How Ivan Cleary went from premiership outcast to the coaching messiah.
It may speak to the ridiculousness of rugby league and the many thoughts and theories that surround it. Or perhaps how quickly Penrith progressed from aspiring premiers to the most successful team of the contemporary era. On the eve of the 2021 season, Panthers coach Ivan Cleary was compared to Brian Smith, who failed to win a championship despite playing more than 600 NRL games and four grand finals.
Cleary, on the other hand, had coached 342 games and reached two grand finals but had yet to win the trophy. “I’ll keep going until I win a comp,” Cleary remarked in an interview with this masthead at the time.
With three premiership rings in as many years, several critics rank him alongside modern-day coaching greats such as Wayne Bennett and Craig Bellamy. In just three seasons, he went from premiership pariah to savior. However, neither Bennett nor Bellamy have coached teams to three consecutive premierships, the last being Jack Gibson with Parramatta in 1981-83, when there was no salary cap. Cleary is too humble to think about personal records, let alone his place in history.
He’s also never played the media game, except for the time he tried to outmanipulate Bennett in 2021 and got his fingers burned, so he’s never had someone in the press inflate his reputation.
Cleary appears to garner the least amount of credit for Penrith’s golden run. It’s either his son, Nathan, or the club’s entire pipeline, from junior nursery to NRL. Indeed, some would argue that the team coaches itself, but this ignores the club’s culture when he took over in 2019; the difficulty of coaching his son, despite Nathan’s ability; watching two key players squeezed out by the salary cap each year; and a long list of key player injuries at the worst possible times during their three title runs.
Nobody at Penrith underestimates the coach, and you only have to watch the club’s excellent three-part docuseries Undisputed, which follows the Panthers’ journey through last year’s finals series, to comprehend his importance. The most memorable moment for me came in episode two, when Cleary spoke with his players in the days building up to last year’s preliminary final versus Melbourne at Accor Stadium.
Penrith have consistently used their 2020 grand final loss to the Storm as incentive to improve. However, the docuseries revealed an unexpected twist. Cleary does not perceive the Storm as an enemy or nemesis. Instead, he views Craig Bellamy’s team as admirable.
“I’m inspired by Melbourne,” Cleary informs his teammates. “I began coaching [in 2006], when they started winning. They have appeared in eight of the last nine preliminary finals. That’s fantastic. They are still there, despite reports that they are not playing well. They haven’t had the best year in terms of previous performances. I completely respect them. I completely admire Craig Bellamy and what they’ve accomplished at that club.”
Can you see Warren Ryan, Bob Fulton, Ricky Stuart, or even Bellamy saying that about their opponents? What about Michael Maguire, who posts photographs of opposing players on the dressing room wall with “roadkill” written in red Texta over their faces? In the so-called modern day, new approaches are required, and Cleary is willing to pursue them.
“In 2020, we learned the hard way,” he adds. “We learned a lesson in the grand final.” We’ve all heard the story: we’re the underdogs, and they’re the top dogs. But the wheel has turned. Are they more dangerous now that they’re the underdogs? We still need to find the fire to take these guys on, because they’ll have it. “We believe in what we do. What brought us here. How we prepare. How we play. The only way to fail is to avoid facing your worries and confronting them front on. Accelerating when you’re concerned about yourself, your ailments, exhaustion, or whatever. Face it head on. You cannot fail when you do it.”