A physical clash between the Manly Sea Eagles and Melbourne Storm at Brookvale saw three sin bins and six players placed on report, with the home side able to emerge victorious.
While both clubs will face nervous waits for the match review committee's findings on Saturday morning, it was the Sea Eagles who were able to improve their record to three wins and a draw from six games, while the Storm were left at the bottom of the top eight with four wins from seven games.
In a half an hour period on either side of halftime, six players found themselves placed on report, while Raymond Vaega, Tui Kamikamica and Justin Olam all found themselves in the sin bin.
All three sin binned players found themselves on report, while Trent Loiero (twice) and Jake Trbojevic were the other players to be placed on report by referee Adam Gee, who struggled to keep control of the game.
Melbourne Storm coach Craig Bellamy was at a loss for words to describe his team's performance, but ultimately settled on "dumb."
"I'm not quite sure how to describe it," Bellamy said.
"If you have a look at the stats in the second half, you'd think we were beaten by 30, so we were brave in some areas.
"I don't like to use the word, but we played dumb at times. We got what we deserved tonight. Like I say, to keep them to 18 points was probably a good effort there, but we never gave ourselves a chance to win the game.
"Our second half was really poor, especially the start."
Bellamy confirmed he had no problems with either Olam or Kamikamica's sin bin decisions, although lamented the actions of his players.
"I don't know what planet they are on," Bellamy said on Justin Olam and Tui Kamikamica's sin bins.
"You just can't do that these days. You can't hit ball-players and halves late with any sort of force at all, so that's what it is.
"To do that. We played half of the second half with 12 men, so that's hard work. When they had 12 men early in the second half, we couldn't get out of our own 20.
"We have had two good weeks. We have been thinking about our footy, but as I said, we got what we deserved tonight."
Captain Christian Welch agreed with his coach, accusing his team of doing "stupid s**t" during the loss to the Sea Eagles, and labelling the game as "clunky."
"It was pretty clunky," Welch said.
"When you come up against a team with Tom Trbojevic and DCE [Daly Cherry-Evans] and these classy players, we just kept doing stupid s**t. The NRL is too close. With two blokes in the bin, it's hard to beat these quality teams.
"We worked hard, but you put yourself up against it by doing stupid things."