With a new NRL season kicking off and a federal election looming, it’s time to return to the Menzies era when innovation was not stifled by regulation; when the monied Silvertails ruled.

Power is now in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, where a new stadium is being built for those hard hat Panthers who have won four consecutive premierships and are poised to repeat in 2025.

The Menzies rugby league needs isn’t the former Liberal Bob Menzies variety – Australia’s longest serving prime minister. The NRL already has a Supreme Leader in Peter V’landys.

No, it needs a Steve Menzies, the Manly back-rower who won premierships in 1996 and 2008 and who holds the record for the most number of tries scored by a forward.

Menzies could play on the left and the right side of the field, unlike today’s edge forwards who play on one side, under the coach-endorsed left field-right field division of (defensive) responsibility. They are so wedded to one side, you are entitled to wonder how the right-side players drive a car to training, or how left-side players manage with scissors.

Edge forwards today have become labourers, unlike Menzies who carried the ball out of his own half from either side of the field. Coincidentally, Manly are still the best in the NRL at shifting the ball in their own territory, via clever halfback Daly Cherry-Evans, a strategy probably forced on them by a lack of robust wingers capable of returning the ball forcefully from kicks.

Yet back-rowers who can move the ball, aka Sonny Bill Williams, are what is needed to beat Penrith. If field position and possession is the holy grail of the game, the Panthers are masters of the former. They trap a team in its own half with a high hang-time clearing kick to an opposing winger, driving him back in the tackle with the best kick chase in the NRL.

It is so effective that it becomes a game of forcings back, with their opponents finding each successive set of tackles begins closer and closer to their own line, while the Panthers move further away from theirs.