Forget the grand final, this is the hardest week in rugby league

Preliminary finals are to a grand final what a nervy, fumbling first date is to a comfy, content wedding anniversary. It’s edgy expectation versus partial fulfilment.

The penultimate weekend of a season, where four teams fight for the right to advance to the Big Dance, often has players and coaches nervous and uptight. They are aware that a tiny slip-up could end their season days short of what could have been a premiership.

Grand final teams tend to be more relaxed, some clubs simply secure at having already achieved their place in history.

“Players can lose their edge going from a prelim to the grand final,” says Storm coach Craig Bellamy. Even the most vigilant coach can’t counter the doorman whispering to grand final players before kick-off, “No matter what happens today boys, you have done the club proud.”

It follows that a defeat in the preliminary final can be more devastating than losing a grand final. Bellamy, coach of more preliminary and grand final teams than anyone over the past quarter-century, has been more gutted after losing preliminary finals than I have seen him after narrow defeats in deciders.

In 2011, after the Warriors won in Melbourne, he isolated himself from everyone, desperately desolate. His team had been expelled from the previous year’s competition as punishment for salary cap cheating, stripped of all honours and a galaxy of star players. A grand final win would have been redemption for all the world to see. “That was the worst,” admits Bellamy.

Ten years later, a Storm winger dropped the ball with the line wide open, and it was the Panthers who advanced to the grand final against the Rabbitohs. The Panthers were still a little fragile, relying on a Stephen Crichton intercept to launch their dynasty. It denied Bellamy the one prize which eluded him – successive premierships – and he fumed at the front of the bus during the silent journey to the team’s Queensland COVID base where they had been isolated almost all season.

As coach of St George in 1984, I felt a one-point loss in the preliminary final more than a one-point loss in the grand final the following year. Lose a grand final, and you can console yourself with having had the experience. Also, the disappointment is ameliorated if your two lower-grade teams win, as the Dragons did in 1985. Lose a preliminary final, and you walk away with nothing. Many a player has declared after losing a preliminary final, “I won’t watch the grand final.”

Yet, paradoxically, the culture both in the NRL and the AFL says there is only one winner in a season. Every team that failed to stand on the dais on grand final day is a loser. So how can losing a prelim be more devastating? It’s the opportunity missed factor, the nagging feeling that if you reached the big day, you would have won. It hurts more when, throughout the season, your team has dominated the team it could have met in the decider.

Perhaps coaches feel the loss of preliminary finals more than players. Young players at the top clubs believe they will be back the following year. Many never are.

Melbourne’s Christian Welch won a grand final in 2020; lost grand finals in 2016, 2018 and 2024 and lost preliminary finals in 2021 and 2023. He counts losing grand finals as far more devastating.

“Having to stand on the field watching the premiership rings being handed out, you picture yourself in their position on the stage singing the team song,” he says.

“You are so physically close to your lifelong dream but in reality, closer to the boys who won the spoon a month earlier. You can feel the euphoria of the winners; they are 10 metres away from you. A grand final loss is just so much more confronting and visceral, whereas a prelim loss you can justify in your head that you weren’t that close to premiership glory.”

One thought I can’t reconcile in my head is how today’s NRL champions don’t display the prime trait of their generation. The social scientists insist the Gen Z population is the most risk-averse generation in history. They fear failure, yet today’s dressing shed disappointment is like non-stick cookware.

Maybe it’s the attack-focused nature of today’s rules that promotes the rocks-and-diamonds players, such as Reece Walsh and Scott Drinkwater. It follows that these preliminary finals may not be the nervous, mistake-dreading encounters they were in the past.

Still, the bunker plays to the textbook Gen Z fear. The lottery luck of some of the decisions sees players concede “12-point tries”. That is when a try is denied and the opposition scores immediately afterwards. An NRL official, not authorised to speak publicly, says an incorrect bunker ruling followed by an opposition try occurs far more than is reported.

The psychiatrist’s riddle is relevant to this weekend’s finals in terms of the focus on the Sydney crowd turnout and the number of teams that progressed from week one with zero or minimal recent experience in the play-offs. Is the stadium half full or half empty?

Will the newcomers be contenders or pretenders? To continue the analogy at the top of this column, will the teams like the Dolphins be nervous first daters or relaxed anniversary celebrants?

By contrast, Penrith’s nucleus of playmakers are now in their seventh successive preliminary final. Maybe they will reach the altar a fifth time, but the bunker has a habit of being the disruptive, uninvited guest at a wedding.

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