The great icon of the Penrith four-peat – like many of his team-mates – has not been himself in 2025, and Sunday was looking like another tough day. The Staggs hit was met with glee by the 50-odd thousand present, a rugby league community impatient for the end of the Panthers dynasty.
But in this Magic Round rumble played between sun showers, the Penrith prince leapt off the turf and seized the spotlight. On the fourth tackle of a Panthers set, five minutes before half-time, there was no urgency from the Brisbane line. When Cleary shaped to kick, the 40m line – centimetres from Cleary’s left toe – was suddenly flashing red.
Penrith’s interchange forward Luron Patea beat four defenders to plant the ball on the line soon afterwards, but everyone knew the try was thanks to Cleary’s 40/20. “He’s got that in him hasn’t he,” Broncos coach Michael Maguire rued. “It’s this time of year too where they start to rise.”
Cleary wasn’t finished. Three minutes later, with sleight of hand appropriate for Magic Round, the No 7 shaped to the blind and five defenders fell under the spell. His left foot step – reminiscent of the one that took the Panthers past the Broncos in the 2023 grand final – carried him through untouched.
The echo of that painful night wasn’t lost on Broncos half Adam Reynolds. “He comes up with some great plays out there, he’s an integral part that team and the reason why they’ve had so much success,” he said. “He’s obviously among the elite in the game at the moment.”
Panthers coach and Nathan’s father Ivan Cleary admitted with a smile that the 2023 flashback was “a good omen” in a victory that finished 32-8. Isaah Yeo said his co-captain had made a difference in the big moments. “He’s been playing well, but obviously off the back of losses, that’s probably where question marks happen,” he said.
The premiers are decided in October, so rugby league in May is usually more concerned about Origin speculation, or the performance of referees. This was the bottom-placed team versus one hoping to consolidate their place in the top four. In an ordinary NRL season, these are ingredients for a forgettable fixture.
But between the lines there were novels to read. Magic Round marks the end of the first third of the competition, before the six weeks when Origin wrenches players from club duty and muddies the form guide. It is also the one weekend where the world of rugby league is watching, and there is nowhere to hide.
The Panthers had been in the top three by the end of round 10 every season since 2020. This year, the four-time defending premiers woke up on the Sunday of Magic Round on the bottom of the ladder. They had lost games early with porous defence, they had given up close contests with lack of discipline and ruthlessness, they had collected injuries like eggs in a bird flu scare. So numerous, so diverse were their issues, it was hard to decipher how they had fallen so far.
And so while the rhetoric of the players and coach Cleary might be about working day-by-day, week-to-week, game-on-game, the ladder – together with an impending six weeks of Origin absences – showed things were getting urgent.
Their opponents had just walloped the table-topping Bulldogs, and veteran halves Adam Reynolds and Ben Hunt – a septuagenarian pairing when the No 7 celebrates his birthday in July – showed early on that rugby league is not necessarily a young man’s game. A teasing Reynolds kick dropped beneath the crossbar as Hunt soared over Cleary and used the right goalpost to evade fullback Dylan Edwards.
But after Cleary’s composed chip put Izack Tago over, the Broncos lost their way. In an unusual admission, Maguire said he was at fault for the Panthers’ surge late in the second half with his decisions in play and interchanges. “You can write however you want on that one, but that period of the game there, I’m going to wear that in what was played out there,” he said.
The Panthers recorded this crucial win following an earlier victory by the competition’s early pacesetters Canterbury, who defeated the Titans 38-18 thanks to a hat-trick from winger Jacob Kiraz. As the premiership contenders for 2025 emerge, Ivan Cleary said the Panthers – whom he described as a “new team” this year – were still overcoming the challenges of new combinations and a lack of training. “There’s reasons for why we are where we are,” he said. “But I don’t really think we’re that far off.”
