4 days ago
After making history together, Nathan Cleary and Jarome Luai will face off in the NRL for the first time
As far as Jarome Luai is concerned, there are only two kinds of people on a rugby league pitch, even if he's facing Nathan Cleary.
He said as much before the last time he played against Cleary, ahead of the 2022 World Cup final, a showdown the two will wage in the NRL for the first time when the Panthers face the Tigers on Sunday.
"We're competitors through and through and it's going to be a great battle against one of my boys. But out there on the field, there's no friends — only brothers and enemies," Luai said.
"I'm always going to look at it that way."
Luai is the kind of player who talks and lives in absolutes, but if anyone could be both brother and enemy to him it might be Cleary.
They first competed against each other a long time ago and Luai was the better prospect when they were boys — Cleary himself has acknowledged as much many times before, as will anyone who's been at Penrith long enough to remember the two of them running around for St Mary's and Penrith Brothers, and then for the club's junior rep sides.
Luai won plenty of those early contests as well. When they first wore the black jerseys together as Under 16s players in 2013, it was Luai who started at halfback with Cleary first stuck on the bench before getting a start at hooker.
Eventually, they combined for the first time in the halves later that season, and once they did it was clear their games were made for each other because even back then they were a mix of the iron will and the loudest voice, the light and the heat.
The following seasons are when Cleary surged ahead — three years after he couldn't beat out Luai in a junior team, he was starting for Penrith in the big league at 18 and looking good doing it.
By the time they partnered in the halves in the NRL for the first time in 2019, Cleary had already three finals series and a winning Origin campaign under his belt, as well as all the prestige and pressure that comes with being anointed as one of rugby league's young Messiahs. For Luai, it was just his ninth NRL game.
That first match was against Parramatta, six years and two weeks ago at the same ground where they'll face off this Sunday. Back then, the Panthers were dead last on the ladder and talk was that Cleary could be in danger of losing his spot for New South Wales.
It was a tough watch. Calling it one for the purists would offend the purists and it's strange, after what they've become, to go back and see a time when Luai and Cleary were the incomplete versions of themselves.
Cleary is determined and dogged, but the game always seems a bit beyond his reach. He is grasping out desperately but cannot seize and control it the way he does so easily now.
Compared to the bulletproof confidence and electricity he exudes so easily now, Luai is positively demure — he mainly shifts the ball from side to side, doesn't run it once and kicks it only twice.
But one of those kicks came late, and it took a rebound off a Parramatta defender right into Cleary's path for him to score what would be the winning try. It doesn't look like much, but once you know what happened next it's a harbinger of doom.
This rebounded kick in a sloppy, forgettable game is the first time Luai and Cleary clicked together in first grade and that's a clicking that didn't stop until they parted ways after last year's grand final as the most successful club halves combination of the NRL era.
In the first few premiership years, Cleary fed off Luai's confidence while Luai excelled with the space Cleary learned to provide. Watching them together is to see two players in perfect harmony with one another.
As the run of titles continued and their games became more complex, each began to show more of the other. Cleary learned to add more and more flourishes and subtleties to his rock-solid fundamentals as Luai learned to take the team around the park more effectively without blunting his own prodigious attacking gifts.
That transformation helped drive Penrith to immortality because it meant each learned to live without the other and in a world where most teams are a strained halfback's hamstring away from collapsing, having two playmakers who can shine independently as well as together is close to priceless.
Their combination took them to greatness but to stay there they had to be as effective apart as they could be together and in the last two years they have proven they can.
Cleary has played many great games in his life and has many more to come but the final stages of the 2023 grand final will likely always be his finest hour, due in no small part to Luai succumbing to a shoulder injury and the weight of destiny falling almost solely on the halfback.
Likewise, with hamstring and shoulder problems slowing Cleary down, last year it was Luai who came to the fore as the side's top dog, running them around the park in a style all his own.
By the time the finals started, Luai (eight) had played nearly as many games at halfback as Cleary had (ten) and the Panthers were ensconced in the top four and ready for yet another premiership tilt, which they duly converted into a title that felt like it ran on muscle memory.
Things are different now for Penrith. They miss Luai and James Fisher-Harris as they have not missed any of the other stars who have departed through the premiership years.
They miss Luai's energy, his focus, his ability to channel his competitiveness towards victory and to inspire such efforts in others as much as they miss his skill, his cunning and his ability to work both with and without Cleary.
The Panthers only moved off the bottom of the ladder last week and with a heavy Origin representation they cannot afford to drop many more games if they want to make the finals, especially against a side like the Tigers who are also fixing to be part of the logjam at the end of the top eight.
Cleary is still great — his fingerprints were all over last week's win against Parramatta, as they have been for most of Penrith's best moments this year. But with so many of their players so unfamiliar with such hard times what the Panthers wouldn't give for Luai to supercharge them, to remind them of who they are, to send a bolt of lightning up their arm and get the angry blood pumping again.
That is exactly what Luai is fighting hard to give his new club. At the Tigers he is starting again with a club stuck way down in the hole, trying to teach players young and old how to be great which is a lesson as hard to teach as it is to learn.
This is a club still in transition, still building itself up after years in the doldrums.
They have made progress this year and Luai has been a big part of it but after three straight losses and the Lachlan Galvin saga the Tigers need a win and they need it bad.
Which means Luai and Cleary back where they were when they first locked horns on suburban fields across Sydney's west all those years ago.
Their only previous meeting as stars was at Old Trafford in front of 60,000 with a World Cup on the line and Cleary's Australian side got the better of Luai and Samoa.
But this one is more familiar to them both because it's a battle of the weekly desperation that they know so well, the knife fight in the mud that makes all the bigger days possible. Cleary and Luai both know that finals are the end of the story but wins like this are how you get there.
Their mighty wills, which were united so many times through the history they made together, are now fixed on the other and for the first time in their club colours they want the same thing and only one of them can have it.
Brothers fight all the time but so do enemies and after the history Cleary and Luai lived together they really can be both, even if it's just for 80 minutes at a time.
