Winning the Premiership is hard. Winning it twice, back to back, is even harder.
Were it not that the Panthers have won it four times straight since, we’d be looking at the 2018 and 2019 editions of the Sydney Roosters as a dynastic team, one who changed the way the game was played forever.
And make no bones about it – they did.
The Six Again is a direct response to their defensive tactics in that period, built on delaying the game in their own end and backing themselves to withstand multiple bouts of pressure, so long as that pressure came slowly enough.
In that regard, Trent Robinson’s Roosters can be filed alongside mid-2000s Melbourne, Warren Ryan’s Bulldogs and Eric Simms’ Souths in teams that were so good that the rules had to be changed to stop them.
It’s worth remembering this impact when considering their 2025 team, and just how likely they are to trouble the Premiership come September and October.
It sounds glib, but one of the key aspects of winning a Premiership is having previously won one – or at the very least, gone close to winning.
The experience of Grand Final week, the pressure of knockout footy and the differing standards of refereeing come finals time are all things you learn from experience.
No team in the NRL era has ever won the big prize from outside the top four, but with two teams stacked with Premiership calibre talent in the bottom half of the eight, plus a few teams above them either untested or on the slide, this year looks as likely as ever to provide one.
For the Roosters, it’s easy to forget that they have double Premiership-winning experience, because it was five years ago now, but a serious chunk of the dramatis personae from that dynasty-that-wasn’t are still there.
Robbo is still one of the smartest coaches in the game. James Tedesco, who won the Dally M in 2019, is now the captain.
Daniel Tupou, Lindsay Collins, Victor Radley, Angus Crichton, Nat Butcher and Billy Smith all remain, not to mention the backroom staff currently at the club who played then and are still hanging around.
11 of the 2019 squad are still in the building either playing or in off-field roles, as well as Robbo in the top job and Matt King as an assistant.
As the 2025 Chooks fly up the ladder, that list only grows in importance.
As was discussed in these pages recently, the dynamics of rugby league change in the finals, and the value of your most important player changes relative to your least. The strongest weak link sport becomes slightly less so.
Moreover, Robinson’s Roosters have long been among the most skeptical of this, or at least, have weighted it differently.
The big four of modern coaching – Robbo, Craig Bellamy, Ivan Cleary and Wayne Bennett – can be split into two categories as far as this is concerned.
Robbo and Ivan are system-first guys, who believe that you use the collective to cover your weak links.
This is mostly for good and rarely for bad, and is easily evidenced by their teams playing roughly the same way regardless of personnel, because you have to believe in the method first and let results follow.
Bellamy and Bennett are similar – unsurprising as Bellamy was Bennett’s assistant in the 1990s at Brisbane – in that they cover weaknesses by raising the level the individual, simplifying roles for lesser players and giving enormous freedom to better ones.
Where Ivan and Trent differ is how they expect their collective to work.
Ivan’s Panthers have always prioritised defence, particularly line speed.
Penrith’s system is enacted by delegating the bulk of yardage production to the back 5, which frees up the middles to get up quickly in defence, which halts the concession of metres and, in turn, ensures field position, pressure and eventually, points.
If you wanted to condense a four-year Premiership dynasty to one sentence, that might be it.
Robbo, on the other hand, thinks you win games by scoring points. He learned at the feet of the high priest of attacking footy, Brian Smith, so it’s entirely understandable that he thinks this way and, given the results, it’d be hard to argue with it as a strategy.
That isn’t to say they don’t defend, obviously, but their fundamental strategy is the other way around to, say, Penrith.
Tactically, rugby league is often about the delicate balance of position and possession, essentially a question whether having the ball more often is more important than where the ball is.
The Panthers have been very successful thinking the latter – and you could argue the short dropout rule changes have come in to stop them, too – but the Roosters are true believers in the former, like any good coach from the Smith coaching tree would be.
Famously, they won the comp with the lowest completion rate twice, and continue to be the team that care least about making errors.
“Promote the football” is a key Smith mantra that Robinson has taken to heart, which is why his sides are always looking for offloads, always up in support and rarely play conservatively.
When it clicks, as it has of late, it’s spectacular and very few sides can stop it. Ball movement, offloads and invention scrambles organisation, kills line speed and, as a result, attack overwhelms defence.
You can see this philosophy not just in tactics, but also selection. Robinson, perhaps more than any other coach, is willing to forgive weaknesses if the strengths are strong enough.
We see this now with Mark Nawaqanitawase, all attack but dodgy defence, and previously through Dom Young, Joseph Suaalii and even all the way back to Shaun Kenny-Dowall.
(Indeed, the first statistic that your columnist ever devised was called the SKD Index, designed to track how much a player contributed in tries minus how many they directly caused through errors.)
It’s not just backs, either.
Robinson has given the longest of leashes to penalty machines like Spencer Leniu, Victor Radley and previously Jared Waerea-Hargreaves and Jake Friend because they did enough other stuff to make it worthwhile.
Don’t expect that to change, either: they’ve already signed Reece Robson for 2026, currently the NRL’s most penalised player.
Don’t think for a second that Robbo doesn’t know about the weak link, though. He rarely holds onto a player who isn’t contributing to the team or, especially, the culture.
Terrell May, Brandon Smith and Dom Young are just three who have been shown the door in a year for reasons separate to their football ability, while few have shown such long-term faith in players who, for whatever reason, might have been given the flick elsewhere.
Sam Walker, Joey Manu and Latrell Mitchell all got dropped to reserve grade and came back better for it, learning vital lessons about deficiencies in their game.
This season perhaps more than any in a long time, Robinson is also showing that he understands the most important part of long-term NRL success – filling out a roster.
With the Roosters, outsiders always feel that they’re doing something nefarious, when actually, it’s their ability to produce their own that has come to the fore in 2025.
At the highest level, someone like Naufahu Whyte, brought from New Zealand as a teenager, has become one of the best props in the league and Robert Toia, scouted out of Queensland’s rugby union schools, in an Origin player.
But the vital lower end of the top 30 are almost all home-produced: Siua Wong, Beniah Ioelu and Salesi Foketi came the same way as Whyte from across the ditch, De La Salle and Xavier Va’a followed the Toia route down from Queensland.
Hugo Savala came through the local Coogee Wombats, Blake Steep and Tyler Moriarty are from their academy on the Central Coast and of the bottom end juniors, only Taylor Losalu (Western Sydney) and Toby Rodwell (Illawarra) have joined from what you might call someone else’s patch.
In fact – with hat tip to official club historian Alan Katzmann for the stat – of the 30 players used by the Roosters this season, 22 have never played for anyone else.
It’s actually 24 self-produced players as Connor Watson began at the club and came back and Angus Crichton is an Easts junior who debuted elsewhere but returned for the bulk of his career. Penrith would be proud.
This matters at the pointy end of the season, because if you have a lot of guys who only know one way, it’s a lot easier to integrate them.
As far as team cohesion goes, there’s nothing like playing together – win or lose – and that is something this group has.
There’s all the guys from the Premierships, but also the young blokes in their first season.
It looked like Robinson was throwing Hugo Savala in at the deep end when he debuted in Round 2, but he was playing the halves with Sandon Smith, whom he partnered in SG Ball as far back as 2021.
Robbo has been in charge so long that the principles of play are the same – see also Cleary at Penrith – and all the juniors know them.
When you play like the Roosters do, every player needs to believe in the process. It’s very attacking, risky football at times and the participants have to know that they can make mistakes without fear.
Robinson and his staff – almost entirely former Robinson players – are steeped in the system, so can do that at all levels.
On a more granular level, there are other factors that play into the recent upswing.
Robinson teams have an exceptional record in August – the man knows how to peak – this year even more so as Sam Walker, arguably the side’s spirit animal for his ability to keep trying outrageous attacking plays, only returned to fitness midway through the year.
There’s an argument they’re artificially low in the table due to his injury, as most sides losing their halfback, goalkicker and main playmaker would be, but that absence has left him fresh for the run in.
Speaking of freshness, James Tedesco’s non-selection for Origin also helped.
Your columnist tracked his movements intensely over the 2022 and 2023 seasons where he played more footy and just about anyone else on Planet Earth, having been captain of the Roosters, NSW and Australia and almost never injured.
That meant a huge wear and tear on the body, which bled into the rest of the system. The second part of “promote the football” is having someone to promote it too, and Tedesco admitted at the time that the levels of push supports around the play had dropped.
Given how much he played and how much effort goes into off-ball option running, it wasn’t a surprise.
Easts had as many rep players as anyone except the Panthers, and that multiplied across the team.
This year they had Origin, but less of everything else. Only six male Roosters featured in the 2024 Tests, for example, down several from the year before and lots from the year before that during the World Cup.
Robinson was loathe to use that as an excuse at the time – your columnist was scolded more than once in a press conference for bringing it up – but time has shown that it was a major factor.
Now, Easts have Walker fit and firing, Tedesco back to his best and a blend of young and old players who know the system and how to win together. They have the tactical and cultural skills to compete at the most important part of the season.
Given the makeup of the league, you’d back them against the Bulldogs, who they just thrashed, and the Raiders, who lack the experience they have and will have to play away in major games in Sydney.
The Warriors, Broncos and Sharks are barely worth considering unless something major changes on a structural level between now and the finals.
The elephants in the room, however, are the Panthers and Storm.
They have all the things that the Roosters have, but crucially, a brilliant head-to-head record too: Robinson has won two of the last 15 against Bellamy and three of the last 15 against Cleary.
That will have to change, but Robinson will back this group to do it. They’ll have the knowhow, the enthusiasm and the roster. Winning the Premiership is hard, remember.