Though their star halfback is a Rooster, their famous champions will turn 35 on the same day in June, and in the days of video-on-demand, it’s no real secret what they’ll bring each week, Melbourne Storm has been the testing material of this National Rugby League.
Their fast guys seem faster. Their big guys seem to wrestle to more brutal effect. Storm’s all-round game, and their “shape” seems, for whatever reason, harder than their opponents’. In the physical man-dance following each aptly-named “hit”, Melbourne Storm are the masters and Cam Smith is Yoda.
Yet, behold: your competition favourites the St George-Illawarra Dragons who brought plenty to their spiritual home, Kogarah-Jubilee, on a crackerjack May Day, and touched up the premiers.
It was a chance for the Dragons to stamp their credentials in red-V ink. And they did. Big fast forwards tore in like beasts. Big fast backs ran hard at ragged edges. Little fellows scurried about on electric feet and made a heaving home crowd of 19,173 believe.
We learned: if Storm is the testing material, the Saints are now of the same cloth.
The match was the Saints’ acid test. It was a match to determine if the Dragons are the real deal. It was a May “grand final” between the bookies’ two outright favourites. The jury remains out. But, the Dragons brought plenty of grunt.
Storm knew it. They went at the Dragons’ big units early. There’d been press about Jack de Belin, the Origin chances of Tariq Sims, how Ben Hunt is buy-of-the-year. There were old-fashioned bits early on – a little knee to the cheek, a forearm across the chops.
The Dragons played up-tempo: big men hard-charging, getting up, quick play-the-balls, gifting their tricky ones options to work at back-peddling pigs. Again, not the science that launched Sputnik. But done well, at pace, it’s extremely hard to stop, as Euan Aitken was after slick work inside by James Graham (convincing decoy), Gareth Widdop (slick ball) and Hunt who threw a “flat” pass for his centre-man to run into a hole and bop over to score.
Storm came back; you would expect nothing else. Cameron Munster fed Billy Slater, who fired a flat torpedo for Josh Addo-Carr – the Fox – who needed but a scintilla of space to scythe over out wide. Later, Slater threw a miracle overhead ball for Addo-Carr to leap in, but Storm had won a play-the-ball penalty instead. Smith was confused about the call. Rugby league will yap about it all week.
From there the game became ragged, like two heavyweight boxers had lost a little lightning after the initial crisp flurries. It was scrappy, even ordinary – as if the conditions were too good. The rub of the green suited Melbourne for a period and they bombed in. But the Dragons weathered the Storm, their goal line was Rorke’s Drift repelling the Zulu impis. It would prove critical.
The Storm? So many guns. Smith, Slater, Munster, Anthony Kaufusi. Ryan Hoffman’s been running edges since 2004. When Craig Bellamy talks about his relationship with Hoffman he gets teary. And yet, they were just off, the Storm. Just off like a cheese you’re not a hundred per cent sure of. It looks tasty, but… no.
And so the May grand final rolled on. Three minutes to half-time the Dragons kicked a penalty. Taking the points is 2018’s new black. Widdop fired a laser beam between the big sticks. The Dragons took an eight point lead into half-time. They’d played poorly. But hadn’t suffered. Sign of a good team? You’d have to say it is. They were playing Melbourne Storm, after all.
Early into the second half, Jeremy Latimore bopped Smith in the testicles and Cam McInnes burned over. Soon enough Gareth Widdop – super-smart, cool, clinical, the most-effective afield – fired torpedoes left and right, changed the point of attack and threatened plenty. He set up Tim Lafai’s game-breaking 48th minute leap-and-plant try, and the sideline conversion meant the Dragons led by 22.
There looked like points in this fixture. The surface was pure, and the Storm was the Storm. Weren’t they? Munster threw a beautifully-weighted floating ball for Addo-Carr to notch his fourth consecutive double. Yet when Aitken notched his own double after a scything, bopping, Origin-bound try under the posts, the Dragons underlined themselves as the best team in the NRL (in May).
The take-out? This was not a quality game of rugby league. In some ways it was like a grand final – scrappy, and not up to expectations. Saints had some luck, for sure. Yet such was their D-line desire that Melbourne Storm – the NRL’s foremost executors – could not execute them. The Dragons won the game on defence. Premierships are won on defence.
Sure, it’s only May. But if the premiership is Mount Everest, the Dragons are ascending. Melbourne Storm – and everyone else – are limping into base camp.
