On Friday night, the next episode of The Kalyn Ponga Show will premiere and you can be sure ratings will be through the roof.
The Newcastle superstar will be attempting to switch to five-eighth for the second time in his career and, while seven seasons is a little early for a show to be starting re-runs, this feels a little different to the last time Ponga tried to move to the halves in 2019.
Back then, the ploy was abandoned after two-and-a-half matches. This time, the Knights and Ponga are locked in for the long haul, regardless of how long it might take to bear fruit, which makes it hard to see Friday’s trial against Parramatta as anything other than the beginning of a crossroads for both player and club.
Ponga is, by just about any measurement, one of the most famous players in rugby league. It’s been that way since before he came into first grade – ever since his early teens there was talk of the multi-sport phenom from Queensland.
You probably remember the first time you saw him play because it was probably in this video.
There were sizzle reels like this before Ponga came along and there have been many more since, but his is still the biggest.
It’s currently sitting at just over two million views on YouTube, over a million ahead of the highlights of Ponga’s Origin debut five years ago.
This three minutes and 57 seconds of schoolboy excellence is Ponga’s origin story. Plenty of players have sterling junior resumes with long lists of accomplishments, awards they’ve won and teams they’ve made, but those are just words on a page.
They can’t cut through and capture the imagination like seeing Ponga teleport around defenders can. You watch that video and you think there’s no limits to what this player can do, no level of greatness he can’t achieve. God, just look at him. Look at how he moves.
And so the Ponga hype machine began and didn’t slow down for some time. The expectations were high but Ponga wore them so lightly and so easily, even as he made his first grade debut in a sudden death semi-final and signed a big money deal with the Knights after just two games, even as he almost won the Dally M Medal as a 19-year-old rookie and became a State of Origin regular.
It was as fast a start as any player has had this century, which fed into the hype like desperate workers shovelling coal into the furnace of a steamship. But it was never, ever going to last.
Ponga’s early days were exceptional, no question, and seemed to have no limit but what we could imagine. But as rugby league always seems to when confronted with the new hotness, the game got totally carried away.
Even as Ponga became one of the game’s best fullbacks, his stardom eventually outstripped his ability and, given how much ability he has, that’s no small feat.
Once that tide turns and the snake begins eating it’s own tail, it becomes open season and the heat has very much turned back on Ponga.
Some of the stick he’s copped, like his lack of consistency for the Knights or the embarrassing bathroom incident with Kurt Mann last year, has been fair.
Some of it, like the talk he’s too active on Instagram and that’s proof he doesn’t care enough about his football, is not.
Saying there is nothing concrete to back up the talk and attention around Ponga is wide of the mark, because the talk and attention doesn’t exist if there’s no foundation to build it on. Ponga is 24 but feels older than that. He has been in our lives a long time, mainly because his stardom began when he was so young, but there is still so much he can do.
We saw a glimpse of what was possible not that long ago in his finest hour as a footballer. In Origin III last year, when most of the best players in the world put on one of the best matches of recent times, Ponga was the best player on the field.
He was skilful and tough, courageous and desperate, fast and furious. He was the best player in the world that night, finding the very best of himself as a player when it mattered the most and that means an awful lot. It was definitive proof he had the true steel, that there was that realest and rarest of greatness within him.
Ponga played two more matches for the Knights after that, both 42-12 losses, before he was shut down for the season after suffering a third concussion in six weeks, and memories of that glorious Queensland performance faded away into another storm of discourse, debate and questions whether this Ponga bloke was worth the trouble anyway.
Which brings us back to Friday and this new start at five-eighth. From a skill perspective, Ponga can make the switch a success because he can play just about wherever he wants on a football field and on paper he has the ability to thrive in the halves.
The Knights have taken steps to make the move more sustainable than last time by signing Jackson Hastings, a high-involvement halfback who should free Ponga up to attack when and where he chooses, and Lachie Miller, a blindingly fast fullback from Cronulla who can provide another point of attack.
Newcastle need this one to land. They bet their future on Ponga when they handed him the keys to the kingdom via the huge extension he signed last season and it’s reasonable for them to want that future to start right now.
Through that lens, this switch makes sense. Ponga is the club’s best player and they want to get more out of him, so they move him to a position where he’ll touch the ball more often. They want a return on their investment. They want their big gun to fire.
Whether that starts happening against the Eels is beside the point. As desperately as some of us devour preseason matches, with our hunger ravenous after the long, football-less summer, premiership campaigns are not made or broken in trial matches in Gosford on hot February nights.
You need to take some time with a switch like this, regardless of how it breaks early. But for Newcastle and Ponga’s sake you’d hope it doesn’t take too much time, because you can bet Ponga’s the lead of every report about the game.
You can bet he’ll be the one every reporter wants to speak to afterwards. You can bet a dissection of his performance will be on every TV segment and be the talk in every front bar, every Facebook comments section and every footy group chat across the internet. The Kalyn Ponga Show will roll on.
That’s Ponga’s blessing and his curse, a covenant beyond his control that was forged when someone rolled the camera on that schoolboy field all those years ago.
The volume of the praise if he succeeds and the criticism if he fails will be equally deafening because of that vision in our heads, that dream we had when we first saw him play, the one that comes up when he rips a cut-out pass through the air or steps around somebody like they’re not even there.
If he’s good, he’s that little bit closer. If he’s not, he’s even further away. We are looking for something that might not be there but we can never help looking.
How can you let those things go? God, have you see him move? Did you see him run? Imagine what he else might do. Imagine what else he could become.
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