WestyLife
First Grade
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That's the price of having a job in the public eye for better or worse.
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The women some of these ugly f**ks bang makes it well worth it
Huh? Perhaps you can quote me where I said that, or implied it. Life's too short to hate and I certainly don't hate homosexuals.
Sorry but IMHO our Panthers have never been what I would call "ruthless" I feel they only do what's needed and ease up in intensity.
They will choke in the finals as usual.
I have recently learnt that it is legal, however there is steps towards this. They are called Live Life Claimits. I started setting one up, howver I will not be using it to drive with no license moreso for paying 0 tax.
Enjoy the weekend Nealo
Unlocking the understated genius of Isaah Yeo
The Panthers lock is quietly breaking records of rugby league greats with little fanfare. So is he just as important to the premiers as Nathan Cleary?www.smh.com.au
By Adam Pengilly
May 13, 2022 — 3.45pm
It’s easy to think Nathan Cleary is the best player in the NRL.
He has a sixth sense in being able to read a rugby league game, knowing exactly how to move his players and the ball around the park, suffocating the life out of rival teams whether by landing kicks on a five-cent piece, or opening up defences with sleight of hand.
But what if he isn’t even the best player in his team?
What if it was a bloke who has the brain of Cleary, but a body which dictates he has to make 40 to 50 tackles a game and charge for about 150 running metres as well, accelerating, stepping and trying to offload?
Like all magic tricks, Isaah Yeo’s greatest gift is one you can’t really see: what’s going on inside his brain.
And it’s the evolution of a player who is quietly breaking Norm Provan’s records which is changing the way locks play.
“It’s kind of like having another halfback out there,” Cleary says before the Panthers’ Magic Round blockbuster against Melbourne on Saturday night.
“We bounce ideas off each other and it’s pretty cool. Talking to him, we both see the game the exact same way. For someone to play in the middle as long as he does, making all those tackles and runs, and to still have his head on seeing the game the way we want to ... is pretty incredible and quite unique. He’s a freak.”
Trying to understand what sets Yeo apart from other forwards is not easy.
Firstly, the boy from Dubbo is incredibly humble and prefers to deflect to teammates for any credit. Earlier this year, he put together one of the greatest individual stretches of form - amassing a maximum 12 Dally M points from Penrith’s first four games.
Secondly, Yeo always just stops himself short of yielding too much information about the nuances of Penrith’s attack around the ruck, knowing the subtleties will be crucial to their back-to-back title bid this year.
But what is easy to understand is just how Yeo might be the perfect NRL prototype, big and mobile enough to play in the middle, but with the smarts of a halfback to work alongside Cleary in the faster-paced six-again era.
“The main thing he’s just really simplified his job,” NSW State of Origin coach Brad Fittler says. “It looks complicated, but it’s simple in his own head.”
It’s a testament to Yeo that, barring injury, he will be one of the first names on Fittler’s team sheet for game one of the State of Origin series. Fittler is blessed with gun No.13s like Victor Radley and Jake Trbojevic, yet none will displace Yeo.
When former Manly and current Bulldogs coach Trent Barrett returned to the Panthers as an assistant to Ivan Cleary in 2020, he came with a special project for Yeo.
Barrett had been working with Trbojevic on the evolution of the lock role. The No.13 would often stand at first receiver and pose a two-fold problem for the defence: they were big enough to run and make metres by busting tackles through the middle, but also skilful enough to know where space was and feed the ball to their halves, who could stand wider from the ruck.
“I want you to be my Jake,” Barrett told Yeo.
He not only became that, but a whole lot more.
“I feel like [the position] is having a bigger impact on the game now,” Yeo says. “Just about every 13, regardless of whether they’re a ball-playing role or front-rower, are extremely important to their side. I’m very different to someone like Tino [Fa’asuamaleaui], but Tino is very important to how the Titans play and their style. I just feel the ball-playing role adds another dimension.”
It’s a tricky balance, though.
Radley speaks of trying to understand when your team needs grit from the lock, rather than guile. By his own admission the Roosters hitman has gone for the latter a bit too much on occasions this year.
“I need to take a step backwards and make sure I’m thinking, ‘run first’,” Radley says. “But at the same time not putting my blinkers on. I’ve been working on that this year where I want to run the ball more, break more tackles rather than just thinking about the other side of it.
“He [Yeo] is the benchmark. Penrith are the benchmark. He’s got a really good balance at the moment where you don’t know if he’s going to pass, or he’s going to run. That’s really hard to defend.”
So, is Yeo’s first instinct to run rather than pass?
“It depends,” he says. “The position is as a forward and you still need to be able to run. You have to gauge what the team needs, or how you think the game is flowing, and I always try to do that in the first 10 to 15 minutes.
“The game plan is the first 10-15 minutes, then you’re making adjustments on the run and I’ll talk to Nathan about what we’re seeing.”
Yeo started as a gangly kid out in the backline, but gradually worked his way closer to the middle. He was spotted by Penrith’s veteran recruitment chief Jim Jones, who was watching a Catholic schoolboys competition at Forbes.
“They were short of people and they said, ‘do you want to be a selector’,” Jones recalled.
He said he originally declined but was convinced to take the role. “They said, ‘who do you like?’ I said, ‘I like that big, tall 14 (Yeo)’.
But when the team was picked Yeo was not part of the squad.
“I said, ‘where is he? He’s the only one I liked’.”
Yeo was Penrith’s first regional product from the central west to come to Sydney under Phil Gould and Matt Cameron’s pathways plan, blazing a trail for the likes of Matt Burton, Charlie Staines, Brent Naden and Liam Martin.
Jones said the country demeanour of Yeo survives to this day: “The way he was when he came here seven or eight years ago is the way he is now.”
With the more experience Yeo got in various roles, the more he understood what ball receivers wanted from their playmakers.
“The different positions have probably helped me because I know how I used to like getting the ball,” Yeo says. “That means I can help my other teammates around me as well with the way the position is going. I try to relate to what I feel works for me.”
So enamoured with Yeo’s all-energy game - “I try not to show it as much, but there is a fair few conversations going on in my head when I’m tired” - Fittler has named his salvia plants after the NRL’s most dependable player. He calls them his “Isaahs”.
“They’re just machines,” Fittler says, “They just grow out of control, flowering non-stop. I found it easier if I named the plants, I would be able to remember them.”
And if he had plants with the personality of Josh Addo-Carr?
“We’d sell them,” Fittler laughs.
But it’s exactly why Yeo is so valuable to not only Penrith, but the Blues.
While Jarome Luai, Stephen Crichton and Brian To’o carry boomboxes into the club’s academy and play pick-up basketball games, and Addo-Carr is the life of every State of Origin camp, Yeo can be found reading books on successful sporting dynasties. Cleary jokingly refers to him as “grandpa”.
He’s studied Tom Brady’s New England Patriots success (Yeo and Cleary emulated Brady and Rob Gronkowski’s viral “Bad Boys For Life” video after their NRL title), and the All Blacks’ rugby union dominance.
Rugby league’s most successful dynasty, the Dragons’ 11 straight premierships in the 1950s and 1960s, had Provan steering the ship. The most number of games Provan won in any 50-game stretch during that period was 47, according to stats guru David Middleton. Before last week’s loss to Parramatta, the Panthers had won 48 of their last 50 games in which Yeo played.
It was the greatest winning run of any player in rugby league history.
And it might just make him the most important player to his team
Thanks CWP I’m from Sydney and it’s an eye opener in Caxton st and in the stadium last night I’ll tell you that !
I had a look around all the likely places before putting it up. Maybe we need a thread just for news articles.
