Johnston feeling 2014 vibes with Rabbitohs belief sky-high:
https://www.nrl.com/news/2021/09/15/johnston-feeling-2014-vibes-with-rabbitohs-belief-sky-high/
Proof Wayne Bennett’s pre-match ploy helped unravel the Panthers
If you ever doubted the sway that Wayne Bennett exercises over NRL referees you just need to replay the audio from Saturday night, writes PAUL KENT.
September 14, 2021 - 12:36PM
Paul Kent has branded Penrith Panthers coach Ivan Cleary naive during his post match press conference, following his side's loss to the Rabbitohs.
The kick from Nathan Cleary’s foot was one of those high, familiar floaters and the impact it would have on the game would shake all of them.
Rabbitohs rookie Blake Taaffe moved under the ball and, as usually happens with the floater, the ball drifted on the breeze like it was half-filled with helium until, at the last moment, it moved late and Taaffe lurched forward and dropped it.
The impact on the game was not the kick itself but what happened immediately after Cleary struck the ball when it was still high in the air.
“Matt! Matt!” referee Gerard Sutton said. “Don’t change your line.”
Penrith backrower Matt Eisenhuth was on the run and looked at Sutton, somewhat confused.
“What? What?” he said.
Sutton replied: “Mate, take a position, don’t move.”
And with that, all the back and forth between Penrith coach Ivan Cleary and Souths coach Wayne Bennett was suddenly real. In a moment, all the talk of the previous 24 hours became valid.
Any suggestion that the pre-game talk was as innocent as one old coach simply schooling a not-so-old coach on the Art of Distraction in the lead-up to a big game was buried right there in Sutton’s comments to Eisenhuth.
How much of it was planned remains the hot topic today, and for several days to come.
Predictably, some have hinted at vast conspiracy theories, suggesting Cleary leaked the information to a media ally in the hope of protecting Nathan’s kicking game, and pressuring the referee to allow his blockers to remain in place, in what would be a double sting.
Such mind games are not uncommon among the coaching ranks but have rarely, if ever, been part of Cleary’s armoury.
The most likely solution is that Bennett’s complaint to the NRL after round 23, in which he was critical of Penrith using illegal blockers to protect Nathan Cleary’s kicking game, was leaked from within the NRL and Cleary was sought for comment and naively fell into it, although it was not portrayed that way.
The impact on his team was damaging.
The confusion in the Panthers players from that first kick stayed with them for the rest of the game.
Was the referee cracking down on them? How much protection could they continue giving Cleary if the referee was already warning them after the first proper kick in the game?
When it gets this late in the season, and the margins between teams is increasingly minimal, it sometimes does not take much to knock a team from its rhythm.
“Our boys were being spoken to about stuff on the run that we never get done for, so I’d suggest that type of thing has an influence,” Ivan Cleary said after the game.
The NRL’s head of football Graham Annesley, a former referee himself, was not sure the pre-match slanging match between Cleary and Bennett had any certain effect.
Annesley said referees did not go into a game with preconceived ideas on how they would adjudicate.
“Referees just see incidents and react to them,” he said Monday.
“The reactions are instinctive and they make a decision on it.
“Whether that is influencing them subliminally or not, we will never know.
“I don’t think it has any overt influence over how they referee the game. Whether there is something in the back of their mind, I don’t know.”
Maybe …
Sutton’s comments to Eisenhuth, when aligned with Cleary’s post-match comments, would suggest a subliminal influence, at least, was being exerted.
And the fact is, coaches complain to the NRL every week, some more regularly than others.
And they do it because they believe it works. Bennett and Cleary are at the lower end of complainants.
As the night wore on, Nathan Cleary, perhaps because he was no longer as well protected, perhaps not, reverted to more traditional end-over-end bombs which take less to set up, so can be fired quicker, but are not as nearly difficult to defuse.
It was evidence the Panthers had unravelled.
To show how riddled with conspiracy theories the NRL can be, there is also a belief around the game that it was Bennett who leaked his own complaint, to then force Cleary to react.
For those preaching at the House of Wayne, who believe in this theory, the logic follows an old Bennett rule that says if your players are at risk of being distracted, then make yourself the distraction.
So with the Rabbitohs entering the game without Latrell Mitchell, and supposedly unable to win without him, and having not beaten Penrith in their previous five games, and questions sure to come up about that, it goes that Bennett found a way to make himself the conversation instead of his team.
It seems a mighty stretch, but Bennett supporters remain firm believers.
What is a fact is that, with a subtle shift, the pre-game attention did quickly shift to Penrith’s kicking game and not the limitations of South Sydney.
And say what you will but, after Sutton’s early warning, it was the last ball Taaffe dropped.