NRL Round 5 featured stirring breakthrough wins for previously winless Manly and North Queensland, renewing hopes of a finals push after most fans and critics had drawn a line through their names for 2021.
In the third edition ofย Zero Tackleโs Top 8, This Warriors Life's Will Evans counts down the best revivals horror starts during the NRL era.
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4.
North Queensland Cowboys (2015)
The Cowboys were notoriously slow starters and fast finishers during the 2010s, reaching the finals in 2013-14 after winning just one of their first four games in both seasons. But they defied more than 60 years of history to win the clubโs first premiership in 2015.
No team had lost its first three games and gone on to win the title since Souths in 1953 โ a bad omen for Johnathan Thurston and co. after the Cowboys went 0-3.
A run of 15 wins from their next 16 games laid the platform for a third-place finish, however, before they lifted the trophy courtesy of the first-ever golden point Grand Final, a 17-16 epic against the Broncos.
Parramatta 2009 doesn’t even get a mention?!?!
5 wins from 18 rounds and go on to make a GF… that’ll do me!
I take your point – but this list was based purely on teams that lost a bunch of games at the start, going 0-3, 0-4, 0-5 etc.
The ’09 Eels won two of their first three so I didn’t consider them for this. Absolutely the greatest late-season charge since Souths’ Miracle of ’55 – in fact I put them at No.2 in the ‘Late-season Rallies’ top 10 in my book ‘The NRL Book of Lists’.