The Dinghy of Theseus
The mythical premiers are showing signs of humanity
As I sat perched on my sofa on Thursday night watching the Panthers make schoolboy errors and get rolled by South Sydney to the tune of a flattering 28-18, I had flashbacks to the stone hands of Waqa Blake, the frustration of the hooking carousel of Sione Katoa and Wayde Egan and Mitch Rein and late-career Peter Wallace, the bomb squad of 2010 that promised so much but ultimately delivered so little (relying on a Travis Burns and Luke Walsh halves pairing was fraught with risk, who could’ve known?)
Penrith were supposed to have moved past this era of clownery and boyish nonsense. No more five year plan or paying players to go away.
The Penrith Panthers have made mince meat of the NRL for the better part of five seasons now (2020 NRL Grand Final shell-shock aside). It’s a mark of that dominance that now the side from the foot of the mountains has started 1-3, the obituaries are filing in (not really but hyperbole sells).
After a quality win in Las Vegas with a new halves combination in Nathan Cleary and Jack Cole against a Cronulla outfit desperately trying to disprove their fraudulence among the general NRL pub watcher, the Panthers have gone on a cursed run, getting stunned by the North Sydney Bears wearing Sydney Roosters uniforms, gutting out a tough loss in Melbourne sans Dylan Edwards and Cleary, before faltering in “comical” fashion to the Rabbitohs.
Are the Panthers cooked?
Full disclosure to those who may be newer around here but I am what you could call a “Panthers fan”, so if you thought I was a bastion of neutrality due to the level-headedness of my takes, my sincere apologies. The reason I preface this discussion with that is so you may choose to interpret these as copium if you wish, but bear with me.
The losses outside of the Melbourne game have been bad, it’s true. The Panthers had basically the full complement in that shock loss to the Roosters (Edwards leaving partway through with an injury aside), compounded by committing a bevy of errors so basic and boneheaded that the St Marys Saints Under-10s would blush.
I considered writing this piece after the Roosters loss but wanted to let things develop further before planting my flag either way.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the Panthers of 2025 are not yet, for lack of a better word, cooked.
Now let me defend my utterly vanilla position.
Every season since the 2021 Grand Final we’ve lamented the losses the Panthers have had from a personnel perspective, and the laundry list of players they’ve lost has been published ad nauseum, but this season has felt somewhat different to years prior.
Gone is the quiet leadership and middle dominance of James Fisher-Harris. Gone is the boisterous swagger and off-the-cuff fireworks of Jarome Luai. Where there was a confidence that the machine could regenerate after the losses of guys like Api Koroisau, Viliame Kikau and Stephen Crichton, all of a sudden it felt like Windows 95 being overtaken by…the next Windows.
Not my best metaphor.
The Panthers attack has looked chaotic and clustered at times, but this is also a team that didn’t care if it took 20 rounds to cave your skull in. Blunt force trauma is as good a weapon as a bullet to the eyeball.
The defence though, now that’s fallen off a cliff, particularly out wide right where Izack Tago and Paul Alamoti have been repeatedly targeted by wide sweeps and shapes. The Panthers have conceded 118 points through the first four rounds of the season, a shocking number unthinkable for the reigning premiers. Only the Cowboys, Roosters and Eels have shipped more.
It took them until Round 9 last year to concede that many points.
It’s been a patchwork spine to start the season. Between the injury to Edwards and the concussion to Nathan Cleary, Ivan has turned to guys like Thomas Jenkins and Trent Toelau, capable reserve graders who are nice to have around the squad in a pinch but shouldn’t be relied upon in volume.
And yet they still could have, and maybe SHOULD have, won against South Sydney.
As alluded to above, the Panthers were labelled comical by the head coach for the litany of errors that plagued the side in the first half, whether it be forced offloads coming out of yardage, basic handling errors, a failure to secure a high ball, and childish penalties.
Now I rarely do numbers, and I’m not about to bend into the stream of advanced consciousness, I’m not PythagoNRL (who you can read here), but some basic numbers to illustrate my point.
Against the Rabbitohs, the Panthers had 200 more total running metres, more post contact metres, averaged five metres more gained per set than Souths (which might not sound like a lot but it does stack up), had 16 offloads to 4 (attribute that to caution abandoned in the second half), and more than double the kick return metres.
Watching the game it did feel like every time Souths were made to work away from their own line, Penrith were restricting the metres well. Moses Leota has had a quiet start to the season but this was his best game so far. The move of Lindsay Smith back to the bench also helped shore up the middle once Leota went off, and while I’m sure the club had grander plans for Isaiah Papali’i than rotational middle forward, he’s there out of necessity right now.
The problem was that while Souths struggled to make metres through the middle, there was always the release valve, either through a shift left to exploit the Panthers right side, or a needless penalty.
The Panthers also felt the absence of a noted kicking game, with Souths outkicking Penrith by over double. The boot of Jamie Humphreys getting Souths out of danger in their yardage sets a noticeable difference to the scratchy long kicking games of Jack Cole and Trent Toelau, and while I’m not the biggest fan of Brad Schneider, in retrospect it looks like Ivan pulled the wrong reign there by not starting him over Toelau.
The Panthers, as they always do, kept themselves close, and the middle form began to shift in their favour in the second half once they tightened up the dumb errors, but the damage was done.
You can’t expect to win in this league at the best of times when you hand your opposition consistent territory on a silver platter, especially if you’re a team in as much flux right now as Penrith integrating new parts.
No one is going to feel sorry for Penrith as they work through the kinks, but the avenues for improvement are there. The return of Cleary and Edwards will help, especially if the middle performs again like the numbers showed against Souths minus the ludicrous discipline early, and while I know the pair were present for the bad Roosters loss, the Panthers love one questionable defeat a season at full strength (see the Tigers at Bathurst).
Maybe Blaize Talagi comes in to the side as the utility given Daine Laurie’s struggles. Maybe Casey McLean or his older brother Jesse earn a recall now that Brian To’o is out for a month with a hamstring issue. The Panthers have had a charmed run of injuries up until this point, the years of good karma are finally catching up.
But the violins aren’t playing on the decks of the ship yet, and it’s going to take a lot more for me to think this side is well and truly sunk.
Theseus will ride again.