All roads led to western Sydney on Sunday night but few heading to Accor Stadium would have predicted the one-way traffic once they got there. Perhaps they should have, though, because each one of the 28 almost-unanswered points Penrith scored en route to the 2022 premiership was a step on the club’s inexorable march to the NRL promised land.
It is the kind of place from where historians retrieve their statistics to illustrate grandeur and glory. And it is where the Panthers reside after a grand final throughout which they turned the game of rugby league into an easy-to-use kitchen appliance and switched it to high for a good first-half chopping. At the 75-minute mark, Parramatta were still the off-cuts on the scrap heap.
