Forgotten worm food
Anubis has the Panthers on the scales of justice
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The Panthers are a stain on rugby league
There used to be a concept of panache. It was not just winning but doing it with a sense of style, which seems to have fallen by the wayside of the last few decades. The Tour de France recently concluded in Paris and Tadej Pogacar was anointed the overall winner for the fourth time. He is not yet the best to ever do it but at the rate he is currently going, it is slightly less than a complete certainty that he will eclipse Merckx, likely in time for his 30th birthday.
Pogacar wins somewhere in the range of a quarter to a third of his race starts, the point that certain events are foregone conclusions by his presence. You might think that watching a rider whose palmares will surpass that of “The Cannibal”, so known because he wanted to and did win everything, would be boring. On the contrary, Pogacar lives for the thrill of the race and is self-assured without arrogance. He calls his shots - he said he would win Strade Bianche in 2024 by attacking 80 kilometres from the finish, did precisely that and won by nearly three minutes - and for that, he is very popular. Despite the statistics, there remains the chance that he misjudges his efforts, as he did in the Tours of 2022 and 2023, and loses. Will he do it? Can he do it? Seriously, again?! Living by an extravagant sword and dying as extravagantly by the sword is pure panache.
Pogacar’s 20s dominance and aesthetics stands in stark contrast to the pre-eminent ride of the previous decade, Chris Froome. Froome won the Tour as many times as Pogacar has but did so in a way that seemed less about sport than it did about risk management. Froome’s approach - scientific, robotic, analytical, bureaucratic, mechanical - was as dull as dishwater. The vision of Froome running up Mont Ventoux in 2016 was the most impactful of his career, a stage that was ultimately neutralised for the lack of control of roadside fans, rendering his jog in cleats pointless. The whiff of doping undergirding Team Sky’s smarmy “marginal gains” rhetoric did no one any favours. Doping, and degrees of cheating more broadly, is like anti-panache. It’s impact on winning is to trivialise it. Froome’s reward was getting piss thrown on him.
Sport is, like art, a fundamentally and wholly human pursuit. Its rules are arbitrary, its value is exactly what you give it - no more and no less - and its longevity is both ephemeral and mythological. It can be the best of us, the worst of us but it is us, wholly and solely. We don’t need to stray very far from home to understand this. The Queensland Maroons’ series victories in 1995, 2020, 2025 - take your pick of these, 2024 for the women or any number of other examples of spirit overcoming circumstance - speaks to this in a way that the lizard part of your brain can and does respond, never mind the higher, more mammalian synapses.
Our economic system is inhuman. It requires the suppression of self-expression, the concession of your only resource - your time - and the prioritisation of the patently unimportant in exchange for you to be allowed to live. The result is an ever more efficient, powerful, ruthless machine that turns resources into stuff, whose gears are oiled with the bodies and souls of the people shoved into its roiling maw, all to enrich the men with their hands on the lever and no other purpose. The record speaks for itself. I will leave it to you to decide whether that is complimentary or derogatory but its probably both.
Sport, like art, serves as a diversion from the almost overwhelming stomach-churn of our economic reality. Within the cultural pantheon of sport, there are winners and there are winners. There are people whose victories reaffirm our humanity, the decision to use our limited and very precious time on this planet to bear witness to their greatness, and creates the scintilla that something more than ourselves is possible. Their success underlines, rather than undermines, the basis of modernism: that tomorrow will be better than today. There are those whose victories do not do that, whose triumphs are as spiritually fulfilling as a tax return. Their successes enable the worst impulses of the id: the world is kill or be killed, so the ends justify the means.
The Penrith Panthers are a casino with a football team taped on the side. They exist to immiserate their community, capitalising on Australia’s crippling gambling addiction, and expend that capital by offering an ostensibly brighter future to young men of limited means whose presence in that particular part of that particular city at that particular time is as much a work of merciless economic bullying and ugly historical forces as anything else. The price those men pay is measured in blood, paid now, and in mental faculty, paid later, and only they can decide whether it was worth being lubricant for an unthinking and unfeeling automaton that is comprised entirely of humans and yet lacks any humanity. That machine will pay off women for abortions, commodify players and treat them as callously as possible, and steal public money to build a carpark to funnel more through its doors to financial immolation.
When asked about how he treats his teammate, F1’s Lando Norris recently observed:
In 200 years no one is going to care. We'll all be dead.
Norris, perhaps along with Anthony Seibold, understands that we all do the danse macabre eventually but irrespective of the philosophy or the religion, most people with any degree of self-reflection seem to agree that how you comport yourself matters, even if we all wind up forgotten worm food in the long run.
To win four premierships in a row is a historical achievement, more mythological than ephemeral by its stature, even if adjectives like ‘mechanistic’, ‘soulless’, ‘boring’ are fully applicable. For the Panthers to have then found themselves on the wrong end of the worst franchise in the league amassing 26 unanswered points in less than 40 minutes of football would be embarrassing but it’s just one of those things that happens over a long enough time span and certainly nothing to concern a nation-conquering colossus. Like losing to Bradford, St Helens and Wigan, especially after the ice in the veins gaffe, the rest of us would have had a good laugh and then moved on to the next inexplicable comedy thrown up by the sport.
Whether the act of a trainer running in front of Jayden Campbell caused him to miss the conversion is immaterial. That someone in the Panthers organisation even thought to do it, let alone follow through, speaks to a sick commitment to winning at all costs. Only the most sycophantic, intellectually shallow and probably fascist people you know will defend it on that basis but most people with any regard for their species will correctly recognise it for another example of huge loser behaviour from an organisation that prides itself on winning to the exclusion of literally all else.
Calling this blatant cheating an honest mistake is insulting, especially when this is not the first example of Panthers trainers interfering in matches. Given the NRL is completely incapable of regulating the sport - what is a $50,000 fine to a company that gets $14 million from the NRL every year and millions more through the pokies? - we are left to hope that a drunk Frenchman will throw piss on them.
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Around the grounds
The unbelievably crap weather in New South Wales means we are forced to create a new principle: under sufficiently bizarre circumstances, the results only count if they support the point I am making. Let’s call it the Young Principle.
Dolphins 20 defeated Warriors 18. Speaking of cheating, on the game winning play, two people (probably another dipshit trainer, maybe a dumbass fan, we'll never know) yell out “FORWARD!” The Warriors on the Dolphins’ left come to a complete halt, not realising it hasn't come from the referee. The Dolphins hesitate but respond faster, get the ball to the other side of the field and Isaako wins the game. Sucked in.
Broncos 60 crushed Rabbitohs 14. This was the slowest but most thorough destruction of a Broncos opposition I've sat through in person. It's like the Broncos had heard of this concept called “patience” and decided to give it a go, although I might be confusing this for straight up laziness. The Broncs are not good at it but served as an interesting change of pace nonetheless. Wayne Bennett might be undermining Souths like a medieval sapper but he's right that Lewis Dodd sucks.
Titans 14 drew Bulldogs 14 (W). This doesn’t quite require an invokation of the Young Principle but it was very clear that neither team was going to get anywhere near scoring during golden point and a draw was a foregone conclusion. Only the Raiders getting beat by the Knights featured fewer metres per set. These teams were stuck in the mud.
Capras defeated Bears (M). Turns out if you give the Capras the merest whiff that you're weak, they'll body you into oblivion to get that win. A few people must be wondering where that is every week. Jesse Arthars and Josiah Karapani made very little impact in a Burleigh team that simply could not defend their line against a more motivated, ferocious Capras.
Panthers 30 “defeated” Titans 28. The most Titans thing to have happened would have been to win this game, drawing level with Souths on wins, and then blown the upcoming spoon bowl. Now that they've lost this game, and seen how fragile Souths are, the Panthers’ relentless and shameful cheating might actually benefit the Titans into avoiding the spoon.1
Broncos 28 defeated Sharks 14 (W). The Sharks’ 14 belies that they were scored in garbage time, which was at least the last 20 minutes of the 70 minute match. Brisbane were otherwise untroubled by the conditions or opposition. Other than 15 minutes against the Roosters, the Broncos have been superlative in 2025.
Warriors 12 defeated Cowboys 6 (W). The Warriors being better than the Cowboys does not support my agenda, so this result is discarded in accordance with the Young Principle. However, the Cowboys’ offence was incredibly bad. North Queensland had the ball and the position but couldn’t string anything together. The Warriors weren’t much better but good enough on the day.
Sharks 32 defeated Cowboys 10 (M). Can I invoke the Young Principle to justify not watching this at all?
Women’s Magic Round
Footy Industry reports that the first women’s Magic Round was a success:
Round 5 of the 2025 #NRLW season was attended by 11,391 across both days, averaging 5,696 per day. The season to date has seen 131,318 attend at an average of 4,377 per game. Standalone matches account for 27,483 at an average of 2,114…
NRLW ratings on Nine on Sunday saw 171,000 watch the early game, and 150,000 watch the middle game on Nine. Excellent ratings for stand alone fixtures.
I wasn’t there and I don’t know where people hide at McDonald Jones from the weather, so it’s impossible for me to judge the accuracy of that crowd figure but good ratings and a decent reported attendance suggests there’s something here.
Future editions couldn’t possibly get any worse than not one, but two, interrupted games for weather. The NSW government has the rights for the next two years with the intention of taking it to regional areas. You may have noted the “Make the move to regional NSW” ads on centre field. Hard to imagine poorer timing: come to regional NSW where it pisses down constantly and you’ll get bogged. Oh well, the only way is up.2
Speaking of the weather, it's great that nearly every Magic Round in Brisbane is accompanied by the dumbest hand wringing from no-nothings that rain and the alleged dodgy surface at Suncorp has to force the NRL to relocate its flagship event in the week leading up. Putting aside the total economic disaster that would represent for everyone involved, we’ve been through this situation several times and nothing has ever happened at the men’s Magic Round, Suncorp’s surface is fine and everyone who complained looks like a moron. It won't stop them next year but I never want to hear a peep about Suncorp's surface ever again after what we were served up in Newcastle.
Sir, these are divisions
It’s weird of Greasy Chammas to drop this League Unlimited forums-ass post in the run to finals, when there’s both good footy and recriminations to be had, and yet: Conferences, mid-week games and 10-team finals: How a 20-team NRL competition could work.
Should you deign to read it and if it sounds familiar, I dropped a very similar suggestion in a footnote earlier in the year with a view to integrating Super League into NRL. That is, I had a problem that I wanted to solve: how to pull together two unequal professional leagues into a single format. Was that problem or solution realistic at the time? No, and it is even less so now as Super League actively moves away from the guiding hand of the NRL, but I had a specific intent.
The brain geniuses that run the NRL don’t plan on solving that problem, so why are we introducing conferences? No one knows.
V’Landys:
“Conferences done correctly, yeah, absolutely, I like it. When I first started as chairman, I had a delegation of high-profile coaches and administrators. They wanted conferences, so I’ve always had it in the back of my head. Tribalism is the main ingredient in our sport.”
Cool, back to the tribalism rhetoric, which seems to be the fallback when there’s nothing to actually say.
Nick Politis doesn’t have anything better to offer:
“It’ll be great for the gate,” Roosters chairman Nick Politis recently said.
“Playing the Sydney teams twice is better for us than playing the Titans or Dolphins at home. Revenue will go through the roof. You’ll get better crowds. It’s fair.
“We get back to playing a proper draw, not all over the place like it is now.”
The only person talking sense is David Gyngell, who is quoted for some reason:
“I wouldn’t want another team in New Zealand, I would want another southern Queensland team.”
Blake Solly, as if he doesn’t have enough to worry about with the imminent cave-in of Souths’ fortifications, pipes up and completes the set of clubland people that I am sick of hearing from because they are stupid (Gus is less stupid than self-serving and full of shit). This time, Solly pushes his anti-Origin barrow, as if changing the configuration of State of Origin in any way wouldn’t immediately tank the next broadcast deal, taking Souths’ financial distribution with it. We’d definitely hear Solly in the papers saying it was worth losing a million every year to not have to deal with Origin injuries. Now to check in on how Souths’ strength and conditioning went this year. Oh. Oh no. They lost two players in the warmup before the Broncos game? Oh dear.
There’s some other quotes from Bennett (refer previous paragraph) and Clint Newton doing his job, there’s some graphics cooked up very quickly and frankly, you could find an equally well thought out proposal on any corner of the internet that NRL freaks lurk (Reddit).
This is top notch, premium content that’s definitely worth the $300+ per annum Ninefax want you to pay to access their newspapers. Personally, I’d suggest getting a paid subscription to the Maroon Observer and I’ll filter this crap for you. I will be your NRL format concepts oyster.
My main objection is that these are clearly divisions, not conferences, and calling them conferences is a weak appeal to the aesthetics of US sports pitched at people who do not follow any US sports. But it’s also not clear what problem is being solved here: crowds are as high as ever, you’ve had 100+ years to form your rivalries, the draw is never going to be a “proper” draw and Origin is the only thing making this sport nationally relevant.
What are we doing and why are we doing it again? Ah, of course.
Intermission
Central Queensland’s winger turned second rower, Zev John, causes Guy Hamilton to briefly mess his shorts before scooping and scoring in the Capras’ shock win over the Bears. Great stuff, I have a lot of time for Zev.
Hotseat
The least surprising thing happened:
The Tweed Seagulls board has announced that, after careful consideration and review, the club will not be renewing Dave Penna’s coaching contract for the 2026 season. Dave’s tenure as the Hostplus Cup Coach will conclude following the last game of the year against the Townsville Blackhawks on August 30, 2025.
I picked this one pre-season. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that it was confirmed before any of the NRLM coaches have been tossed.
The Seagulls are currently 5-12, behind the Capras and only two wins above the Clydesdales. It would look even worse if the Pride played to anywhere near their capability. That’s three seasons under Penna with no finals (Tweed’s last being the Jamayne Isaako game in 2022). Given more teams make finals than not, barring maybe three programs in QCup, that’s simply not good enough.
Upcoming Slate
Before we begin, I want to draw attention to a radioactive fixture between the Hunters and Clydesdales, this Sunday at 3pm. It’s the first game of the year that is deemed completely unwatchable (yes, normally I would give a half star for a Hunters home game but its the Clydesdales, so no). Congratulations to all involved.
Bears versus Dolphins, Saturday 3pm, Pizzey Park
If Burleigh play like they did on Saturday, then this is over. Redcliffe by a million. If we expect a return to form and are prepared to write that off as a weird one-off performance in a standalone game, then we have a real contest. I will admit I haven’t watched anywhere near enough Dolphins tape this year, so I am leaning heaily to the Bears on the lineups alone, so you’ve been warned. Tip: Bears
Dolphins versus Roosters, Saturday 5.30pm, Suncorp
Clear the schedule to watch the Herbie-less Dolphins finally fall apart. It’s got to happen eventually right? Right?! The Roosters are not great but are potential top eight material. A centre pairing of Feagai and Naufahu doesn’t inspire confidence but Feagai’s been there for a moment and survived, and Naufahu looked OK in his NRL starts. But then the pack is missing Felise and so Mark Nicholls is starting and… you know, what? Let’s stop worrying. It’ll probably be fine. Tip: Dolphins
Eels versus Cowboys (W), Sunday 6.15pm, Parramatta
As much as I am looking forward to the Broncos running in 70 against the Raiders, this will probably be a more stimulating contest. The Cowboys haven’t quite hit their straps for mine and the Eels have shown a fiestiness that might get them into the finals. Both have 3-2 records, so that makes this a compelling contest in terms of what the teams can deliver and the outcome of the season. Kirra Dibb returns, after seemingly being dropped and the team’s lack of offensive output against the Warriors, and Rosie Kelly has paid the price. This seems like a positive switch because while Kelly has moments, she isn’t doing the yeoman’s work that Tillett has been putting in. Good to see China Polata in the reserves as well, after nearly 12 months on the sidelines with various injuries. The Eels are fronting a fair few U19s, so we’ll see if they have the experience to match North Queensland. Tip: Cowboys
(Tips 31.5 / 61 in 2025; 48 / 92 in 2024)
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Read this
Pam Whaley: Falling standards at the 0-4 Canberra Raiders expose big NRLW issue. Good read, giving a complete picture of the standard and issues at the lower end of the NRLW.
Rugby League Writers: Panthers Perform Under Pressure, NRLW Detail & How Storm Set Up Coates
The Sportress: Six again: The Good Lose
Storm Machine: Game 733 – S28E22 Review
Down Round: Knock On. Podcast about the rugby league game from outside the rugby league fan bubble.
Gavin Willacy: What happened to the rugby league Lions – and could they be revived? I would have thought the 2019 tour spoke for itself.
Rugby League Eye Test: Why rugby league is a weak link sport plus some Lachlan Galvin stats. I read this and spent a fair bit of time thinking about whether I buy into the weak/strong link problem framework (I don’t) but there’s still insights to be gleaned from this data.
Notes
Rugby league great Sam Backo dies after battle with melioidosis. Backo already had health issues but melioidosis is a disease that lives in soil after floods.
Queensland Rugby League releases statement on status of Edmonton Storm Rugby League Club. I found this story pretty perplexing but suspect the Edmonton Storm are not being given good legal advice.
The one thing we didn’t want to happen: after putting Nigel Wood back in charge and expanding to 14 teams last week, two of the RFL/Super League’s sources of funding are under threat because Sky doesn’t want to pay for an extra game and Sport England are not thrilled with the lack of proper governance. Good stuff.
Broncos: Willison out for probably 8 weeks
Storm: “The Club will recognise the traditional owners of the land through an Acknowledgement of Country on Thursday night for Indigenous Round.” Oh, wow, doing the bare minimum to not be racist during INDIGENOUS ROUND. A round of applause for the Melbourne Storm, everyone!
49ers' George Kittle bemoans NFL's new ban of smelling salts
Two Queenslands: Mount Isa's underground copper mine ceases production after 70 years but also Work demands a blow for sporting clubs in Queensland's once booming mining towns
Claims Coochin Fields approval will ruin 'greenbelt' between Brisbane and Sunshine Coast. I included this to note, “The Coochin Creek developments are among five projects to be called in by the LNP government since it took office in October last year. By comparison, the former Labor government called in three developments throughout its final four-year term.” Hmmmm.
This week in Substack: Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. If you’re wondering why I’m still here, it’s because everywhere else sucks and there’s Nazis all over the internet.
This week in PNG: Hela Wigmen secure trademark victory after K50,000 settlement
Australian-made rocket crashes after attempted north Queensland launch. ‘"Congratulations to Gilmour Space Technologies on having a crack. They truly exemplify the Gold Coast 'have a go' spirit," Cr Tate said.’ Wut???
Nickelware
Some good content
10 glizzy’s gobbled.
If the Titans do get the spoon and I were a Frizelle, I’d be tabulating a commercial cost to the business and then be suing Corey Bocking personally for damages. Avoid the NRL and the Panthers, there’s probably clauses in the licence agreement about that. I’d also ensure that the amount is over $250k, so that it goes directly to the Supreme Court. Even if the claim is spurious, which I would let my learned legal colleagues debate at great length, the cost of mounting any defence will be sufficient deterrent. If the NRL won’t punish pricks, then all we have left is shame (hah!), piss throwing and the legal system to make these cunts uncomfortable enough to cut out the bullshit.
To Cairns in 2028, once Barlow Park is refurbished and the Cowboys’ centre of excellence is completed.