Campo’s Corner previews: Bulldogs, Knights, Panthers, Tigers
The Bulldogs, Knights, Panthers and Tigers missed the playoffs last year so can they make the jump in 2020? Nick Campton runs his eye over the four teams in the countdown to the NRL season kick-off.
Knights
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We’ve made it everybody.
The long, horrible, rugby league-less summer is over, and the greatest game of all is just about back.
Time to stop not thinking about the grand final and sink our teeth into the 2020 season, and all the things that might happen.
Campo’s Corner returns with a four-part season preview that touches on every NRL club, and tries, once again, to decide who will drink from the keg of glory and take home the title this year.
Please remember that the real premiership is the friends we make along the way.
Part One: Dragons need finals to prevent fan revolt
CANTERBURY BULLDOGS
Dallin Watene-Zelezniak joined Canterbury in June of 2019, when the Bulldogs were absolutely terrible.
They were dead last on the ladder and were every fan’s pick for the wooden spoon. His first game was a dreary, 38-12 loss to the Roosters at the SCG in the rain. The once and future premiers rested a host of their rep stars and still won without breaking out of a walk.
It was the kind of existentially depressing loss wooden spoon seasons are made of, a loss from which there were no positives beyond the misery only lasting for 80 minutes – in real life, misery can stretch on forever, most of the time footy misery at least has a clock on it.
Nobody would have blinked if the Bulldogs laid down and just let the rest of the season happen. Just cop the losses, finish last, have a big summer and leave it all behind. That’s what bad teams do, and it’s what they’ve always done.
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But to their eternal credit, the Bulldogs refused to lie down. They won their next two, rose all the way to 15th, and Watene-Zelezniak said in an interview they could still make the finals. I laughed at him. You probably did as well. It wouldn’t have taken a miracle, it would have taken a string of miracles – think feeding the five thousand while walking on water that was turned to wine.
It was absurd, and it wasn’t possible, and in the end it couldn’t be done, but Watene-Zelezniak believed it and his teammates believed it and that’s more important than if some moron sportswriter believed it.
The Bulldogs won four in a row, never scoring more than 20 points, and they knocked off the finals-bound Rabbitohs and Eels. They faced the Broncos in the final round, with nothing to play for, and ran up their biggest score of the season, 30 points, that’s three zero, and Brisbane went on to the finals but Canterbury could be proud.
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Watene-Zelezniak typified why the Bulldogs won these games. The former Panther has spent plenty of time on the wing but fullback is his true position, and off the field he’s a friendly fella but on it he’s a glutton for punishment and for punishing. Dallin Watene-Zelezniak is made for running the ball and running it hard, and every now and then he collects a kick, looks up at the defensive line and decides that the only thing to do is run as fast as he can for as long as he can until he hits something that’ll stop him.
That’s the spirit Dean Pay is building in these Bulldogs. They might not be winners, but they’re fighters. They can be outrun and outgunned, but if a team gets down in the gutter with them the Bulldogs will either beat them or rough them up trying. They played the Roosters again in that late season run, six weeks after the first meeting. The Roosters won again, 20-12 this time, but nobody got rested, and they weren’t walking through it this time.
Finals football might be a bit beyond the Bulldogs this year. Desire is as admirable a quality as one can find in a footy team, but it can only carry them so far. As badly as the Bulldogs want to win, and as much as they sacrifice to make it happen, it won’t turn them into the kind of star-studded roster other teams can boast. Last year they scored more than 20 points in a match just five times, and defending totals like that every week just isn’t sustainable.
The Bulldogs still need to upgrade at a couple of key positions to end what has become the second-longest premiership drought in the club’s history. But those premierships have to start somewhere, and they start when a team learns how to fight and keep fighting even when the cause looks hopeless because it is hopeless, and those starts can be anywhere, even on rainy days at the SCG in games they never looked like winning in the first place.
THE TEAM
From a personnel standpoint, the Bulldogs have a lot of the same issues as last year. It’s not that their forward pack is bad, it just lacks punch. Aiden Tolman will get through his tackles and make his runs every single week from now until the End Times, and it’s good to have somebody so reliable who is always there, but he’s not the kind of player who can be the foundation of a real, top class forward pack. If he’s your second-best middle you’d feel great, if he’s your best there might be some elements lacking.
Dylan Napa has the ability to be the kind of destructive, tackle-busting middle the Bulldogs are crying out for, and he finished last year very strongly, but the blue and whites need him to do that every week. He’s seven years into his career now, so maybe that’s just not in him, but if the Bulldogs are to defy the oddsmakers they need the red menace, and they need him all the time.
Josh Jackson is still Josh Jackson, and that’s all that needs to be said, because the Bulldogs can always count on him and although Corey Harawira-Naera started slowly in 2019 by season’s end he was the Bulldogs best attacking weapon, and a real threat on the left edge. That combination with Will Hopoate and Reimis Smith is the best thing Canterbury have going for them in attack, and how it continues to develop will be something to watch. Hopoate deserves special mention – he’s never really gotten his speed back after his Mormon mission, but his wonderful hands, judicious offloading and top shelf footwork have turned him into one of the most underrated players in the game.
There might not be room for him out there, but Dean Britt playing on an edge in Canterbury’s first trial was a promising sign. The skilful Britt is tenacious in the middle, but I like him more when he’s a little bit wider. Getting minutes with Jackson and Harawira-Naera in front of him will be tough, but Britt is more than good enough should the Bulldogs need some relief.
With Kieran Foran gone for much of the year, and given his injury history his future has to be in serious doubt, the Bulldogs need to land on something in the halves. There were things to like about each of Lachlan Lewis, Jack Cogger and Brandon Wakeham last year, but Pay needs to pick a pair and stick to it. Cogger in particular took some big steps forward – he was thrown into first grade far too early at the Knights and suffered for it, but he’s still got plenty of ability.
Canterbury’s main issue in 2020, as it was in 2019, is points, and where they will come from. Their backline is solid, but filled with finishers rather than creators. There will be heavy pressure on their halves from the jump to create – as much as I have sung Watene-Zelezniak’s praises, he is still developing as a ballplayer, and Jeremy Marshall-King is, again, more of a runner than a creator for others.
THE TIP: If the Bulldogs can stay in the mix for the top eight until the final weeks of the regular season that’s a good result. They’ll aim higher, without doubt, and they’ll believe they can make the finals, but if they do make it they’ll be overachieving. As hard as they fight, and as stirring as the end to last season was and as much as it may have given them hope for the future there’s still some ways to go before a trip back to the finals becomes a realistic proposition.
NEWCASTLE KNIGHTS
If you think about it, Mitch Barnett explains everything you need to know about the Knights over the last few years.
Barnett arrived at the club midway through the hellish 2016 season, when Newcastle’s recent misery hit its lowest ebb. Only two teams in the previous 50 years had one win in a season. It’s a level of hopelessness that other fans cannot ever really understand.
In that hopelessness, it’s important to hang on to whatever is there, and Barnett was one of those things. He joined from Canberra, played the final nine games of the season and was close to the Knights’ best in just about every one of them. Their final game of the season was a heartbreaking, 28-26 loss to St George Illawarra courtesy of a Gareth Widdop penalty goal in the 79th minute.
To the Dragons, who were out of finals contention, it meant little, but it would have meant everything to the Knights, and Barnett did everything a player ever could in his efforts to drag his team victory.
Since then Barnett has played 64 more matches for Newcastle, and he’s never been better than he was in those early days. He’s been very solid at times, and for a few weeks here and there he’s been more than that, even claiming the club’s player of the year award in 2017. But Barnett has not become the player he once promised to be. He’s still got plenty of time to do it, but he’s not there yet.
In Barnett, we see the problems the Knights have been grappling with in recent years. Since Kalyn Ponga and Mitchell Pearce arrived in 2018, and David Klemmer followed last season, talent has not been their biggest issue so much as failure to fully capitalise on it.
Over the last three years you could count on one hand the amount of players who have arrived at the Knights and improved, and that, more than anything else, is what’s stopped them returning to the finals.
Adam O’Brien is an unknown commodity as a coach, albeit with an impeccable pedigree, and that shapes as his greatest challenge – can he extract every ounce of talent from his players? Can he inspire them to become more than they have ever been before?
The Knights don’t have a perfect roster, but there’s a good football team somewhere in there and they are waiting to be coached, to be lead, to be moulded into a greater version of themselves.
The win over the Roosters at home last year felt like the start of something, and the bitter memories of recent years were supposed to be buried under the roar of a ravenous Hunter crowd, who never stopped loving the Knights but might have stopped believing in them.
Two weeks later the Knights went down to Melbourne and were given a footballing lesson, they lost eight of their last 11 matches and Nathan Brown got sacked and those heady days of beating the premiers were a world away because it’s not enough to just be good at home in the big games in front of the bellowing crowd.
Newcastle’s goal this year must be a return to the finals, and such a goal is well within their capabilities. But beyond that, they need to maximise the talent on their roster, and they need at least some of the players who gave them a little bit of hope in the darkness to prove there’s a place for them in the new world.
It’s all right to be a big fish in a small pond, but the pond has to keep growing and sometimes it’s more comfortable to be a top player in a bad side than pushing onwards.
Mitch Barnett re-signed over the off-season until the end of 2023. He is a good footballer, the club believes in him, and his talent, and his ability to realise that talent. Ponga and Pearce and Klemmer will all play well, we know this, but it’s the Mitch Barnetts who hold Newcastle’s fate in their hands.
THE TEAM
David Klemmer did everything shy of move mountains for Newcastle in the middle last year, but he really lacked support, especially when it came to yardage. The Knights were 15th in run metres last year and last in total runs. Klemmer averaged 163 metres gained per match, good enough for eighth in the entire league – the Knights did not have another forward in the top 100.
Daniel Saifiti made his Origin debut last season while posting the worst numbers of his career. He averaged 9.9 runs for 90 metres per game – both career lows. Tim Glasby defends well and Herman Ese’ese carries strongly but Saifiti is the player who needs to lift and work in tandem with Klemmer and after four years and 85 matches in first grade there’s no more excuses for the 23-year old.
We have already spent a fair bit of time on Mitch Barnett, but I would very much like him to be played at second row, where is more effective in attack than at lock, and allowed to stay there for the entire season. Barnett’s skill is a nice compliment to Lachlan Fitzgibbon’s strong hole-running on the other edge.
It’ll be interesting to see just where Connor Watson lands following Jayden Brailey’s arrival. Brailey is an 80-minute hooker, and should help tighten up the middle defensively, but dummy half seemed to be Watson’s best position as he was again shuffled all around the spine last year. Perhaps Watson can be used as a temporary middle forward, as Melbourne did with Ryan Papenhuyzen at stages last year, where his speed can be used to target tiring defenders.
Or perhaps Watson can slot in at five-eighth, which shapes as the biggest hole on Newcastle’s roster. Watson, Kurt Mann, Mason Lino and Phoenix Crossland have all been touted as potential partners for Pearce and while each has their strengths (Watson and Mann both run well, Lino can be an auxiliary playmaker, Crossland has the most upside) none seems to have made the role their own in the pre-season.
With Pearce and Ponga taking the majority of the creative duties, whoever O’Brien chooses doesn’t need to be a world-beater, they just need to be able to play their part.
A final note - landing David Furner as an assistant might be one of the underrated moves of the season. Furner’s success as a head coach in the NRL was spotty, but he’s an excellent assistant, taking charge of some excellent attacking teams at Canberra, North Queensland and South Sydney. He’s got some toys to play with in the Hunter, so expect the Knights to be strong in attack in 2020.
THE TIP: There are no fans in the league so loyal as Knights fans, but they can’t exist on faith alone forever.
Heads have already rolled after the disastrous end to the Brown era and the implication is clear – Newcastle can’t keep waiting for tomorrow, or next week, or next season, they need success now, even if it’s just a return to the finals and an exit in week one.
Right now, they’re in the deluge of teams who can finish anywhere from 6th to 12th and it’s up to O’Brien to make them rise up - I’ve liked a lot of the signs coming from Newcastle, so let’s say they finish eighth.
PENRITH PANTHERS
Every pre-season for the last four years it was very fashionable to predict Penrith would ascend to the very top level of the NRL.
It’s easy to see why. The Panthers had so many young stars, and more on the way, they were exciting and thrilling to watch, they were a team you could dream on. Sure, they might not have done much right then, but that wasn’t important. You had to look into the future, you had to see beyond what they were and imagine what they could one day become.
People saw futures when Matt Moylan was like Darren Lockyer, and Bryce Cartwright was the ball-playing pride of the west, and Waqa Blake was going to be the Fijian Greg Inglis, and Tyrone Peachey was going to play everywhere at once and Reagan Campbell-Gillard was going to kill people with a smile and a moustache.
None of this ended up happening, and all these players are somewhere else now. Penrith have become a victim of their own junior machine – there is so much talent coming through, so many players who might be great one day that the can keeps getting kicked further and further down the road. There’s always next year, the next player, and it’s all about tomorrow and never about today.
Even last year, the best thing about Penrith’s season was their debutants. They had nine first-year men, and so much of the good in what was an uneven and difficult year flowed through their rookies. The backs to the wall win against Cronulla, when Matt Burton debuted at five-eighth alongside players he’d only met a few days before, stands out. So does Brian To’o’s athletic dives and unwillingness to ever go down easy, and Brent Naden making the most of what looked like his last chance at a first grade career and Liam Martin fighting well out of his weight division.
As such, Penrith face 2020 the same way they faced 2019, and 2018 before that, with the same challenges and same potential pitfalls. They’re the inverse of the Bulldogs and the Tigers in that they have far more talent but consistent effort and application continues to elude them, as is often the case with young squads.
And what Ivan Cleary is putting together may well be more sustainable than the wild Anthony Griffin years, when the Panthers were a glass cannon that couldn’t cope against the best teams in the competition – but it’s not as exhilarating or as exciting or as liable to catch people’s imaginations. This isn’t a bad thing or a criticism as the hype of the past probably didn’t do Penrith any favours.
Their new recruits are not flashy, but they don’t need to be. Apisai Koroisau’s return should give them more attack out of dummy half, an area Penrith have struggled in since James Segeyaro left (even accounting for the emergence of the promising Mitch Kenny). Zane Tetevano can stiffen up the middle and give some of the young fellas a bit of steel. Kurt Capewell isn’t the same attacking colossus as Viliame Kikau, but he’s a strong attacking player in his own right and gives them a little more balance in terms of size on their edges.
When I think about Ivan Cleary’s Penrith teams I am often drawn to the 2014 side.
They scraped into the top four amid a truly dreadful injury toll, looked the minor premiership-winning Roosters dead in the eye and beat them 19-18 courtesy of a Jamie Soward field goal in the final minutes. It remains Penrith’s only trip to the preliminary finals since 2004 – the injuries reduced their roster to its bare bones, but they had something those fancier, shinier Panthers teams that came along later never really found.
Cleary is trying to build a team that favours function over form, while Penrith teams of the past were too focused on the latter. Consistent focus and application, not just from week to week but sometimes minute to minute, eluded them all too often. Case in point was last season – in the last five weeks of the year, while they were still in finals contention, the Panthers went down to Canterbury and North Queensland, both bottom-eight teams, to fall out of the race. Things like that can happen to young teams, and the Panthers have been young forever. It might not be time for them to grow up fully, but they can’t be kids forever.
THE TEAM
I am excited to see how Nathan Cleary goes without James Maloney. At club level, their combination never quite clicked despite the undoubted talents of the pair – they are both dominant, controlling halves, and neither was ever quite able to find balance with the other. At rep level it was a different story, with Cleary adopting a simplified role and allowing Maloney to take near total control, but we never quite saw the best of them for Penrith.
Cleary acting as the main playmaker will be the best thing for him, and for the Panthers. At 22 he is still young in a relative sense, but this will be his fifth season in first grade. Because he started so early, he’s on an accelerated timeline and his youth is not accepted as an excuse and this is his team now, nobody else’s.
Jahrome Luai is expected to start the year as his halves partner, although I have a feeling Matt Burton will also play a fair bit of top grade – regardless, either man should be able to combine well with Cleary.
If Tyrone May returns at some point it throws another spanner in the works. He has an established combination with Cleary, and they complement each other well. It remains to be seen when, or if, May returns to first grade, and he may take some time to get back to his best after a year on the sidelines but it’s another element to consider.
One of the best stories to come out of Penrith last year was the rejuvenation of James Tamou. The 31-year old averaged 51 minutes per game, just shy of his career high of 52, and responded with his best year since he joined the club. He’ll once again form the cornerstone of the middle alongside the rapidly improving James Fisher-Harris, who was also given significantly more minutes per game (rising from 58 in 2018 to 76 last year) and thrived on it. With Tetevano joining, and Moses Leota and Isaah Yeo already here, Penrith’s pack doesn’t rely on any one player in the middle, going for a strength in numbers approach.
They did rely heavily on Viliame Kikau in 2019, often too much. Kikau is one of the best attacking players in the league, and a weapon close to the line, but the Panthers were so fixated on feeding the big Fijian they became one-dimensional. As effective as Kikau was and still is, they need to diversify their attack in 2020, which is why Capewell is a smart get. The former Shark is rangy and an effective runner, with the ability to offload, and he can balance things up nicely.
Josh Mansour is not the elite yardage winger he once was, but in conjunction with Brian To’o and Dylan Edwards the Panthers should be able to get plenty of metres out of their back three. In choosing Edwards as the long-term fullback over the departed Dallin Watene-Zelezniak, the Panthers have made a commitment to the 24-year-old and must believe in his ability to develop as a ballplayer. Edwards runs well and is strong in support, but two try assists in 20 matches last year is not the best of returns. Beyond the starters, Stephen Crichton impressed me in his brief appearances in first grade last year and is a name to remember.
THE TIP: If Penrith can keep their best 17 on the park and if Cleary can take a step forward and if he strikes up a combination with Luai and if Edwards can improve his playmaking, the Panthers fit right into the deluge of teams fighting it out for spots in the bottom half of the eight. Those things might all be “ifs” but they can all happen.
WESTS TIGERS
The punters were on the streets of Leichhardt from 7.30 in the morning, wearing jerseys and waiting for the pubs to open. The roads around the ground were choked with black, gold and white hordes as they streamed into the best worst stadium in the world.
Robbie Farah was always unlikely to play, and it got confirmed as the warm up began that he would miss the game, and he would not feature in the Tigers’ quest to beat Cronulla and end the longest finals drought in the competition.
But then Corey Thompson went into the sheds, and word came up that it was on, he was playing and if it happened in a movie we’d say it was too clichéd. I’m sure it came through on television, but to feel the full force you had to be there, and I’m sorry for you if you weren’t.
Farah would risk permanent injury to play for the Tigers one last time here at Leichhardt, and the whole place went wild and he led them on to the field and the drums were beating and the hill was surging and there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the Tigers were going to do this, it was going to happen, it was their destiny.
But destiny in rugby league doesn’t exist beyond what men can make for themselves, and the Sharks didn’t give a shit about the drums or about Farah or about Leichhardt Oval, and they beat the Tigers 25-8 to make the finals and end all the dreams and they were able to do it because as hard as the Tigers fight and as well as they’d done to make it as far as they did that’s not always enough to chase down a more talented team. By the time Farah came on the game was all but gone, and Paul Gallen kicked a field goal just because he could.
The match summed up the strengths and the weaknesses of the Tigers in 2019, and most of that holds over into 2020. Michael Maguire has moulded them into a hardworking, gritty team, but overcoming the gap in talent between them and the teams who do make the finals is too great a divide to bridge every week, and no amount of emotion or drumming or fans on the hill at Leichhardt can change that. They would die to win, but that doesn’t make them killers.
Corey Thompson is a sharp and reliable player, who is one of the club’s real success stories over the past few years, but he can’t become the size of Blake Ferguson. Benji Marshall has become a wise playmaking guru, like the master who lives at the top of the mountain in a kung fu movie, and he will still form a big part of the good things that happen to the Tigers, but today is not yesterday and he can’t be what he once was. Josh Reynolds would, quite literally, run into traffic or wrestle a bear or both at once, if that’s what it took for his team to win, but he can’t will himself to stay injury-free.
Michael Maguire is building something at the Tigers that can be lasting, which is all they really need after the constant turnover, of both player and coaches, they’ve copped in the last few years. The finals drought won’t last forever – even the Titans make it every now and then – but it still feels like they’re a year away from being a year away.
The Tigers will fight hard again in 2020, and they’ll have days when they knock off more fancied opposition and their fans will start talking about 2005, and how great things were back then and maybe that’s how they can be again one day. There will be sunny afternoons at Leichhardt and Campbelltown, and maybe they’ll be in good form and the fans will all come back and Marshall will throw a no-look pass that sticks, and it’ll be a grand old time. But the big things are still over the horizon, and wanting them to be here now doesn’t make them any closer.
THE TEAM
Scoring points was a problem for the Tigers last year – Marshall, Farah and Luke Brooks shouldered almost all the creative responsibility, and while Marshall still has plenty of moves and Brooks is one of the competition’s most improved players in recent years, it just wasn’t enough. With Farah departing and no clear replacement at hooker (Billy Walters and Reynolds are competing for the job, and both work better as runners than as playmakers anyway) the Tigers needed some spark, so they signed the brothers Leilua, who have all the spark anyone could ever want and then some.
As I outlined in January, Joey Leilua has gears no other centre in the league can match. That’s on his good days. On his bad days, he’s one of the league’s greatest wildcards – but even on those bad days, his work rate from his own end is very strong, which should help the Tigers given David Nofoalouma’s lack of support in the yardage department in recent years.
Playing on an edge alongside younger brother Luciano, an uncommonly skilful second-rower who looked in great shape at the Nines, means the Tigers finally have something resembling a strike weapon, which they’ve not really had since James Tedesco left for the Roosters.
Both Leilua brothers have experience on either side of the field, and choosing whether to link them with Marshall or Brooks will be an interesting decision for Maguire. Will they play on the left with Brooks, the more orthodox player, to offset their penchant for the unusual? Or does Maguire go all in, and stick them on the right with Marshall, and let flick passes be the order of the day? Neither choice would be wrong, but the improvement of Luke Garner, who struck up a fine combination with Brooks in the closing rounds of last year, could make his decision easier.
Losing Ryan Matterson is a classic “one step forward, two steps back” situation that always seems to happen to the Tigers, and it robs them of the cornerstone of their pack. Alex Twal is a player I have so much time for, Thomas Mikaele has representative football in his future and Michael Chee Kam and Josh Aloiai are both underrated, but the middle is light on experience, perhaps fatally so.
Moses Mbye’s endless wandering through the line-up has him likely stopping at centre for the time being, which allows new recruit Adam Doueihi to slot in at fullback. The former Rabbitoh impressed at the back in 2019, especially with his positional play, and looks the sort who can fit into a structure quite well. He might not be a gamebreaker, but he doesn’t need to be – if the Tigers can build the right mix around him, he can be very productive in 2020.
THE TIP: Since 2004, the Tigers have finished ninth six times, including three out of the past four years. There are things to like about their roster, but they’re still building themselves up - they have all the players who can fit between the stars on a really good side without having the stars to cover the gaps. If they make the finals it will be a special achievement – but I see them coming in from the 9th to 12th range.