Quote: WIZEB "Penrith are a juggernaut, greatest club team ever.
I'd take any of their 17.'"
This is one of those subjective questions with no real answer as we can't pit sides from the past against teams from the present, but it's a discussion we all love to have.
I would pick out three outstanding club sides from the past forty or so years:
Parramatta 1981-83, Wigan 1990-94, Penrith 2021-24.
Each of them were dominant, each were packed full of superstar players, each set a benchmark for others to follow.
Wigan's achievements were slightly skewed due to having a massive financial advantage over everyone which allowed them to cherry pick everyone else's best players thereby weakening their main opposition, but they unquestionably contained some of the finest players of the early nineties.
The great Parramatta side (the only other team apart from Penrith to complete a hat-trick of NSW/NRL victories since the late sixties) came about due to a freakish collection of young players all coming through together (Ella, Grothe, Kenny, Sterling). The bizarre thing about them was that, apart from this period (roughly 76-86 in total), Parramatta have effectively amounted to very little throughout the rest of their history, generally being no more than bit-part players in most seasons.
One of the commentators, at the end of today's game, said that winning four in a row shouldn't be possible in the modern day salary cap sport. Players are also more inclined to switch clubs than they were in years gone by.
Given the context, circumstances and standards of today's NRL, I think today's historic win does probably make Penrith the greatest RL club side of the past fifty years.
Any comparisons with a team pre-1970 (possibly even pre-1980) is largely fatuous as we really are talking about a wholly different sport, certainly a more brutal one!! Teams from the 1960s would have had their own special ways of dealing with someone like Nathan Cleary!!
