You don’t win premierships in April, but it’s looking pretty good for Penrith so far.
The Panthers are hot favourites to lift the trophy for a fifth time in six years following their 50-10 demolition of last year’s beaten grand finalists, Melbourne, on Friday night.
Penrith are now officially off to the best start to a season in NRL history after claiming their fifth-straight win.
Paying $2.60 to win the competition, bookmakers SportsBet and Betr agree they are the lowest odds a team has been to lift the trophy at this point of the competition in recent history.
Melbourne were paying about $3 this time last year after round five, following wins over the Eels, Panthers, Dragons and Sea Eagles.
At the start of the season, Penrith were paying $7 to win the competition, according to Betr, and that price has continued to drop every week. Before their Friday night victory, Penrith were paying $3.25, and the week before they were at $3.75.
Now sitting at $2.60, it is unlikely that number will drop too much lower, even if they continue to win games. Their closes rivals, according to the bookies, are premiers Brisbane, who are paying about $8.
Coach Ivan Cleary was hesitant to label this current crop the best team in Penrith history, telling reporters on Friday night: “Things are going well; it’s early in the year.”
But the stats don’t lie.
Penrith’s for and against of +150 is the best of any team at this stage of the competition in the NRL.
Historically, only Brisbane in 1996 and the rampant Eastern Suburbs of 1935 rival them, but the latter had a forfeit and a bye respectively in the opening rounds of their seasons.
Ivan Cleary’s men are also the first in premiership history to have won their first five games of a season by 20 points or more.
Their attack is clicking like no other with eight different tryscorers contributing to Friday’s tally.
“Probably shows that we’ve got options all across the field at the moment,” captain Nathan Cleary said of the team’s diverse range of scorers.
“I think everyone just feels really in the game and calling the ball and I think that’s probably the most impressive thing about our attack at the moment – everyone’s alive on every single play. It just gives options, and it makes it difficult to defend.”
With both last year’s grand finalists – Melbourne and Brisbane – among the teams Penrith have tossed aside already this season, the Panthers may not lose a game until State of Origin season rolls around, when they will likely lose a third of their team.
The Panthers’ best winning streak was in 2020 when they won 17 games straight – a run that was ended when Melbourne beat them 26-20 in the grand final.
In a warning for the rest of the NRL, Ivan Cleary says his team is “actually getting better”.
Penrith also have the best defence in the competition. And as NRL coaches love to say, defence wins games.
On average, Penrith are conceding just eight points a game. The last time they had that good a start to the season defensively was in 2021, when they conceded an average of five points a game after they held the Cowboys and Bulldogs to zero in the opening to games of the year.
Nathan Cleary agreed this was the best start to a season the team has had since he began playing in 2016.
“I think this early in a season, probably,” he said. “Usually the start of every season it’s quite clunky and probably bar the first two rounds probably this year, which were kind of clunky with attack, I thought the last three have been really good, and we’ve been getting better each week.
“It’s nice to see our defence still being the foundation of what we do, and I thought the last play tonight summed that up. There were seven, eight, nine guys scrambling to save a try when the scoreline was what it was [up 40 points].”
With AAP
Billie Eder is a sports reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.