Only two teams have ever won the premiership from outside the top four. Could the Roosters be the third? – صحيفة الصوت

Championship qualities are easy to identify in retrospect but harder to see while they’re being forged. 

Teams might start looking to have that premiership quality long before the finals, or they might find them a few weeks before the playoff, or they could just catch fire for three good weeks in September and find themselves on top of the world.

It’s only once the dust has settled on the first Sunday in October that we know what we were looking at.

But there is one constant thread between almost every single team that’s ever won a title. Of the 113 teams that have claimed premiership glory since 1908, 111 of them have finished in the top four.

For those of you who enjoy a stat, that’s 98.23 per cent. The 1993 Broncos won the comp from fifth, the 1995 Bulldogs did it from sixth and that’s it.

Safe to say, if you want to win the grand final a top four berth is more than everything, it’s the only thing. If you’re planning a premiership campaign don’t leave home without it.

But it’s not impossible, is it? Those Brisbane and Canterbury teams showed it can be done, if you’re good and lucky and a few other things. Two out of 113 is not a strike rate you can rely on, but every year we go without a team winning from outside the four we go closer to the year it will happen again.

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On Thursday night, the Roosters sure didn’t look like they’ll make it 111 teams from 114 premiers. Before they took the field against a Manly side that had been through something bigger than football during the week, a massacre was predicted.

In the end, the Roosters won 20-10 and wins are wins, and they’re better than losses, but it wasn’t the kind of statement one would expect from a classic Tricolours premiership run.

The gallant Sea Eagles, missing seven players and coming off a week unlike any other in the club’s history, dug deep enough that by fulltime the story wasn’t about how brutally the Roosters tore them apart – it was about how Des Hasler’s side rose above themselves despite the odds.

That’s not a fatal thing, because nobody knows how to get a team to time their run better than Trent Robinson, and no team knows when to start sprinting as well as the Roosters do. Those premierships in 2018 and 2019 are still large in their memory.