back half of this season.
With that howl, Mansour seemed to be announcing that the new-look team had finally arrived, and would be making their way to a finals berth some time in the next couple of years.
Fast forward to December 2017 and things have shifted once again.
Most dramatically, Mansour is out of the first part of the season with a freak ACL injury.
Given Mansour’s history with injuries and the way he personified that last surge of Penrith energy, his ACL issue has to be a dampener for both him and the club.
On both Reddit and in the wider media world, banter has abounded around his recent “bionic” implant, as if everyone is willing him to return as soon as possible to the form he was displaying in the leadup to the Four Nations.
Given Mansour’s critical role in the synergy between Matt Moylan and the rest of the Penrith backline, it’s going to be interesting to see how the team copes without him.
On the one hand, his loss may be keenly felt; on the other hand, it may be yet another opportunity for the Mountain Men to demonstrate the resilience and flexibility in the face of reconfigurations and rearrangements that kept them alive in 2016.
The addition of Mitch Rein and James Tamou just makes things more interesting. How will these players, so iconic at their previous clubs, fare at Penrith?
Tamou, in particular, will be fascinating – it’s hard not to picture him in a Cowboys jersey.
Add to that the return of Dean Whare and the premature release of Chris Grevsmuhl and things get even more intriguing.
In essence, the Panthers 2017 line-up looks as different from the current line-up as the current line-up was different from the early 2016 line-up.
Yet all that variability is going to place more pressure on two players, in particular, to step up.
For Moylan, it feels as if 2017 will be a make or break year.
We’ve seen that he’s capable of playing Origin, we’ve seen that he’s capable of playing with the Kangaroos, we’ve seen that he’s capable of playing fullback with deftness and dexterity.
While he may not quite have Tedesco’s ingenuity and creativity in the No.1 jersey, he has the potential to become just as iconic, and 2017 also feels like the year in which these two players will place themselves to inherit Darius Boyd’s status as greatest current fullback in the game.
At the same time, the shifting identity at the Panthers will also place more pressure on Nathan Cleary.
Despite his impressive pedigree, this kid seemed to come out of nowhere in 2016.
One minute he was a no-name on the bench, the next minute he was kicking bombs that made Pepper Stadium feel like Cape Canaveral.
Over the second half of the year, Cleary proved that he was as consistent as he was visionary, a workhorse as much as a great thinker and risk-taker on the field.
Time and again, he delivered, often against all the odds, putting his body on the line with the bravery and determination of a front-rower.
Like Moylan, 2017 is poised to be the year at which he comes into his own and takes advantage of the continuing flux at Penrith to cement himself as a real custodian for the club.
Let’s not forget, too, that Mansour is not necessarily out for the whole season. Ironically, Whare suffered a similar injury, but Mansour has been told that he might be back sooner.
Over the course of 2016, Moylan and Mansour helped turn the Panthers backline into one of the most exciting in the business.
Watching it, I felt that we were in the midst of a great new NRL synergy – perhaps not as timeless as Cameron Smith, Cooper Cronk and Billy Slater, but certainly more impressive than the much-touted trio of Shaun Johnson, Issac Luke and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck.
Whatever configurations the team goes through, I hope that, by the end of the year, this combo is given room to breathe in some way.
So will the Panthers make finals footy in 2017? All the ingredients are there, it’s just a matter of seeing whether they can take advantage of contingencies as flexibly they did in 2016.
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