Today we take a look at the teams who had genuine premiership hopes, but will not be playing finals football, the emergence of the incredible Will Warbrick and the nostalgic and completely impossible dreams of some merger clubs.
Read on as we tackle some of the big talking points in this week's Real or Not.
Long list of flops as 2024 season draws to a close
REAL: It is surprising to note the number of teams in the bottom half of the ladder who would have had realistic aspirations of winning the premiership at the start of this season.
If you look at the last five grand finals, four of the losing teams have missed the Top 8 this season. The fifth team was Penrith, who lost the 2020 decider to Melbourne, but has famously won all three grand finals since. The others, Brisbane, Parramatta, South Sydney and Canberra are all out of the finals this season. Add to those teams the Gold Coast who would have had high hopes for their powerful roster under the coaching of Des Hasler, so too the Warriors who were one win away from the 2023 grand final and who welcomed back Roger Tuivasa-Sheck to their already talented line-up.
The Bulldogs, Cowboys and Sea Eagles have all improved to march into the finals, while the last spot in the Top 8 will go to the winner of this weekend's clash between the Knights and Dolphins. The Dolphins, in just their second season, will be hoping to play in the finals for the first time.
It would be nice to say that the salary cap is doing its job, giving everyone a shot at premiership glory, but that would overlook the prolonged and ongoing success of teams like the Panthers, Storm and Roosters. Player recruitment, development and retention, as well as the quality of coaching, all go a long way towards determining which teams will taste more success than others. Still, it is surprising to see such a rapid demise of so many powerful clubs this year.
Melbourne Storm don't have the outside backs to beat Penrith
NOT REAL The Storm have built their success on a world class spine combined with bit part players who all perform their jobs to perfection. None of the outside backs, apart from perhaps Xavier Coates, stand out as superstars of the game, but you would be hard pressed to find a better finisher in rugby league than winger Will Warbrick. He put on an absolute demolition clinic on Thursday night against the Broncos, scoring the first two tries with a combination of strength, deception and the running form of a 100 metre track athlete.
Warbrick was then put in the clear with a bullet pass from Jahrome Hughes on the Storm's 30-metre line and looked set to score a third try, until Tristan Sailor somehow managed to latch onto him. He managed to hold Sailor off well enough to slip the ball to Nick Meaney who caught the ball behind him and waited to find Hughes in support. A huge smile cut across the champion halfback's face he sprinted towards the corner to score.
Warbrick's opposite number Corey Oates was shown up so badly that Kevin Walters sent Alfie Langer out to tell him to try defending on the right wing instead.
Warbrick might have secured a hat trick just before halftime as Meaney got his hands to a bouncing ball that looked likely to fall to the winger. Instead Meaney knocked it on, bringing a typical Craig Bellamy response, despite the Storm's 22-0 lead at the time.
Into the second half Warbrick positioned himself under a Hughes' bomb, took a couple of steps before firing a pass inside which was knocked down by a Broncos player before Hughes scooped it up to score his third of the night.
The statuesque Storm winger wasn't finished, running onto a Hughes' rainbow pass to claim his hat trick with ten minutes left on the clock. With that try he passed Tyran Wishart as the Storm's leading try-scorer for the season. With the broken Broncos left in their dust, the Storm head into the finals looking sharp and clearly the team to beat for the premiership.
Talk of Balmain Tigers rebirth is nostalgic nonsense
NOT REAL: There was a story earlier in the week which caught the eye of rugby league fans, but quickly fizzled out like a shooting star. It concerned a Balmain Tigers board member suggesting that his club would be better off splitting from the Wests Tigers merger to go it alone. It was pure fantasy and was soon shot down by higher authorities at the club.
The Balmain and Western Suburbs clubs were forced to merge as part of the Super League war peace agreement because neither was particularly rolling in cash and the newly formed National Rugby League needed to consolidate the number of teams involved. In adopting the ethos of spreading the game as far as fiscally viable, there was a need to cut the number of Sydney suburban teams.
The St George Dragons and Illawarra Steelers were also merged at the same time for similar reasons. South Sydney Rabbitohs refused to merge and were consequently kicked out of the competition, while the North Sydney Bears merged briefly with Manly Sea Eagles, before that arrangement died and Manly once again stood alone. The fact that the Rabbitohs won back their stand-alone place in the competition through the courts, still sticks in the craws of fans of the clubs that succumbed to mergers.
All the recent talk of the Bears being reborn in Perth, while the Jets, another defunct Sydney brand, look to resurface in Brisbane, must have caused a bit of nostalgia to rise in fans and officials of clubs that no longer own their historical identity. Almost every long-term fan of the Tigers, Magpies, Dragons and Steelers would tell you they would rather have their stand-alone identity back. But clearly, the league can't take that backwards step, when expansion remains the ongoing goal.