Dylan Edwards shines as Penrith defeats Reece Walsh’s Brisbane

First, Jordan played a short pass to Riki from close range, opening the hole in the defense wide to attack forward. The Kiwi lost his composure, an offense later repeated by Xavier Willison on a similar Ezra Mam ball in the second half.

By the second half, Walsh appeared to release Deine Mariner, but the winger was well covered and was unable to get down as he was dragged helplessly into touch.

Another lunge to the left should have freed Josiah Karapani, but Gehamat Shibasaki’s final pass headed out behind the winger.

Try as the mercurial Walsh tried, the Broncos never looked cohesive on offense and his final throw did nothing but give Tom Jenkins a break and score.

Undisciplined and punished

17 errors, 8 penalties, 36 ball misses. Every mistake the Broncos made caused confusion around the park. This was nothing like the side riding a wave of energy and momentum towards the 2025 title.

Whether from their own end or during the attack, the premiers were rudderless and invited the Panthers through the door.

While there was an impressive tackling defense from Brisbane on their own line at times, they made 29 tackles inside their own 20 meter area and forced Moses Leota and Isaiah Papali’i into mistakes when they were confident the pair would score, too many mistakes were always going to be punished.

Broncos coach Michael Maguire lamented: “We put too much pressure on ourselves. We’ve made too many mistakes to involve ourselves in a game you’re playing against a high-quality team, and you’ve got to put pressure on.”

“Take away half of those mistakes and put yourself in better field position and the whole game is different.”

Even worse was the Panthers’ ability to punish them. A soft Pat Carrigan on Broncos offense fumbled the ball and it ultimately took less than five minutes for Casey McLean to convert the first down at the other end.

As the half-time siren sounded, Kotoni Staggs’ decision to run off the line to put pressure on Blaize Talagi’s five-eighth strike backfired, with the cross falling off the ball and allowing the young star winger to deliver a spot-kick to the unmarked Jenkins for the first of his two tries.

Calm, calm, Cleary

Cleary may have a lot of tricks up his sleeve, but rugby league’s leading halfback didn’t need to use any of them.

It was a simple No. 7 from the Penrith master, but it was superbly done. His pinpoint bombs gave Brisbane three nightmares; Two drops from Walsh and Mariner in the first half led directly to tries through Casey McLean and Edwards.

It was almost a third with 15 minutes remaining as the Mariners spilled another for replays that showed McLean taking the first touch of the ball.

This was not a Penrith team at their clinical best, making 13 errors of their own. This is where they needed Cleary to execute the basics, and he did it perfectly.

His kicking game pinned Brisbane in their own end. Payne Haas was the only one among the Broncos’ forward to surpass 100 running metres, with a lack of momentum behind Cleary’s methodical approach as the Panthers ran for more than 500 meters from the hosts.

“There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement, but we were looking for the right things at various stages and communicating pretty well, so I think those are welcome signs,” Nathan Cleary said.

“We knew not everything was going to be perfect in the first round, especially given the conditions – it was pretty slippery out there – but I was pleased we put ourselves in the right positions, competed hard and found a way to score points.”

The Broncos needed Adam Reynolds to do the same, but with so little going forward and so much goal-line defense required, there was little the retiring general could do.

“We haven’t gone into the long game where people talk about kicking into corners and fatigue getting to you when you don’t put yourself in a position because of the pressure you put on yourself,” Maguire said.

“We didn’t put the fatigue on them.”