Melbourne Storm always knew what was under the bonnet, life in the hub only highlighted it.
Via Gilbert Gardiner
They are not the highest paid, or the most athletic necessarily, and yet without the “team behind the team”, Storm figureheads Craig Bellamy and Frank Ponissi would be lost.
“If Cameron (Smith) lifts that trophy on Sunday night,” football director Ponissi said. “It’s got a lot of people’s fingerprints on it.”
The grand final team will get the plaudits and deservedly so, whatever happens.
So too, the ‘Renegades’, the reserves who this season, unlike any other, trained each week to prepare the top squad without a game of their own to look forward to.
But a third publicly unheralded cohort, until now, has as much skin in the game.
