Panthers vs Titans
Our first major road trip for a match this year and for a while there I thought the outcome was going to be that we travelled all this way to witness our first loss.
When we looked at the fixtures list when it came out the match against the Titans always stood out as a good one for us to travel to, it’s only 10 hours up the road, we’ve never been to the stadium before and the Gold Coast is a great place to bring the family, we knew we definitely wouldn’t be disappointed if we decided to tick it off our list.
The match itself was scrappy, you certainly couldn’t say that the Panthers were at their usual best and with a tough match against Parramatta next week you would hope that the team can get their mojo back for that. It was only last week we were saying that Dylan Edwards has been rock solid at the back, we couldn’t remember the last time he’d dropped a high ball under pressure however tonight it seemed like we might have spoken to soon, in fact dropped balls seemed to be the common theme across the team.
I thought the Titans were solid, their defence was reasonably tight and for most of the match it felt like they were always in with a chance of scoring, they had plenty of possession, plenty of field position and at times it felt like they even had the rub of the green, which I guess sometimes it just seems to be going your way. Unfortunately for them the Panthers came back out in the second half in a bit of a mood and put in two quick tries, turning a 4 - 0 half time deficit into a 12 - 4 advantage after 50 minutes.
The match continued to be a somewhat sloppy affair and at times felt a little stop start which was only exacerbated by yet another pitch invader though this time security didn’t end up with the biggest hit of the match, the Panthers with a nice try by Jerome Luai off a skilful Nathan Cleary kick extended their lead out to 14 points which is where the game ended, 18 - 4 and their eighth successive win for the year.
Overall we enjoyed our trip to Cbus Super Stadium, we’ll definitely look at coming for the same match should it be fixture next year.