The Dolphins were travelling to Sydney for the first time when they rocked up to meet the Sea Eagles at Brookvale on Friday night, while the Sea Eagles had a point to prove for Daly Cherry-Evan’s 295^th game in the maroon and white. They’d only won a single match of their last five – against the Raiders, when Tom Trbojevic stepped into first gear and nabbed a hat trick – and hadn’t won at Brooky since they hosted the Storm back in April. With the Eels, Storm and Roosters ahead, they needed an imposing win here – and more than delivered.

Tommy, the only Turbo on the park tonight, fielded the kickoff, and flicked it across for Taniela Paseka to take the first charge of the match, before Haumole Olakau’atu added some grunt up the right, and Reuben Garrick brought it into Dolphins territory. Daly Cherry-Evans struck his first one hard, and while Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow took it cleanly within his ten, he couldn’t make much headway through a strong combined tackle from Lachlan Croker and Toa Sipley. DCE only intensified his kicking game on the next Manly set, taking this one over halfway too.

This would be the first of many boots that were aimed at Tesi Niu, who lost control into a Jason Saab contest, ushering in the first close-range sweep of the Sea Eagles’ evening. They didn’t get the timing quite right, leaving Christian Tuipulotu with nowhere to turn after he reined in an over-high ball, but self-corrected immediately as they swung out to the right. DCE got them rolling with a beautiful wide ball for Garrick, who responded with a catch-and-pass for Saab to amble over on the right wing to bag the first four points of Manly’s eventual 58.

The hosts didn’t quite hit a point per minute, with Garrick lobbing the kick away to the left, but the Dolphins had now conceded the first try in the opening seven minutes for the fourth game in a row. In two straight sets, Manly experimented with elasticising the left edge – first, with a trademark Josh Schuster no-looker that cascaded into a Turbo catch-and-pass that momentarily opened up space for Tuipulotu along the sideline. For the moment, the Dolphins survived, as Niu took a spiraling DCE bomb, albeit without a metre as Garrick plunged on top.

Still, the visitors spent most of this set between their twenty and thirty, and while Manly struggled for position for their opening few tackles, Tolu Koula took another crack at the left sideline, accelerating up the edge and flicking the footy back in to Bullemor. This was the burst of energy needed by the Brooky boys, who parlayed it back to the other wing for the second time in as many minutes. Again, DCE providing the guiding vision, dancing the footy into the line before shooting a breathtaking wide ball out to Turbo, who sent it on to Garrick in turn.

Turbo had proved himself sensitive to the needs of his team mates over the last set, emulating and condensing both Schuster’s no-looker and DCE’s wide effort, and his vision paid off here, by providing Garrick with just enough space to get around Euan Aitken and go it alone to the chalk, despite Saab barking for a double on his outside. It was a pretty good showing for the Manly backliner who was only starting at the centre for the third time, despite it being his preferred position, and he bolstered the putdown by slicing through the first two a beat later.

There were already traces, then, of the Brookvale win over Melbourne – not simply in the speed and crispness of Manly’s passing and game management, but in their ability to self-correct, both at a collective level, in their two shifts from aborted left sweeps to successful right sweeps, and at an individual level, in Garrick’s movement from try assister to tryscorer, as well as the precision of his second conversion attempt, which sailed symmetrically through the crossbars. If the Dolphins didn’t score soon, they would leak some serious momentum.

They got a much-needed bump up the field with a Sipley ruck error early in the next set, and yet no sooner had they glimpsed this position than the Sea Eagles struck back with a two-shot defensive punch – first a hit from Tolu Koula on the Hammer, who lost the ball backwards, and then a follow-up effort from Tuipulotu, who channeled the spirit of Jorge Taufua to get in Valynce Te Whare’s face and force the knock-on. Two tackles later, this duo suffered an even more egregious dip in form, as Turbo stepped into the spotlight with pure footy magic.

Tommy took it from Daly 35 metres out from the line, and dummied to Koula as if to continue the left sweep, only to pivot back inside away from Te Whare, slip through an Isaiya Katoa tackle, take advantage of a sluggish Brenko Lee on his outside, accelerate beyond the Hammer, and eventually cross over untouched. That made it eight tries from eight games at Brookvale for the master, while Garrick slotted through another two from the left, and Lee left the park a moment later with the leg injury that had caught him up in the defensive line.

Bullemor took another crack up the middle on tackle four on the restart, laying a good solid foundation for Croker to both win six again and offload for DCE to set up more metres for Olakau’atu on the right. Manly’s attack was dynamising by the second, with Garrick and Paseka both poking their noses through the line, so it felt inevitable when Daly delivered a couple of big steps to bring the ball back from the right edge and open up a gap for Croker, who dummied left, and saw JMK hanging off the tackle, waiting for defence that never came.

This was an embarrassing moment for Wayne Bennett’s Dolphins, as Croker simply sliced between Hammer and Mark Nicholls (who was fresh off the bench) to score in back to back games for the first time since donning Brookvale colours. Garrick’s missed kick now felt like the distant past, as he booted through another two to put his men at 22-0. The Sea Eagles were 9/9 to 3/5 for completions, had 404 to 118 run metres, and had enjoyed three quarters of both possession and territory – pretty imposing stats on the brink of the second quarter.

They didn’t show any signs of slowing down either, as Tuipulotu made twenty post-contacts on tackle two of the restart. DCE was barking for six again a beat later, but got the position anyway when Aitken stripped the Steeden. Schuster now stepped into the spotlight, lobbing out a deft no-looker that Koula took brilliantly with a full wingspan rein-in on the left edge, before dancing across the ruck and opening up just enough room for Croker to glimpse a double in exactly the same spot. The gap closed, but for a minute it didn’t seem to matter.

That was because Croker played the ball quickly enough for Sipley to scoop it up from dummy half and roll his way through JMK to come down beneath the crossbar. In the first big letoff for the visitors, this turned into a Manly penalty for a double movement, although it was hardly a victory for the ex-Bulldog, since the tackle had only been completed in the most theoretical terms here. It wasn’t that much more convincing than JMK’s earlier hangoff, so the Dolphins still had to to work extra hard to gain momentum, let alone points on the board.

Meanwhile, the Sea Eagles delivered a brutal four man tackle to ensure Aitken couldn’t bring it out of his ten, before Kodi Nikorima compensated with a twenty-metre charge – a pattern that repeated itself when Nicholls failed to make metres, and Kenny Bromwich notched them up for him on the following play. All in all, it wasn’t a bad accumulation of position, as Herman Ese’ese drove it into the forty for Katoa’s kick, allowing the Dolphins to keep Manly within their twenty for the longest period so far – four tackles – before Turbo finally crossed the red.

DCE was still within his thirty by the time he put boot to ball, but even so the visitors had now made a staggering 111 tackles to Manly’s 38, while the Brooky boys had only missed a single tackle compared to the Dolphins’ 15. That made the restart midway through the next Queensland set particularly precious, especially once Ese’ese got the offload back to the Hammer, laying a platform for Nicholls to hit the red zone off a JMK pass for the Dolphins’ best position all night. Katoa clinched it with a grubber that Tuipulotu had to clean up in goal.

Nicholls was also the man to hit the twenty on the dropout, two plays in, and for a moment it looked like the Dolphins might not do much at close range, as Nikorima was forced to shut down an early right sweep, and Katoa was frustrated on the left, where he was compelled to take the tackle after realising that Nicholls was going to be called offside. Yet the visitors corrected beautifully late in the count, when they took another crack on the right edge, this time with a wide ball from Nikorima that caught Koula so far infield he barely touched Isaako.

Tuipuloto was even further inside, and so Isaako became the second highest tryscorer of the 2023 season (13) between Maika Sivo and Campbell Graham – a nice counterpart to his domination of the general pointscoring tally (146), light years ahead of Latrell Mitchell (119) and Mitch Moses (112). He might have missed both conversions last week, but angled it artfully here, as the Steeden careened out to the right of the posts before correcting at the last second. No surprise, then, that the Dolphins looked rejuvenated on the following restart.

Ray Stone, Kenny Bromwich and Ese’ese carved their way up the middle, before momentum was lost when big Herman took an age to return to his feet, the Bunker correctly deciding that no crusher tackle had come from Ben Condon, despite audible boos from the away crowd. In fact, Niu got done for an early tackle on Saab, beneath the kick, and so Manly were rolling again, elasticising up the right through a deft Turbo-Saab combo, albeit failing to quite parlay it back to the other edge, where Kenny Bromwich just managed to shut down Schuster.

Still, they delivered a gorgeous pair of passes on the next play, when Turbo busted through a couple of tackles on the left, and offloaded for DCE to start an enormous sweep out to the other wing, where Olakau’atu gently grubbered the footy over the chalk to garner a dropout. Schuster was inside the twenty with a dummy and run midway through the count, and won a holding down penalty off Schuster for his troubles. Yet with their best position of the night, Manly failed to deliver convincing plays on the left, then the middle, and finally on the right.

At first the left sweep looked promising, but it disintegrated into an overlong ball from Schuster that Tuipulotu only just reined in. Croker then glimpsed another gap before the crossbars but found it closing just before he could smash through, while Turbo followed with his worst ball of the night, a wayward pass that Ray Stone scooped up. With Te Whare trampling over Bullemor early in the count, this was a pretty decent recovery for the Dolphins, although that just made it all the more impressive when Manly struck back on the next set.

Koula got them rolling with a skip up the middle, Bullemor followed with fifteen metres, and this turned out to be just the spark the Sea Eagles needed to light the flame once they hit Dolphins territory, where DCE dummied at the forty, drew in Katoa and held up the line before putting Turbo through a gap at the thirty. Tommy offloaded on the ground through a Ray Stone shot, and Croker stepped into the spotlight with his greatest effort in the Manly jersey yet, as he caught-and-kicked a millisecond before Ese’ese’s contact brought him to ground.

So mercurial was this play that it wasn’t clear, in real time, how the footy had found it way in goal, where it sat up beautifully for Garrick to slice past several waves of scattered defence, ending with Niu, to pop it down. In slow motion, however, the geometric precision that Croker had wrested from chaos became clear, the Steeden tracing two sides of a triangle as it moved up from Turbo’s hands, and then down to his hooker’s boot. Garrick slotted through the two from right in front, and the hosts had reasserted themselves with an imposing 28-6 scoreline.

The Manly big men had some of their hardest and straightest runs on the restart, overflowing with energy that momentarily overtook DCE, who lobbed his next pass about ten metres back. Even so, Croker got the the kick away, while Schuster spearheaded a tough three-man pack to drag the Hammer seven metres towards his own goal line on the return. Koula and Condon offered a similarly staunch effort on Kurt Donoghoe a play later, and with Kenny Bromwich clipped by Fainu, and falling into a Bullemor-Condon shot, this had been a real defensive flex.

Fainu was cut down himself on the next set, by Te Whare, at the end of an escalating right play, and for a moment it looked like this might get the visitors back on the attack, especially when Bullemor coughed up the footy inside the ten on tackle four. Instead, Connelly Lemuelu was called offside, Manly opted to tap and go, and a Schuster catch-and-pass gave Turbo a glimpse of space on the left. Tommy didn’t back himself to nail the harbour bridge ball, and so it ended with DCE launching an extravagant chip kick back over the other side of the field.

Olakau’atu and Aitken competed for it, and there was a brief question of a professional foul, but the result was a goal line dropout when Niu, who finally cleaned it all up, failed to work his way back around the maroon and white wall. Bullemor had more metres than Olakau’atu by this point, and took the first charge here, laying a platform for the Eagles to spread it left before bringing it back in for a Condon steadier. Again, they shifted it to the left, where Te Whare shut down Koula, and again they brought it back inside, four tackles into the dropout.

Sensing that another aborted sweep might cost his men momentum, Croker now booted it towards the crossbars, winning another dropout when Nikorima only just beat Tommy to the ball. This time Katoa went short, and Croker got hands to the footy, but tried to tap it on instead of just securing it, a sorry sequel to the dropout his boot had set up. Nicholls came up with it, and the Dolphins had possession, desperate to start making up the 848-421 deficit in run metres, in what might be their last set before the sheds, given Manly’s huge possession.

Yet the end of the first stanza was pretty bathetic for both teams. All that Nikorima could muster on this critical set was a shallow kick. Turbo showed the same caution that had caused him to pull back from the earlier harbour bridge ball again here, extricating himself from the kick contest so that he could secure the tackle on Hammer. Croker broke through the line a beat later, and shifted it out to DCE, but with Turbo mistiming the support run, and the Hammer losing it twenty seconds out from halftime, the first forty concluded with a whimper.

The Dolphins managed to make it five metres inside Manly’s half by the time Katoa took his first bomb back, while DCE couldn’t break his forty for the next kick. Driving runs from Te Whare and Stone only compounded this positional advantage, putting Donoghoe inside the twenty by the penultimate play of the next set. Yet when the left sweep failed to congeal, Nikorima was forced to pivot back infield, and then resort to an unconvincing dribble kick that the Sea Eagles cleaned up clinically, bringing this glimpse of Dolphins resurgence to an end.

Midway through the very next set, Manly got a bump up field when Nicholls was called offside in the ten, and yet the hosts were unable to quite bring things together here either. Croker mistimed a pass on play two, forcing Turbo to scoop it up precariously on the bounce, while Tommy himself hit the grass two plays after that, meaning Saab had to save it on the right wing. Everything came down to a DCE kick, which Isaako contained with a metre leap into the air, as JMK looked on from the side, confined to the bench by his perennial shoulder issues.

In other words, the Dolphins still had a chance to make good on their mini-surge after the break, as Katoa delivered a bomb from the forty, and Tuipulotu came to ground in order to collect it, precluding a single metre on the return. As would occur so often tonight, however, the Sea Eagles reasserted themselves in a single spectacular sequence, apparently from out of nowhere. This time DCE chipped early in the count, just after they cleared the red zone, and Garrick curved around to take it on the bounce and flick it to Turbo halfway up the park.

From there, Tommy made it inside the opposition twenty, looped away from the Hammer, and lobbed a one-handed pass back to Garrick, who in turn drove it into the left corner, and then curved away like his fullback before him, before dummying twice and sending the footy back for Turbo to complete this arcing play by slamming down beside the left padding. It was one of the most elegant ever combinations between the two Manly backliners, poetry in motion that traced a series of curves that brought the hosts to 34-6 with Garrick’s conversion.

It was frustrating, then, when Olakau’atu lost the ball four plays into the restart, and while this was initially called a strip, the Dolphins sent it up to prove that it had been a loose carry. In fact, Nikorima had forced a second error in backplay, when DCE tried to scoop up the ball, and the impact of his leadership ushered in a decent period for the visitors. Nicholls dragged the footy from the forty to the thirty, Te Whare drove it into the red zone after Katoa dug into the line to clear space for him, and Ese’ese was raring at the ten by midway through the set.

All in all, this had been the toughest Dolphins progression of the night, and it continued when an around-the-corner pass from Nikorima brought Lemuelu five metres out, and finally when Ese’ese attempted a crash play on the penultimate tackle. Everything came down to a mammoth Te Whare charge on the last, and while it took three men to hold him down, right on the line, the Sea Eagles had survived. They spent the first half of the next set in their twenty too, until Ese’ese channelled his residual aggression into a swinging arm into Paseka’s head.

From here, Manly delivered another one of their split-second spectacles, as Bullemor made another limber run to break the forty, and Schuster booted it on the second. In one of his greatest Brookvale moments yet, Koula chased it down, and split the Dolphins’ 1 and 2 for his first try of the season. It was a particularly embarrassing sequence for the Hammer, who had slowed down to a light jog as the ball bounced, completely unaware of the Manly centre surging up behind him. With Garrick slotting through another two, the hosts had hit forty.

On the other side of the Steeden, these were the most points the Dolphins had conceded in their short club history, and this propelled them into a pair of decent recovery sets. While Nicholls couldn’t quite manage the offload late in the next set, Hammer still managed a good ball for Niu to make metres up the left, where Garrick and Saab had to scramble for cover defence. Nikorima then capped it all off with a better version of his grubber just after the break, rolling it through to the left corner where Fainu was trapped with it behind the chalk.

Finally, the Dolphins had a dropout, as Jesse Bromwich took the first run straight off the bench, prompting some tough defence from Croker in exchange. They were inside the ten by tackle two, as Te Whare was shut down in a desperate charge on the right edge, before Nikorima dug deep into the line, and lobbed out the harbour bridge ball to Niu, who in an echo of the Hammer’s sluggishness on Koula, tried to rein it in one-handed but lost it over the edge. Still, the Dolphins got a chance almost immediately, and off the Eagles’ next linebreak.

For no sooner had Paseka busted through early in the next count, and tried to offload, than Aitken banged the footy from his hands to ensure his men a scrum from the thirty. The Hammer now made up for his miss on Koula by capping off the Dolphins’ best spine combo of the night, as a pair of silky passes from the halves gave him room to get outside Tolu, and beat Tuipulotu as well, before Isaako added the extras to bring the visitors to twelve. True to the spirit of this game, however, the Redcliffe men now slumped as quickly as they peaked.

Jesse Bromwich was absolutely swamped on play one of the restart, and Nicholls couldn’t make his way through a staunch Aloiai-Olakau’atu-led pack, and so it took Kenny Bromwich to break the forty, although Olaka’atu stepped up again by combining with DCE to ensure that Lemuelu couldn’t make headway after Nikorima tried to elasticise things up the middle. By contrast, Tommy took yet another strong run at the start of the next set, well ahead of the Hammer by this stage at 184 to 131 run metres, and the Sea Eagles settled into their flow.

Te Whare tried to reset his own team’s flow next time he had ball in hand, and gave Keppie and Aloiai a real run for their money when he charged into them on the edge, but any momentum this might have garnered quickly dissipated when Garrick came in for an absolute bone-rattler on Aitken, who was lifted clean off the turf and landed heavily on his shoulder. He stayed on the park, but the rhythm had been broken, while Kenny Bromwich was also slow to get up, making it a critical steadier when Hammer took the next high ball under pressure.

Kenny was off a beat later, and while there was a brief burst of energy in the middle of the field, where Nikorima showed a big dummy to set up space for a tough Hammer-Garrick fend, Turbo quickly eclipsed it by upstaging Hamiso’s last collect with the most balletic and gymnastic effort under the high ball tonight – bending his whole torso backwards, and then twisting to the right, like he was made of silly putty, with Ray Stone only metres away in the chase. This was grace under pressure, and prompted the Dolphins to fight back once again.

In fact, this was probably the biggest arm wrestle of the night, as Nikorima mirrored Turbo’s dexterity with a beautiful banana kick back in goal, where DCE held his ground on the chalk, fighting as hard as he could despite being 28 points ahead, but couldn’t withstand an enormous combined effort from Te Whare and Isaako to roll him back over. It became back-to-back dropouts a minute later, when Katoa tried to thread the needle on the left, and Tommy cleaned it up behind the line for the visitors’ most sustained possession this evening.

Yet this merely paved the way for the most scintillating of all the Sea Eagles’ sudden spectacles, as Katoa went for an early kick, with disastrous results. In one of his very best plays in the Manly jersey, Fainu stuck out his right boot, scooped it up, and maintained possession through two retaliatory efforts from Katoa, who reached out to try and steal the Steeden back, and then went for a half-hearted ankle tap, by which time Fainu had already sent it out to Koula, who collected it at the thirty and set eyes on the line before anyone could get him.

This was even better than his first try, an end-to-ender that left the entire Dolphins defence in his wake, with only Nikorima glimpsing him at the death, but even then remaining a good ten metres behind. That sublime speed continued on the restart, first with a Karl Lawton dummy half run up the middle, and then when DCE drove deep into the line, and popped a harbour bridge ball out for Garrick, who fended off Aitken and flicked it on, in the face of Niu, for Saab, who cemented Manly’s dominance on both edges and brought them to fifty points.

For a moment it looked like the Sea Eagles might go back to back again, when Turbo came down a metre out, and won a penalty from the Hammer for a slow peel. Then, the tide shifted, and the Dolphins came agonizingly close to a hitback, as Donoghoe pounced on an unusually messy ball from DCE, and made it to the forty, before Daly got on his bike to make sure he couldn’t gain any more metres. With Aitken adding speed up the left, and Lemuelu adding some post-contacts, the red and white settled into what could have been a late consolidation.

That newfound vision all condensed on a beautiful curving ball from Hammer that found Niu on the chest, and would have been the most precise assist of the game if Tesi hadn’t made his second choke on the wing. This time he reined it in with both hands, but hadn’t counted on the strength of Garrick’s defence, which propelled the footy from his grasp as he hung in the air above the try line. Manly hit back fast, hard and precise, as Turbo sent a short one out to put Olakau’atu through the line late in the following set, with Garrick ready for the assist.

He got it too, landing in the right corner for a hat trick, and equaling his own record for most club points in a game – thirty, equal with Matthew Ridge – when he banged through the two. The Sea Eagles had reached their stunning final scoreline of 58, while the decision to keep Turbo on the park with Origin looming had paid dividends in this last sequence. Schuster ended the restart with a bold chip-and-chase, but this time the oblique bounce favoured the Dolphins, and Te Whare made the most of it by trampling right over Bullemor on tackle two.

The game was all but over when Saab leaped up to collect his next high ball, but to their credit the Dolphins made the most of the last error of the night – a forward pass from Lawton. With fifteen seconds off the scrum, Nikorima booted it immediately, and this time Hammer beat Koula, while also defying Saab’s speed and a Schuster ankle tap to plant it to down behind the posts on the stroke of full time. Isaako added the extras after the siren, and the Dolphins had climbed to 18, but it was still a mere dent on the magnificent Manly effort on display tonight.