The Roosters, flush with success after a thumping victory where they won big and looked good doing it, are coming.
Their stars are aligning. Their path is golden. On Thursday night they’re taking on the Panthers, who are the greatest winning machine in the league which means this always feels like a big game, and they’re going to announce something to the rest of the NRL.
They’ll be steady like a train, sharp like a razor and blessed with what only truly great teams have – that ability to find wins where others cannot, because while some sides take what they are given the Roosters take what they want.
The Tricolours are back, which means its over for just about everyone else … only it isn’t, not really, not yet.
Because since they won back-to-back premierships in 2018-19, which remains a titanic achievement regardless of whatever Penrith in the years to come, this is what we have been waiting for from the Roosters and it hasn’t happened. As quickly as new dawns have been declared, they have proven to be false.
Going into every new campaign the Roosters are among the premiership favourites but the past four seasons have been something of a wilderness. Between them, the Roosters and Panthers have won five of the past six premierships but it has been a lean few winters for the Bondi club by their standards.
They have slipped down the ladder each year, from fourth to fifth to sixth to seventh. Four straight finals appearances might sound good, but only if you’ve forgotten what great was.
There have been good wins, certainly, like their 48-6 belting of South Sydney last week where they looked imposing and dominant in all the right ways, but none of it ever seemed to truly last.
They watched the Panthers race by them and couldn’t do anything about it. The first game of Penrith’s 2020 season, the year where they started to become the greatest team of all, was against the Roosters.
The Panthers won that night in a 20-14 upset and since then they’ve won another seven in a row, including two wins by a combined total of 78-10 last year.
A win on Thursday night won’t erase that, especially given Penrith will be without Nathan Cleary and James Fisher-Harris which means, for the first time since that 2020 season opener, the Roosters are favourites to knock Penrith over.
It’s easy to see why – at the risk of being duped yet again, the Roosters look good. Sustainably good. Maybe good enough to hang with the likes of Penrith and Brisbane at their best, maybe good enough that the NRL premiership is no longer a game for two players.
We can’t get ahead of ourselves. The Roosters are just over a week removed from a flat loss to Manly and there are still question marks over their halves given Sam Walker’s inconsistency during his time in first grade and Luke Keary’s recent concussion.
But things are happening. The James Tedesco of old seems to have returned after three excellent performances in a row. Victor Radley seems to have turned a corner as he sharpens his roughest edges 80 minutes at a time.
And Brandon Smith, after over a year in Bondi, is starting to get it together. What he’s getting together, aside from feeling more comfortable, is harder to pin down – even for him. But he’s feeling it.
“We had a big pre-season this year but I don’t know what’s changed,” Smith said.
“I guess I just played shit at the start of last year and I still haven’t played my best this year yet. I haven’t done anything special.
“Understanding each other is a big part of it. I’m in the spine and it wasn’t easy, because I had standards and principles I lived by in Melbourne and I came here and there’s a lot of different principles and systems and I didn’t get used to those.
“But over the pre-season I learned a lot more about the team and the players and who you’re playing with.
“There’s a lot more trust, after that finish to last year they trust me to do a job but I had to prove that.”
Smith might not have impressed himself yet, but the signs are clear to see if you look for them. He’s running more regularly and more dangerously than last year, returning to the rugged style which made him such a success in Melbourne.
It’s a resurgence which, like for many of his teammates, has it’s genesis in last year’s finals series.
Amid a storm of injuries, Trent Robinson’s side were stripped of much of their finery but dug deep on reserves of toughness not seen since the premiership years to beat the Sharks by one point in week one before falling in the final minutes to the Storm in week two.
They went further than they had any right to because of a willingness to throw themselves around, to be as physical and desperate as they could be for as long as they could be.
It’s a style that brought out the best in players like Smith and Radley and Terrell May, it’s something Penrith have mastered during their three-straight premierships and that Brisbane found during their ascendance last season.
It’s the kind of thing that builds premiership-calibre teams and if a side thinks they have it, there’s no better team to battle-test it against than the Panthers.
“Rugby league is about big forwards running hard and halfbacks capitalising on it, it’s pretty simple if everyone does their job,” Smith said.
“I’m a bit of a fatter hooker compared to the rest of them, so it’s not as easy to run over me. But we always think about the forward pack running powerfully and going hard.
“When you play professional sport you want to play against the best and let’s be frank about it, they’re the best.
“To have the opportunity to try and set a standard for the competition and take on the best, if you can do that you’re setting yourself up.”
The Roosters, in the past, have sometimes been guilty of playing like greatness is their birthright. At some point since that last title in 2019 they forgot a truth they once all knew – true greatness is a mirage, a destination you never really reach because the real power is in the journey.
There is no team in modern rugby league more comfortable living that way than Penrith. It’s what makes them so formidable, even if they’re without Cleary and Fisher-Harris.
They play as if they enjoy fighting for the win more than the win itself and they like winning an awful lot. The Roosters were like that once and maybe they can be again.
The last time the two sides played a genuine, close match anything close to full strength was in the first week of the 2020 finals.
The Panthers 29-28 victory is, in hindsight, a clear changing of the guard. Penrith were learning the lessons that would make them champions as the Roosters slowly drifted away from those same truths.
A Roosters win on Thursday won’t flip the balance of power back to the Tricolours. Cleary and Fisher-Harris’ absence is too large a caveat to ignore and there are plenty who still need convincing that Walker and Keary can take this team where they want to go.
But one win isn’t ever going to do it. The turning point from challenger to champion isn’t that obvious, it only seems that way once we look back and see the whole picture.
The path to a premiership gets paved a brick at a time. Penrith know that. Can the Roosters learn it again?
Follow tonight’s Roosters v Panthers clash live and send questions to Nick Campton during the game via ABC Sport’s live blog at abc.net.au/sport
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