The dirt didn’t just feel different at the foot of the mountains in early 2025, it was.
The Penrith Panthers were nomads — playing on a strange field while their spiritual
home at Blue Bet Stadium sat behind construction fences, a skeleton of steel and
dust.
It was an unstable footing that saw the champions looking uncharacteristically mortal
by Round 6, struggling to find the superiority they had become accustomed to.
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In the post-match press conferences, the change was striking.
We were used to seeing Ivan Cleary and his captains dissecting a win with clinical precision, but as the losses mounted to five straight, the tone shifted.
You’d hear Ivan use words like ‘uncharted waters,’ admitting he was seeing mental
errors that were once unthinkable.
There was a raw honesty from the players, talking about a lack of resilience and the struggle to ‘stop the bleeding’ as the defensive wall began to leak.
It was the sound of a group finally acknowledging that what once came naturally was
now making them look, well, normal.
By the time they sat at the bottom of the ladder, the narrative was that the talent and
the fortress mentality had been tapped out.
THE MID-SEASON STRUGGLE
The theory that the production line had stalled was backed by a roster held together
by tape and hope. Losing James Fisher-Harris and Jarome Luai felt like the removal
of the team’s snarl and creative spark in one swoop. Without them, and with Nathan
Cleary sidelined for long stretches with a concussion and a groin injury, the clinical
identity of the club vanished. Dylan Edwards was navigating a dodgy groin of his
own, Mitch Kenny was playing through shoulder instability, and the middle-third was
feeling the physical toll of four years at the top of the heap. By Round 12, as they sat
among the also-rans, it looked like the empire was turning to dust.
THE CHAMPION’S CLAW
In true champion fashion, the Panthers began to claw their way back, starting with a
gritty win over the Eels that triggered an incredible nine-game winning streak. At first,
the teams sitting comfortably in the top four were not alarmed. But as the winter chill
set in and the Panthers climbed from the bottom back into the top eight, the mood
across the league shifted. Toward finals time, every coach in the competition was
doing the maths, desperately hoping they weren’t going to be the ones to meet a
battle-hardened Penrith in September.
