I don’t watch much rugby league these days, so I didn’t actually catch a lot of the NRL grand final.
Some posts on my Facebook feed suggested Melbourne were hard done by, but I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that the Panthers’ 14-6 win over the Melbourne Storm secured a fourth consecutive premiership for the Ivan Cleary’s men, and that’s a pretty big deal.
Not since St George’s run of 11 consecutive premierships in the ’50s and ’60s has a team won four in a row and in the NRL era, only one other team has managed to go back-to-back.
Aside from State of Origin time, I’ve watched very little of the game in recent years. There are a few reasons that have probably contributed to that.
For one, I live in Tasmania, where it’s certainly still possible to be an NRL fan, but it’s a bit out of sight, out of mind. Another reason is that I’m a Wests Tigers supporter, which should say enough, but I suppose over time my interests and priorities have changed as I’ve gotten older and settled into family life.
But it wasn’t always this way. I grew up in Wollongong and rugby league was a huge part of my life, both as a player and a fan. I was that into rugby league that my dream was to get to write about it for a living.
While I did go on to work as a sports journalist, I mostly worked covering local sports for regional newspapers and making it as a big-time sports journo never quite panned out. The closest I got was in 2015 – and that’s where the Penrith Panthers come in.
I was working for Fairfax at the time, for a group of community newspapers in Western Sydney. They were one of the free locals that would be thrown on your front lawn, if it happened to be delivered where you lived.
One of those newspapers was the Penrith City Gazette (no longer in publication), and each week there was a dedicated section on the Panthers, which I got to write.
Liam Martin celebrates a try with teammates. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
This meant going to media opportunities at training sessions and getting into the press box and press conferences at home games. I even had my own NRL media pass for that season, which was definitely one of the high points of my career.
The Panthers of 2015 were a very different team to the one that has been so dominant in the competition in recent years. This was in the midst of Phil Gould’s five-year plan and while there was definitely a bit of buzz around them, the chances of winning a premiership still seemed a way off.
It’s not to say that there weren’t some signs of what was to come. Some of the foundations were definitely in place; it just took a bit longer and panned out differently to what I could’ve predicted at the time.
The 2015 Panthers were hardly a team of superstars, but they had a few older heads like Brent Kite, Jamie Soward and Peter Wallace and no shortage of younger players with the potential to be stars of the future.
Players like Matt Moylan, Bryce Cartwright and Reagan Campbell-Gillard were some of the ones to watch as future representative players, while youngsters like Waqa Blake and George and Robert Jennings also made their debuts that year. Blake had been given the tag of ‘the next Greg Inglis’ before he’d even played in the NRL, while the younger Jennings boys were always going to be compared to their older brother, Michael.
What’s interesting looking back is that all these players would be gone by the time the Panthers won the first of their four consecutive premierships in 2021.
There a few remaining connections from 2015 to the team of 2024. Ivan Cleary was coach, but he’d also be gone by the end of that year, before returning a few years later and become to multiple premiership winning coach he is today.
Nathan and Ivan Cleary after the 2021 Grand Final win. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
The only remaining player from the team I got to meet almost a decade ago is one of the Panthers’ current captains, Isaah Yeo. I remember interviewing him too.
At the time he was just a smiling country kid from Dubbo, who was just starting out his career. He’d just overtaken his father, Justin’s tally of 11 NRL games and had joked about how he’d at least have one over on his old man if he didn’t play many more games.
Well, he’s overtaken a few more players since and at 245 games is now the most-capped Panther in history, he’s played for NSW and Australia and captained a grand final-winning side. I’d be lying if I said I could’ve predicted any of this at the time, but it’s fair to say he’s done pretty well for himself.
As it turns out, Yeo is not the only player from the 2024 team that I encountered back then. Although 2015 wasn’t a great year for the Panthers NRL team, there were signs of what was to come if you look at their under-20s team that won their competition, which included Dylan Edwards, Moses Leota, James Fisher-Harris, Jarome Luai and Nathan Cleary.
I did actually manage to interview a young Nathan, who was still in high school at the time, in what may well have been one of the first interviews he ever did.
This came about as the Penrith City Gazette was also the sponsor of a monthly local Sports Star award, of which Nathan Cleary was a one-time winner of. I can’t recall a whole lot of what he said or what was in the article, but it is cool to look back now and realise I had interviewed someone who people now consider the best player in the game, before he had even started out.
I was only there for the beginning of the 2016 season as I was about to move to Tasmania, but one of the last interviews I did with a Panthers player was with Fisher-Harris after he had made his NRL debut.
Now that he’s leaving the club with an impressive list of achievements to his name, I can also say that I was there at the beginning.
James Fisher-Harris. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
While I can attest that these interviews did happen and the articles do exist, unfortunately they’re not easy to find. All of the papers I wrote for at the time were closed the year after I moved to the Apple Isle and a lot of what I wrote now appears to be unavailable online.
All is not lost however, as some of it can still be found though the neighbouring Hawkesbury Gazette and Blue Mountains Gazette sites, which are still being published today.
Something I learnt during that time is it’s not always the biggest stars that make the best interview subjects. It’s interviews with players like Nigel Plum and Jerry Latimore that I remember most fondly. Guys that were personable, well-spoken and happy to have a chat to a journo who wasn’t exactly a star player in the media world.
Among the articles you can still find include one about Plum after he’d played his last game and one with Latimore notching up his 100th NRL game and finding a regular place in the Panthers side after being with a number of different clubs.
Another slightly different story you can still find is about a guy called Michael Duffy, who shows his home full of Panthers memorabilia and talks about his years as a diehard Panthers fan, following them through the good and not so good times.
How happy must he be right now?
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