Cast against a lengthening Eddie Hayson-sized shadow, rugby league delivered two semi-finals of welcome purity this weekend.
Sold-out crowds greeted the contenders, each of whom can reflect on displays underpinned by raw aggression and desperation. One match will be remembered as an epic; the other a possible glimpse into rugby league’s next evolution: a refocusing on attack underlined by ball-movement, limited ‘block-plays’, and intelligent, if sometimes improvised, football.
Wherever you sit on rugby league’s cynic-to-kool-aid spectrum, it’s fair to say these contests were memorable for the right reasons. They were won, rather than lost; they threw up more protagonists than antagonists; and in a cool change to last week’s heat, we do not have to talk about referees.
And so we now enter that time of year when garish scarves, flags and newspaper lift-outs adorn shopfronts and housefronts alike. They’ll be most prominent in Townsville and Canberra, whose teams delivered a display of such ferocious ball-running that it’s hard to recall back-to-back club fixtures with such wince-inducing collisions.
But wild barbarity this wasn’t. In Jason Taumololo and Junior Paulo, viewers witnessed the personification of a controlled, ballistic missile. When players wreak this kind of destruction at this time of year, we’re led to believe that their next opponents, whose ‘feet are up’ at home, watch with glee as both teams obliterate each other.
An alternative read, and probably more accurate, is that both players are in enormously good form, and should be rightly feared by their opponents this weekend.
Where one JT destroyed, another delivered. For rational minds, the concept of a ‘match-winner’ is troubling: technically every play contributes to the end result, not just the last one. But you know it when you see it, and Johnathan Thurston won that match for North Queensland on Friday night.
Most have accepted his belonging in conversations about ‘the game’s greats’, but is that enough? What if he wins another premiership with this team? His legend is not already defined – it is still being chiselled. Many are saying they’ve run out of superlatives to describe him.
In a match that almost felt like a showcase of everything Queensland rugby league stands for, here’s another: is he the greatest player Queensland has ever produced?
Whereas Thurston is a confirmed champion, Canberra, on the other hand, still has the whiff of a contender. For long periods in their match, the eerie rhythm of the Viking clap failed to elicit the sort of rhythm Canberra can occasionally produce.
They brutalised Penrith in the game’s early exchanges for disproportionate reward, and many would have been forgiven for sensing similarities with last week’s performance against Cronulla. But while Cronulla capitalised on Canberra’s profligacy, Penrith squandered their chances.
In many ways the spectacle was richer for it. Conventional rugby league thinking dictates that when the stakes are high, caution rules. But Penrith, 18-0 down, were prepared to chance their arm, and in doing so produced the passage of the match – a Matt Moylan cut-out pass skipping six players before landing on the chest of Tyrone Peachey who duly finished in the corner.
Earlier, Joseph Leilua produced another piece of magic, further confirming his emergence as one of the competition’s elite weapons. Rugby league players tend to be big, fast or skilful – but it’s rare to be all three. In setting up Jordan Rapana, Leilua shrugged off the first defender, sped past the second, and combined imagination with dexterity to manufacture a perfectly-weighted grubber with the outside of his boot to increase the Raiders’ lead. In Hollywood terms, he’s a triple-threat. The Storm’s left edge will have their hands full next week.
The implications are different for both vanquished sides. Whereas Penrith’s premiership prospects appear bright, Brisbane’s is a little less certain. The Broncos were typically resilient, but for the second time in as many years were rendered second by a superior playmaker. After the dynasties of Lewis, Langer and Lockyer, it feels strange that they don’t have a talisman conductor for these situations. Their nominal leader, backrower Corey Parker, now departs the arena. Brisbane will probably be fine.
In a week where the code contemplated issues of integrity off the field, it found no shortage of salvation on it. Rugby league headquarters must dream of an uninterrupted week of pure anticipation, fuelled by storylines of tactical battles, departing warhorses, legends defining their legacy and the unfulfilled dreams of certain regions of the Shire.
We are increasingly conditioned to understand the game as a TV product, but the weekend showed just how redeeming the live experience is. Two grounds with supposedly modest capacities (approximately 25k each), completely full and emitting a feverish intensity. They looked like the sorts of events where you’d prefer to be there than watching it on the box, and not just because the TV advertisements repeatedly insist that you want to drink, punt, and have more hair. You want to be there because the stakes felt high, and that so much collective desire in the air usually leads to something special.
