Smashed. Mullered. Swamped. Yeo cut in half. NAS fending off players like he was swatting flys. Leota unable to hold the ball. The forwards making no yardage. 25 minutes of carnage. A sight we have seen many times when the Panthers play the Storm.
Ennis gets a lot of flack, but sometimes he is insightful. Watching the destruction unfold and 14-0 down, he looked at our team in the background and said "Look at the Penrith forwards. They aren't breathing heavy. They don't have their hands on their hips. Penrith are still in this". That statement sums up the Panthers culture. We are always in it. We don't give up. We don't panic. It ain't over till the final whistle blows. Bash us, smash us and thrash us but we will be back.
I can only imagine what it must be like to comprehensively smash the crap out of the opposition for 25 minutes only to see them keep coming like a pink wave of the undead.
I can only imagine what it is like to focus on stopping the Penrith back 5 making metres, only to watch every single one of them make 100m plus. To focus on kicking away from To'o and watch him still make over 200m. To target the captain, tackle him with the biggest human in the NRL, which was described by the commentators "as a tackle so hard it knocked him into the middle of last week", only to see him still top the tackle count and make more metres than every single Storm forward.
Imagine that. Relentless. Granite hard. No surrender. Just a pink awesomeness.
Last night 17 players and a coach went home and asked there parents to look under the bed and check there are no Panthers there. "Is it safe?"
Rooooooar!