Sad News:NRL and Penrith Panthers superstar Nathan Clearly Announced resignation due too….
Penrith v Melbourne: a clash of NRL titans where generational greatness is at stake.Some grand finals just seem more important than others and the 2020 decider between Melbourne and Penrith certainly had that air. The second half in particular, in which the Panthers roared back from 26-0 down, seemed a portent that these two sides were waging a generational struggle for rugby league greatness.
The Storm, perennially great, were ushering in a new era of stars, with future Immortal Cameron Smith the last of their champions left from the four premierships won (and lost – the 2007 and ‘09 titles stripped for salary cap breaches) in the decade 2007-17. The Panthers had come from nowhere to make the grand final, losing just a single game in that Covid-shortened season, Ivan Cleary’s second stint at the helm.Melbourne, as they had done so often in the past, seemed far too good and blew Penrith off the park to lead 22-0 at halftime. The young Panthers rallied to score three tries in the last 12 minutes but the Storm held on to win 26-22. Another challenger had been vanquished but Craig Bellamy’s men hoisted the trophy knowing Cleary’s side would come again.
And boy did they come again. The next four years have elevated the Penrith Panthers to a side that competes with the Eastern Suburbs teams of the 1930s and the South Sydney sides of the late 1960s-early 1970s as claimants to the title of second greatest in rugby league history, behind only the famous St George squads that won 11 straight premierships between 1956-66.
Last year the Panthers became the first team since Parramatta in 1983 to clinch three premierships on end. No team has played in five straight grand finals since South Sydney’s run from 1967-71. Penrith have won grand finals convincingly (28-12 over Parramatta in 2022) and they’ve won grand finals with historic comebacks (26-24 against Brisbane last year). Over the last five seasons they’ve finished minor premiers three times and second twice. They are 94-21-1 for win-loss-draw in regular season play and have won 13 of 15 finals matches. This is Penrith’s time, the Panther era.
Lost in all of this has been how good Melbourne have been over the same timeframe. Across the last five years, the Storm have won the minor premiership twice and finished second, third and fifth the other seasons. They are 87-29 in regular season footy, just a beat behind the Panthers. Yet the Storm have not featured in a decider since 2020, with their season ended by the Panthers in two of the last three years since that famous grand final four years ago. Penrith may have broken away from the pack but their only legitimate threat has remained Melbourne.For those of a certain age and inclination, the biggest event imaginable was Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant standing toe-to-toe at Wrestlemania III, the irresistible force against the immovable object. For those young and innocent enough not to see behind the curtain of professional wrestling, it had an aura, a genuine feeling of titans clashing, a moment full of anxiety, excitement and drama, one that would bring a certain decisiveness, an answer to a philosophical question.
NRL fans will get that next Sunday. Sport occasionally throws up matchups at the most important of times that not only elevate the grandest of events but also carry the weight of history. Rugby league has a mixed history when two great teams of an era square off. The Bulldogs and Eels met twice in the 1980s but the Raiders and Broncos sadly never contested a decider in the 1990s. We got one Canterbury-Roosters clash in the 2000s and a single Roosters-Storm matchup in the 2010s.
This will be Craig Bellamy’s tenth grand final in his 22 years at the Storm. He guided a golden generation to success and has now taken a second to the peak of the game. Melbourne have finished top-four in all bar three seasons after 2006. Since Bellamy’s first premiership in 2007, their longest run without a title has been five seasons.
Penrith’s greatness has been far more concentrated, spanning only the last five years. But while it has been shorter, it has reached higher altitudes. The Storm never won three premierships on the trot. They never played in five straight deciders. They never dominated as the Panthers have.The Storm have regrouped in 2024, readying themselves for Penrith, knowing that is the goal. They have beaten them twice this season but know it is all about this third and final meeting. Penrith will be striving to maintain their extraordinary streak. Melbourne are trying to bookend two decades of greatness with titles to prove nothing beats sustained success.
Penrith v Melbourne is a true battle of giants, a clash of destiny. We had the opening salvo in 2020. On Sunday night we get an encore four years in the making.Six meetings remain of the 2024 Formula One season and the race for the world championship will be played out in frenetic fashion with two bouts of triple-headers as Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and McLaren’s Lando Norris go head to head for the title.
The run-in, however, will not begin for three more weeks, a period that could prove decisive as the protagonists work flat out towards this final stretch. For McLaren this will be a period of fine-tuning but for Red Bull there is the altogether more urgent task of finding solutions.The next round, the US Grand Prix, takes place in Austin on 20 October after an unusual late-season pause. This autumn break, as it has been dubbed, is however dissimilar from the sport’s traditional summer hiatus, which is genuinely a cessation of work.
During the summer shutdown personnel are prohibited from doing their jobs but the next three weeks are simply a long gap between races and the push for an edge in those final rounds will be pursued with intensity.
With the run-in so tightly congested, the six races will play out in only eight weeks, and all a long way from home: Austin in Texas, Mexico, Brazil, Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Developing on the hoof is going to be a tall order. The title contenders have to hope the car they bring to the US GP hits the ground running.
Norris enters the interlude on a high. He dominated in Singapore, beating Verstappen by 21 seconds and closing the gap to the world champion to 52 points, with a maximum of 180 (including three sprint races and the point for a fastest lap) still on the table.It is still a big ask: he has to outscore the Dutchman by just under nine points per meeting and he has rightly noted that the title is still Verstappen’s to lose. Yet he does believe he can do it and McLaren’s form is the reason for that confidence.
After a raft of upgrades brought to the Miami GP, the McLaren was revelatory, and then only improved further. It is now the class of the field and has outpaced the Red Bull that Verstappen steered to seven victories in the opening 10 races.
Much has been made of their flexing rear wing in this pace, declared legal but which they have since voluntarily stated they will not use again, perhaps indicative of its relative unimportance. The key part in the current ground effect cars is the floor, how it channels airflow and works with the surface aerodynamics. McLaren’s last upgrade hit a sweet spot here and they have been making hay ever since, so much so that they have introduced only minor, limited changes to the car since.
It is understood they have another major upgrade package in the works that includes a new floor but have yet to commit to it, for fear it might prove detrimental, a lesson that has been learned at great cost by other teams.The floor is so key that it can throw off the entire balance of the car, as Red Bull, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Mercedes have discovered. In Mercedes’s case, their mid-season purple patch was brought to a halt with their floor upgrade, which has now been dropped altogether in favour of a new version set for Austin.
“When you have this kind of performance on track, you always approach things from a cautious point of view in terms of development,” said the team principal, Andrea Stella. McLaren are in a strong position, their package works and they have further time now to stress test their upgrade should they need it, putting them on the front foot.
Red Bull in contrast are still struggling with the car Verstappen has called “a monster”. It lacks balance, the front and rear not working together, making it very difficult to drive. All of which the world champion squarely blames on upgrades made since Miami, of which the floor was a fundamental component. Their frustrated team principal, Christian Horner, has described their efforts to solve it as “a vicious circle”.
That Verstappen managed second in Singapore was a superb return given they had expected to struggle at the Marina Bay circuit, but if he is to hold off Norris they need the car back to pace for the run-in. “We’ve now got the best part of a month to work hard and try and bring some performance to the car in Austin,” Horner said. “We’re 52 points ahead with six races to go. A lot of races, a lot of points on the board, there’s a lot of racing still to happen.”How they address it – a swathe of major upgrades or a series of adaptations to the existing package – will soon become clear but they and Verstappen know his lead could look awfully fragile, awfully quickly.The break will also be a welcome chance for Liam Lawson to settle in with his new RB team, having been called up to replace Daniel Ricciardo after the Singapore GP. The 22-year-old New Zealander is a Red Bull reserve driver and considered a potential replacement for Sergio Pérez next season. He sat in for Ricciardo last year in five races when the Australian broke his wrist and performed well.
He has earned his chance but RB’s treatment of Ricciardo was poorly handled. After Lawson’s promotion was announced, he revealed he had already known for two weeks but in Singapore RB would not comment on whether Ricciardo was leaving. The Australian is enormously popular but with RB delaying the announcement he was not afforded a proper send-off at the track that many, including the drivers, felt he deserved.
