The Penrith Panthers have opened up on the brutal honesty session that triggered an unprecedented charge to Sunday’s preliminary final.
The four-time defending premiers hit rock bottom after an underwhelming loss to Newcastle in Bathurst that left Penrith sitting last after 12 rounds.
The performance left many experts and fans declaring the end of the Panthers dynasty, with the 1999 Broncos the only other team to make the finals from that position on the ladder so late in the season.
The players arrived at training on the Tuesday morning to sit through a scathing review by coach Ivan Cleary, followed by an intense wrestling session.
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The experience was a reality check, but one hooker Mitch Kenny now views as a turning point in their year.
“We had an honest and brutal review after that Bathurst game, which was well deserved,” Kenny said. “We got a chance for a lot of guys that don’t play a lot of first grade to come in and showcase what we’re about and we were abysmal that night.
“The week after Bathurst was probably the hardest we’ve trained here for a few years. We had to start holding each other to account a bit more. We were trying to protect each other and being a little bit too empathetic at times.
“We just had to dig our heels in and be a bit tougher on ourselves individually and on one another. It started with lifting the intensity every day at training and then started to gain some momentum going into games.”
The loss to the Knights came with the Panthers Origin stars away on representative duties, with Cleary particularly disappointed by the failure of his young guns to step up.
While they weren’t present for the Tuesday-morning honesty session, it didn’t take long for word of the conversation to filter into Blues camp.
“The boys told me about it, they reckon it was pretty intense,” Liam Martin said. “It’s one I’m glad I missed. Apparently they went at it and it was a good foundation stone for the rest of the year.
“They were going at it with some intensity and holding each other accountable. It was a good old fashioned honesty session and then they went hard on the training field.”
In progressing to the preliminary final, the Panthers have already exceeded what the Broncos managed to achieve in 1999.
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Brisbane were knocked out in the opening week of the post-season on that occasion, with Penrith winning two sudden-death finals to book a date with the Broncos at a sold-out Suncorp Stadium on Sunday afternoon.
The situation was very different, however, through the first 12 rounds of the season.
The Panthers appeared to be buckling as the toll of four-straight years at the top grew.
Players brought in to replace the likes of Jarome Luai and James Fisher-Harris were struggling, with a number of big names battling injuries early in the season.
While most outsiders wrote the side off, the players and coaching staff were confident they could turn it around if they returned to what had worked so well for the past four years.
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“We’ve always been confident,” Scott Sorensen said. “We know what we’re capable of, we just unfortunately weren’t doing that through the start and middle of the year and we were pretty disappointed about that.
“We knew we had to get our groove back and get back to just keeping it simple and working hard at training.”
Cleary’s review after the Knights loss highlighted how far the Panthers had strayed from the elite the standards that took them to the top of the NRL mountain.
The intensity had dropped at training ever so slightly, attention to detail started to slip and corners started to be cut.
While the drop off was only marginal, it was enough for Penrith to win just three of their first 11 games.
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Looking back, the players acknowledge their standards had dropped as they began to expect results would play out in their favour.
“There was a bit of panic happening,” Kenny said. “We had this belief that we could turn things around but then I started to doubt that little bit when we’d go out there and lose again. It felt like no matter how hard we were trying, things just weren’t going right.
“It felt like we were preparing well for games at the time but looking back at it, we were missing the mark on a few things with our standards and stuff like that. We just had to double down on the belief and not let that waiver.
“You build that way by just coming in here and putting the work in every day and the tide started to turn and we got out of that state.”
The post-Bathurst honesty session delivered instant results. The intensity at training skyrocketed and Penrith won nine-straight games to climb back into the eight.
Cleary strategically rested his players in the final two weeks of the season before they defeated the Warriors and Bulldogs in the opening two weeks of the finals to set the stage for Sunday’s showdown with the Broncos.
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A win will secure a sixth-straight grand final, with the Panthers chasing a fifth consecutive premiership.
The roster has evolved considerably throughout the dynasty, with the departure of a host of big names opening the door for new stars to emerge.
The player turnover has kept motivation high, with each year presenting an opportunity for new players to win their first premiership.
Blaize Talagi, Casey McLean and Isaiah Papali’i are among the players chasing their maiden title and have been some of the Panthers best in recent weeks.
So rather than be happy to have produced an unprecedented recovery, Penrith travelled to Brisbane desperate to book another grand final berth.
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“Having tasted success, we’ve never wanted to let that go or just be happy with what’s happened,” Kenny said. “A lot of us are so young, we’ve got so much of our careers left.
“We’ve got so much improvement individually and as a team, I don’t see why we would ever feel like we’ve already done enough. When there’s so much more to achieve and when you know what winning feels like, why wouldn’t we want to keep doing that.
“Then there’s the motivation of so many guys coming into the team who haven’t felt that. We’ve got new guys every year who haven’t tasted that success so it feels like a new team chasing a new goal.
“We want those guys to come along and feel that success as well, so there’s plenty of motivation and we’ve never struggled to find it.”