It's arguably the most exciting week of the NRL season. The last week we have more than one NRL game to watch.
Added to that. preliminary finals or, indeed, semi-finals in any sport tend to be brilliant.
They are nerve-wracking affairs and, for me personally as a coach, I always found them more nerve-wracking than a grand final.
If fear of failure is the driver, then failing at the semi-final stage is worse than failure at the final stage.
In a prelim, the teams involved tend to be top-notch and picking a winner should be very hard as a result. Sometimes, depending on the draw, the hardest game on the way to a title can be this tie and there can be some quality teams go out at this stage.
And perhaps that is why preliminary finals are one of the great sporting occasions. There is so much on the line. You are one game away from playing for the premiership, but you are also one defeat away from having nothing left to play for.
It's a strange sporting purgatory.
Lose the grand final and, at least, you got there. You played on the biggest stage. You had your chance.
Lose the preliminary final and you don't even get that.
Roy Masters wrote about this very subject in the Sydney Morning Herald this week, describing the preliminary final as a weekend where players and coaches are acutely aware that one mistake can end their season just days before the premiership decider.
And the fascinating thing is that this isn't unique to rugby league.
It happens in virtually every major team sport including the AFL and the NFL.
The preliminary final is the equivalent of rugby league's grand gateway. Win and you are into the biggest game of the year. Lose and your season is finished.
In the NFL, the conference championship games carry exactly the same tension. You can play an outstanding season, win through the playoffs and get within one victory of the Super Bowl, only to have the entire campaign finish 60 minutes before the game everyone wanted to play.
Football has its Champions League semi-finals, Cricket has its World Cup semi-finals.
The closer you get to the ultimate prize, the more brutal the elimination becomes.
And that brings us back to the NRL.
If there is one modern NRL club that has to illustrated the cruelty of the preliminary final, it is South Sydney.
The Rabbitohs were one of the competition's most consistent teams throughout much of the 2010s and early 2020s.
They won the 2014 premiership and then made another grand final in 2021.
But there were also the preliminary finals. And they lost several of them.
In 2018, South Sydney's season ended one game short of the grand final against the Sydney Roosters.
In 2021, they finally broke through the preliminary-final barrier, defeating Penrith to reach the grand final.
And then, in 2023, they weren't there at all after missing the finals, and that illustrates another cruel element of preliminary finals.
You don't know when your next opportunity is coming.
A player can walk off the field after a preliminary-final defeat thinking, we'll be back next year.
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't.
Masters makes this point through the experiences of Craig Bellamy, who has coached more preliminary and grand final teams than virtually anyone of the modern era.
Bellamy has spoken about preliminary-final defeats being particularly difficult. Melbourne's 2011 preliminary-final loss to the Warriors was especially painful because the Storm were chasing redemption after the salary-cap scandal that had devastated the club.
Then there was 2020.
Melbourne had won the preliminary final and eventually won the premiership, but the broader point remains: even the most experienced coaches and players are not immune to what happens in these games.
And that is perhaps the biggest difference between a preliminary final and a grand final. Experience doesn't necessarily make the pressure disappear, it might actually make it more acute.
The grand final is different. There is something psychologically different about a grand final.
You have already achieved something enormous simply by getting there.
There is still an enormous amount to lose, of course, but there is also a sense of occasion.
The week is different, the build-up is different, the media attention is different.
The players know they have reached the final destination.
Masters quoted Bellamy making the point that players can actually lose some of their edge between a preliminary final and the grand final because, once they reach the decider, they have already achieved something significant.
That doesn't mean grand finals aren't pressure-filled - they obviously are.
But a preliminary final is a different type of pressure. It is pressure mixed with fear. A fear that the entire season could disappear in 80 minutes.
Fear that one missed tackle, dropped ball, penalty, poor decision or unlucky bounce could become the moment everyone remembers.
And because the teams are so evenly matched, those tiny moments can become enormous. And it's why the best preliminary finals are so good
From a coaching perspective, this is what makes preliminary finals fascinating.
You don't necessarily want your players thinking about the consequences. You want them thinking about the next job.
But human beings aren't machines. They know what is at stake and that victory takes them to the grand final. Defeat sends them home.
And sometimes that knowledge changes the way a team plays.
So, this weekend, look out for it in the opening 10 or 20 minutes.
Some teams start with enormous energy; others can look and play tight.
The ball can feel like a hot potato or, players who normally throw the pass without thinking suddenly take the safe option.
A half who normally takes a chance can hesitate. A winger who normally backs himself can play conservatively.
That is the fascinating part of finals football.
The game isn't just about skill, it is about how players deal with the significance of the moment.
The grand final is the game everyone remembers as the premiership is the prize everyone wants.
But to get there, you have to survive the preliminary final. And history is littered with outstanding teams that didn't.
There is also a brutal element to the preliminary final that doesn't exist in quite the same way in the grand final. If you lose the prelim, there is unfinished business.
You are left wondering what might have happened if you had got through.
Lots of “what ifs?”
That word can haunt sporting teams.
And perhaps that is why preliminary finals are so compelling.
Lee Addison is a former club coach at Sea Eagles and Panthers and the founder of rugbyleaguecoach.com.au. He is a Coach Mentor and his programmes for coaches and clubs can be found HERE.
