Twelve Men, a Broken Leg, and Newcastle’s First Grand Final Since 2001
Penrith led 14-6 at half-time and had just watched Nathan Cleary leave Accor Stadium in an ambulance with a compound fracture in his leg. Newcastle had just lost Phoenix Crossland, sent off for the hip-drop tackle that caused it. One of those teams then played forty minutes a man down and scored three tries to none.
Newcastle Knights 22, Penrith Panthers 14. The Knights are in a grand final for the first time since they won one in 2001.
The tackle that took both halfbacks out of the story
Cleary had been playing through a foot problem picked up kicking the field goal that won Penrith their week off — the detail his team list was built around five days earlier. It was the other leg that ended his season. He went down in the tackle of Crossland and Francis Manuleleua just before the break, and left the ground by ambulance.
“I think Nathan watched the second half of the game in the ambulance, which probably made him feel worse,” Ivan Cleary said afterwards. Penrith lost Blaize Talagi to an Achilles injury later in the second half as well, and did not score again after half-time.
Three tries, no hooker, no margin for error
Twelve men against seventeen for a full half of a preliminary final should not be survivable, and for twenty minutes it looked like it wouldn’t be. Then Manuleleua broke the line and put Dom Young over. Then Sandon Smith caught Penrith with their backs turned from a quick tap and walked through untouched to give Newcastle the lead. Then, with the game there to be taken back, Smith read a Liam Martin pass, intercepted it and ran eighty metres to end it.
Newcastle have now won three knockout matches in a row — away to the Dolphins, away to the Warriors at Eden Park, and this one. Penrith beat them 44-12 in round eight, in April. That result has not aged well.
What it means for Penrith
This is Penrith’s second straight preliminary final loss, and the first of the two in which the club’s best player did not finish the match. The run of grand finals that defined the 2020s is over for another year, and the halfback who drove it faces an off-season of surgery rather than a fifth decider in six seasons.
The grand final
Sydney Roosters v Newcastle Knights, Sunday 4 October, Accor Stadium, 7:30pm AEDT. The Roosters got there on Friday night in Brisbane, Sam Walker scoring the try that sealed it twenty-seven days after ankle surgery. It is their first grand final since 2019 and Newcastle’s first since 2001 — the longest wait of any club still playing. Full bracket and every result: NRL Finals 2026.
