Source :- THE AGE NEWS
Considering he throws the most important pass at Penrith, hooker Mitch Kenny can appreciate the irony.
“That first year of NRL, I couldn’t really pass left to right at all … it might be an issue again, actually,” he grins, “I’ve missed a lot of footy lately.”
Kenny’s importance to the Panthers’ premiership-winning machine has grown with every passing year. Not least because in July he was the first of the club’s high-profile off-contract list to re-sign, on a four-year deal worth about $3 million.
But also because the once ungainly lock-turned-rake now consistently delivers Nathan Cleary some of the most reliable dummy-half service in the NRL.
The best example is the 20-metre pass Kenny served his halfback against the Titans, when Penrith needed a two-point field goal with 90 seconds to play in August 2025. Kenny looked up, realised Cleary was nowhere near where he had expected, yet still nailed the left-to-right pass that was well beyond him when he first came into first grade in 2019.
“Hours and hours of practice, mate; reps, reps and more reps. That’s how you learn a pretty fundamental skill like that,” Kenny says.
“When I came into the NRL in 2019, we had a bunch of injuries and suspensions to some really good hookers like Wayde Egan and Sione Katoa, and ‘Wal’ [former Panthers playmaker turned head coach-in-waiting Peter Wallace] had just retired, too.
“So it meant I got my opportunity … I was playing NRL and learning how to play hooker on the fly, but that’s not as dire as it sounds because I had all those guys and Kevin Kingston on our staff to learn and bounce off.
“I didn’t know much and, like I said, I didn’t have a left-to-right pass in the toolkit. But Cameron Ciraldo is someone I need to credit as well because he spent a lot of time working with me. Cam’s a pretty detailed guy and we’d go over a lot of clips, looking at someone like Aaron Smith from the All Blacks, how his passing technique could help me really build my own game from the ground up.
“I’d look at guys around the NRL, too, who can really zing the ball around. I’m not saying that’s me now, and I don’t think it is. But it is something I work hard at.”
Graft and grind will always remain the 28-year-old’s bread and butter, even if he did delay his return from a badly broken leg this year by a couple of weeks because he pushed his training too hard too early.
Come kick-off in Sunday afternoon’s grand final qualifier against the resurgent Knights, Kenny will also have a wonderfully quirky reminder of his formative years as Penrith’s groundskeeper lurking across halfway.
Explosive Newcastle back-rower Francis Manuleleua looms as a potential gamebreaker for the visiting outsiders at CommBank Stadium.
He’s also treading the same first-grade path Kenny once took, having taken on the lawnmowing gig when he was coming through Penrith’s lower grades before finding his way up the F1.
But just as Kenny has added a long left-to-right pass since his early grass-cutting days, his Panthers teammates speak glowingly of the guile he has slowly but surely added to his game since succeeding Api Koroisau as starting hooker in 2023.
Cleary’s praise is most noteworthy when he talks of the most famous play in his career to date – the try that sealed the greatest grand final comeback in history.
“Mitch’s deception is something that is really underrated in the try,” Cleary told this masthead a year after he broke Broncos hearts, and a few seconds after Kenny had swivelled his head left and right several times, dummied once and only then found his halfback.
“He’s just as much to credit for that try as I am.”
Kenny, naturally, appreciates the sentiment from the game’s best player. And just as easily shakes it off.
“It’s nice to hear that from Nath, but he did the heavy lifting there,” he says.
“I wouldn’t say that was Api-esque or anything. In those situations, you try and do a little something and give a bloke like Nath the ball with as much time as possible for him to do the rest.
“The subtleties and deception of playing hooker, you pick up a lot of that by watching and learning from guys like Api, especially being around them at training, and then by putting it into practice over the years. From there it’s like anything I guess, hours of practice and game time.”
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