TO SAY it was a horror start for the Bathurst Panthers would be putting it mildly as they succumbed 22-44 to the Blayney Bears at Carrington Park yesterday in the opening round of the Group 10 premier league season.
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Just like last season where the Panthers put on one of their worst performances against the Bears during their first meeting, an all-too-familiar feeling crept over Carrington Park yesterday as the minutes ticked by.
The Bears got out to as much as a 28-point lead in the second half in a match that the Panthers will want to forget in a hurry.
Panthers coach Todd Barrow said his team could expect bad things for the season should they fail to improve in almost every single area on the field.
“We were out-enthused to be honest. From the opening set we had a dropped ball off the kick-off and it just set our game. They were just better than us in all aspects,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of boys there having a good hard dig, but we’ve got a lot of boys there who need to work a lot harder and it’s disappointing, but the only positive you can take is that it’s round one.
“I don’t care who we play. If we play like that again, we don’t get the points and it’s as simple as that. We were embarrassing.”
Barrow had to really dig to find the positives from a match in which his side rarely looked threatening with the ball.
Joey Bugg’s drop off the kick-off was indicative of what was to come for the Panthers.
It was none other than former Panthers club member William Kennedy getting on the end of a brilliant Josh Nixon offload to score the opening try four minutes in.
Both teams had chances in the following 20 minutes, with clutch tackles from both fullbacks, Brayden Cassidy for Panthers and Jesse Nixon for Bears, stopping what looked to be certain tries.
Panthers levelled it up eventually through Jake Betts but, after being forced into a pair of goal line drop outs, the home side started to unravel.
Leigh Monaghan muscled his way through some tattered try-line defence to put the Bears ahead 12-6 before Rowan Hopping extended the lead with another Blayney four-pointer.
Another Betts try got it back to 18-10 at half-time, but the away side were comfortably the stronger-looking unit.
It took the Panthers almost 10 minutes to get a full set of six in the second half after a string of drop outs and penalties helped keep the ball in the Bears’ possession.
The Bears were quick to punish as they scored twice in that period – and effectively put a seal on the result, barring a miracle home side resurgence.
In that time Monaghan carried a defender over the line with him to score his second try of the match to the left of the sticks before Josh Rainbow pushed to gap out to 18 points.
The hat trick was completed for Monaghan 14 minutes into the half and, just moments later, Josh Nixon strolled in for a soft try.
After the Panthers found a similarly-soft response with 20 minutes to go, the game started to break down into patchy moments of good play for both teams, but with no reward.
When new recruit Max Wolfson scored a consolation try in the dying minutes for the Panthers, Nixon waltzed in again just to rub salt into the Bathurst wound.
“Sticking to structure was our main thing. We’ve haven’t played 80 minutes of football for two years. We really put it together. There were no great individual efforts,” Blayney coach Dane Howard said.
“The forwards laid the platform for our backs and our backs played well on the outside.
“Getting Laney and Bubba (former Panthers players Steve Lane and Will Kennedy) on our left side ... gives us our structure back.”
BLAYNEY BEARS 44 (Leigh Monaghan 3, Josh Nixon 2, William Kennedy, Josh Rainbow, Rowan Hopping tries; Cameron Dennis 3, Corey Wallace 2, Kurt Behan goals) def BATHURST PANTHERS 22 (Jake Betts 2, Max Wolfson tries; Blake Lawson 3 goals)