Penrith cruised into their fifth consecutive preliminary final with a dominant victory over the Sydney Roosters which was headlined by the flawless return from injury of Nathan Cleary.
The halfback orchestrated the demise of Trent Robinson’s side yet again and in doing so, proved the Panthers remain the team to beat as the competition whittles down to the final stages.
"The scary part is the best is still in front of him," Phil Gould said on his Six Tackles with Gus podcast. "We haven’t seen the best of him yet."
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Phil Gould outlines ‘scary’ feature that makes Nathan Cleary different to the game’s past greats
Cleary has been the game’s consensus best No.7 for a number of years now as the Panthers have embarked on a golden run which has seen them lift three premierships in a row.
Since making his debut in 2016, the local junior has received just about every accolade and individual honour under the sun, barring an elusive Dally M Medal.
Gould noted how in every club’s desperate search to uncover the next great playmaker, who could perhaps go on to rival and even usurp Cleary, there was one distinguishing feature found within the statistics.
"We’ve tracked the data on all the top players - your Daly Cherry Evans’, Ben Hunt’s and Shaun Johnson’s," Gould said. "And they’ve all got a similar trait."
Gould outlined how halfback’s influence on the scoreboard was measured by metrics such as linebreaks and linebreak assists, while their game management skills were also analysed to create a complete profile of them throughout their careers.
"They all come out of their early years and improve really quickly and then they have this sort of dip as all the other coaches and teams start to game plan for them," Gould explained.
"They start to deal with money, fame, the media and success as well as getting targeted by opposition teams.
"The really good ones, they sort of slide for a while. Whereas the rest slide and never come back."
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Gould noted how the likes of DCE and Hunt had experienced this in the NRL with their second wind arriving somewhere around the mid-point of their careers.
"The good ones, they re-group around 24 or 25 years of age and their data starts to take off again and gets to extraordinary levels, which describes all of our great playmakers," Gould said.
"Nathan Cleary’s trajectory has taken a similar path - his graph looks the same."
However, despite sharing this similarity in terms of production and performance levels with some of the game’s other standout playmakers, Gould noted how Cleary’s graph had one key difference.
"The difference between his graph and everyone else’s graph is he’s just miles above them all," Gould said.
"In the early stages, his dip never came down as far and now his trajectory shows he will out-perform any playmaker in history over the next decade."
As the Panthers close in on an unprecedented fourth title in a row, Gould made a bold claim about what Cleary’s eventual standing in the game will be and how this will translate into even more success for the club.
"He’s going to break all point-scoring records," Gould declared. "And the Panthers are going to win five or six premierships."
