Edwards, Sivo set to play key roles
The defending champion Penrith Panthers play the Parramatta Eels in the NRL grand final on Sunday night. AAP talks to two key players.
THE PANTHER
It is one of rugby league’s great ironies that Dylan Edwards is perhaps as close to claiming a spot in Penrith’s alltime XIII as he is winning a maiden representative jersey.
Penrith’s clear players’ player this season, Edwards remains the Panthers’ most consistent star before Sunday’s NRL grand final against Parramatta.
Yet somehow he is also the only member of their fullstrength starting side not to earn higher honours, left behind when every other player featured in this year’s rep round.
‘‘He was our Merv Cartwright Medallist, so that shows what we think of him,’’ Penrith recruitment manager Jim Jones said.
Jones has been around Penrith for more than 40 years, initially as a player and in his current role for the past three decades.
First shown vision of a teenage Edwards playing fiveeighth, Jones was initially told by Penrith coaches the New South Wales north coast junior would not cut it as a half.
‘‘I said, ‘with his training ethic, put him on the wing, just put him somewhere’,’’ Jones said.
‘‘Next year in preseason he brained them in training, eventually forced his way into the team and away he went.’’
Jones’ history also gives him the best perspective of anyone to judge if the ever reliable Edwards is Penrith’s best fullback, after Rhys Wesser claimed that honour in 2006.
‘‘He’s got to be up there,’’ Jones said.
‘‘Sometimes he plays like a front rower. You know he is there, he is dependable. He is safe under the bomb. He’s tough.
‘‘It’s hard to compare them. In his era Rhys was great.
‘‘Now Dylan Edwards is just phenomenal. He’s a great player.’’
Not that Edwards is willing to agree, given that it is as difficult to get the fullback to give himself a rap as it is to find a bad game he has played in the past three years.
‘‘It’s just how I am,’’ Edwards said.
‘‘Humility and staying humble is good. There’s always room for improvement.
‘‘It’s definitely nice for Jimmy to say that. I don’t know that I agree with it, but he’s a nice fella.’’
Penrith players will, however, do the talking for him.
‘‘He’s amazing and [not talking himself up] sums him up,’’ halfback Nathan Cleary said.
‘‘But I’m glad people are talking about him. I’ve been playing with him for six years and I’ve known how much he means to the team.’’
Others note that Edwards is the perfect fit for Penrith’s style, earning quick playtheballs at the start and end of sets while also acting as an extra playmaker in attack.
‘‘We call him ghost or Casper because he appears out of nowhere all the time,’’ forward Scott Sorensen said.
‘‘He’s a freak. He’s such a team player. He’s so hardworking, so selfless.’’
Edwards himself still wants no part in the talk.
And nor is he willing to entertain the thought that a representative jersey could finally come in the form of a Kangaroos World Cup spot next week.
‘‘If it comes it comes,’’ he said.
‘‘And if it does, it comes off the back of team success. You can’t do it by yourself.’’
THE EEL
Parramatta winger Maika Sivo will aim to finish his week with a grand final ring, nearly six years after beginning his NRL journey as a training ringin for Penrith’s reserve grade side.
The 28yearold’s rise from Fiji to bush footy in the New South Wales town of Gundagai is well known after he was spotted by late Canberra recruitment guru Peter
Mulholland.
But his path to the NRL was only made possible because in the summer preceding the 2017 season, the Panthers’ secondgrade side was short on numbers.
Seeking to put on meaningful training sessions, their then coach Garth Brennan picked up the phone to Penrith’s thirdtier feeder club St Marys to fill the void.
Sivo, who had been let go by Raiders reserve grade side Mounties, was at a loose end, and all of a sudden Brennan had a ‘‘timid yet devastating’’ winger on his hands.
‘‘He wasn’t the Maika Sivo you see now who winds up from the backfield,’’ Brennan said.
‘‘He was very shy but he was always fast, big and a fantastic finisher.
‘‘He was so quietly spoken, almost standoffish, but when he got into open space on the field you knew he was there.’’
Brennan explains that Sivo ‘‘hated the limelight’’ but received a standing ovation for singing a Fijian hymn as part of his initiation at the Panthers.
That season they went on to win a New South Wales Cup title with the likes of Viliame Kikau, Jarome Luai and Moses Leota in the Penrith side.
Unlike that trio, Sivo never got a crack at NRL level with the Panthers and their loss would prove to be the Eels’ gain.
As Brennan says ‘‘clubs can be looking for the next big thing when sometimes it’s right under their nose’’.
In his time with the Eels, the winger has registered a staggering 67 tries in 82 NRL games and gone on to gain culthero status.
‘‘I didn’t think I would ever end up here,’’ Sivo said.
‘‘It’s an important week and an important game on Sunday, but I can’t wait.
‘‘I came a long way to be where I am now with this group of boys. There’s one more to go.
‘‘I hadn’t watched one [NRL grand final before I came to Australia]. Now I’m in one.’’