I am glad I am not alone in feeling this way. One of the reasons I don't feel confident is that we very rarely blow teams away. We rarely score length of the field tries, we rarely play razzle dazzle football like the Storm. We rarely see a Panthers player burn another player for pace. We have pedestrian centres and wingers who will be burnt for pace by plenty of other teams. In fact, you could argue that most of our players are relative carthorses compared to players like the Fox and Papenhausen. But somehow....we just grind teams into dust.
I heard a commentator say that "when you play the Panthers you hang in there and compete and think you are doing well, you look up and its 12 nil". We are a very understated team. In nearly every game I have heard comments like "they are doing really well against the Premiers, great defence and they are really holding their own. If they can score now, they could win this". Only they don't score, or even if they do we don't skip a beat, the blitzkrieg continues. Shock and awe.
The clock ticks and the physical beating that the Panthers defence and roll forward imposes starts to take its toll. Players hands go to their hips, gaps appear and we score a very basic, plain try on the edges because the opposition is buggered. And it just continues relentlessly. More roll forward, more smashing defence, more kicks to the corner. More very ordinary tries with simple passes and players strolling through gaps caused by fatigue. Four points, eight points, tick, tick tick. The scoreboard continues to roll over and we ease up and win by 20 points.
We just never look like a scary team. No flash, no dash. We just crush, kill, destroy. Meanwhile, before every game I'm thinking "we could lose this, this team has pace and can play really fancy football, we can't match that". Then our back three go bish, bash bosh and we are at the halfway line and our forwards are still chatting amongst themselves wearing pristine, clean jerseys and drawing lots on who is going to smash the oppositions first hit up. I start to relax, but still a little voice inside me goes "it's only a 12 point gap we could easily lose this from here. Remember the ME years". I need help..........
