It may surprise you to discover that this blog is actually fairly low on my list of priorities and when time’s tight, its always going to be the first to suffer so this isn’t going to be much of a post. With that in mind, this week’s games are looking like a re-run of round 20, where each game had a clear favourite. That weekend, seven from eight tips got up.

Round 23 offers more top eight match ups with the Roosters/Storm, Broncos/Sharks and Cowboys/Panthers going head-to-head. While you would expect 1st vs 2nd, 3rd vs 4th and 6th vs 8th to be tight, we’ve got the Storm, Broncos and Panthers well ahead of their rivals. In fact, the Jury was unanimous on every game except for Wests/Manly, where Euclid was the sole dissenting vote.

The favourites have an average odds of 2-to-1 of picking up the win. As I warned in round 20, you would expect to be correct in 5.2 games but still find upsets in 2.8 games. We’ll have to wait and see which games those are.

Draw

 Canterbury (7-13) @  South Sydney (7-13)

 Newcastle (4-16) @  Parramatta (13-7)

 Cronulla (13-7) @  Brisbane (13-7)

 Gold Coast (7-13) @  St George Illawarra (10-10)

 Sydney City (14-6) @  Melbourne (15-5)

 North Queensland (12-8) @  Penrith (11-9)

 Canberra (9-11) @  New Zealand (7-13)

 Manly (12-8) @  Wests Tigers (5-15)

Tips

“Success”

After round 22: