2025... ah shit here we go again
Season 28 of Melbourne Storm rugby league
Well, we’re back for 2025.
After Melbourne’s grand final defeat last October, this offseason has been a welcome break from rugby league.
There were three posts to wrap up 2024 published here,1 all of which were stale and late by the time I actually hit send. Ah well.
Summer news
There were the Pacific Championships last October and November which saw Harry Grant win the player of the match award against the Kiwis, with Xavier Coates scoring a try in the Kangaroos win in the final against Tonga. Shawn Blore and Lazarus Vaalepu went on tour with Samoa to the UK, but didn’t win either test match.
Frank Ponissi re-signed with the club for a further five seasons, ending speculation he would jump ship to the Broncos or Collingwood. Frank then got Craig Bellamy back involved with the NSW State of Origin program to assist returning head coach Laurie Daley. That will be a fun distraction through the middle of the season then.
Harry Grant was nominated for the IRL Golden Boot, but lost out to Isaah Yeo.
In signings news, Ryan Papenhuyzen signed a one-year contract extension to take the pressure off him this season. Harry Grant took up an option to extend his contract until the end of the 2026 season. Grant Anderson though looks like he’ll be leaving at the end of the 2025 season.
Unfortunately, Dean Ieremia popped his achilles in the preseason to be Melbourne’s first major injury news for the year. Joining him on the sidelines to start the season will be Jonah Pezet who didn’t feature in either of the club’s preseason fixtures on the back of his knee injury last year, stuck on the sidelines with a minor hamstring strain.
Preseason Challenge matches
Melbourne sent a rag-tag bunch of players2 to Hamilton in New Zealand for the first match of the year against the Warriors. The Warriors, playing their second match easily accounted for the Storm, taking a 36–0 lead at half time, before Melbourne fought back in the second half to go down 36–10. Meh.
A week later, the Storm faithful ventured out to Casey Fields where thankfully a cool change blew through in the afternoon so it wasn’t 40°C. The Cowboys won on the back of better cohesion and discipline. Ho hum whatever. Former Storm fullback Scott Drinkwater scored two tries for the visitors, while Sua Fa’alogo scored one just before half time before limping off in the second half with hamstring awareness. Stefano Utoikamanu scored a try after many stopped paying attention,3 mainly because of a lengthy delay when Hugo Peel and Coby Williamson collided. Peel was carted off in an ambulance with concussion and a broken jaw that will see him sidelined for a few months.
Around the league
Before the start of the 2024 season I noted that Melbourne were a rung below the 2023 grand final combatants. The bridge to Penrith was famously crossed twice, but then exposed as shoddy engineering in the grand final. Brisbane meanwhile fell out of the finals, sacked the coach and hired Michael Maguire. Many are thinking that the Broncos will bounce back in 2025, but like Liam writes over at Maroon Observer:
Liam has also done deep dives into the other Queensland teams and the rest of the league:
I did enjoy the brief line about Melbourne’s chances in 2025, but more so Melbourne’s ELO graph.4
If you’re a rugby league fan, go subscribe to Liam’s work.
Over at Rugby League Writers, Jason did a great feature on Harry Grant’s career best season. Well worth a read.
If you’ve spotted something great in rugby league writing and analysis, please send it my way.5
Looking ahead to this season, the words “it’s Penrith’s competition to lose until they do” still ring true. Losing Jarome Luai and James Fisher-Harris from the grand final team might be the cuts that finally wounds them, but probably not.
Canterbury need to be better than the end of the 2024 season and will likely get off to a good start if they can get over the Dragons in round one. I expect them to make the finals again and maybe win one this time around.
Cronulla will likely make the finals and then fail to impress again. Adding Addin Fonua-Blake will help, but they won’t have the soft first half of the season that set them up last year, already losing to the Panthers in Las Vegas.
The Red Fish might make the finals in 2025, but they look a little bit fragile in some key positions. Down the coast, the Titans will again be a non-entity unless the return of Tino Fa’asuamaleaui somehow is the impetus for them to snag a few wins here and there.
I have no idea which way the Roosters will head in 2025. It should be down the ladder and maybe out of the finals, but they’re confusing.
At Fortress Shithole, hope springs eternal, which is about how old their halves pairing is to start the season. As ever, they’re going to need a miracle cure for Tom Trbojevic to play the entire season injury-free to be any chance of threatening the Panthers.
Newcastle didn’t sack Adam O’Brien — good for them. Canberra still haven’t sacked Ricky Stuart and despite their win over the Warriors in Vegas probably don’t have enough to threaten the finals in 2025.
Across the ditch, the Warriors need some kind of way of bringing their attacking outside backs into the play after the forwards lay some kind of platform. If only there were important positions that could distribute the ball between these two groups. They might even be called halves, but the Wahs seem to have forgotten about them.
Bringing in John Bateman in 2025 is an interesting call, surely nothing could possibly go wrong for the Cowboys. They might win enough games to make the finals, but I wouldn’t count on it happening.
A 15th Eels wooden spoon could be Jason Ryles reward for taking the Parramatta coaching chalice. That mix of players could struggle under any coach to be honest.
St. George can’t play.
Imagine thinking that Wayne Bennett is the answer in this decade.
After three straight wooden spoons, surely the Tigers can escape the cellar this season. Maybe?
Predictions
Tried this last year and got most of it wrong, so let’s go again:
Top tier teams: Penrith, Melbourne;
Should go well: Canterbury, Manly;
Fighting for the top eight: Brisbane, Cronulla, Sydney, Warriors;
Mediocrity: Canberra, North Queensland, Dolphins, Newcastle;
There’s always next season: Parramatta, Wests Tigers, South Sydney, St. Merge, Gold Coast.
Queensland should win #wrongpriorities and could do the rugby league world a favour by injuring certain NSW players as a bonus objective.
But what of Melbourne Storm
My hype levels are at a minimum going into 2025. Although, this was cool:
The club could treat this season as a year-long exercise in revenge and use that narrative to go one better. But it just doesn’t feel right. The glorious uncertainty of sport feels more appropriate. Treating each match as a coin toss and riding the odds might put the Storm in a position to go one better, or it could bring about inevitable doom.
Trusting the process and embracing all the cliches of hard work and all that jazz, Melbourne should finish top four, hopefully play two home finals and make it back to Accor Stadium for a date on 5 October. Anything less than that will likely be seen as a failure.
With minimal change to the Storm’s roster (Utoikamanu still feels like a luxury signing), individually the players will need to be wary of regression and complacency. It will be an interesting vibe to measure after the fluctuations in attitude and effort at times in 2023 and 2024.
Programming note
Like last season there should be a couple of new posts here each Storm match week:
Some kind of preview including a feature each Thursday or Friday.
Match review post on Monday at the latest, maybe earlier depending on when the Storm were scheduled and when I’ve had a chance to watch the replay.
Like many I have abandoned the cesspool of a certain social media site. I am on BlueSky, albeit in a limited capacity having finally realised that I don’t care all that much for social media. If you need my instant reaction after a Storm match, the TL;dr of the review post is usually posted to Instagram immediately after the final whistle.
A second post this week will drop ahead of the round one match against Parramatta.
The degree of effort that was put in varied wildly.
Morgan Harper played a match for Melbourne after spending the preseason with the Storm via the North Sydney Bears partnership. He then signed with the Warriors for the season. Preseason matches are fucking weird man.
Given what fans a very long way from the action could actually see at Casey. At least television viewers also had a bad time too with the ultra-low angle from the poor excuse for a main grandstand.
I love shit like this. Especially as it so highlights the Muppet Era decline, my own narrative of Melbourne’s embrace mediocrity dip in 2014-15, and the pinnacle of the campaign that ended ruefully in the 2021 preliminary final.
Even if it isn’t Storm related.