Alex Johnston ran riot while Adam Reynolds put on a kicking masterclass as South Sydney trounced Penrith 42-14 at ANZ Stadium on Sunday afternoon.
Rabbitohs winger Johnston ran in five tries however it was Reynolds who orchestrated the rout, kicking for four of his side’s seven tries in front of 14,103 people.
Johnston’s five-try haul equalled the club record jointly held by Nathan Merritt, Eric Sladden, Ian Moir, Johnny Graves, Don Manson, Alan Quinlivan and Harold Horder and took him to the top of the try-scorer leaderboard for the season with 15.
The cardinal and myrtle faithful would have been questioning where that sort of performance had been all year as Michael Maguire’s side displayed a willingness to chance their arm and played with flair and precision.
The result means the Panthers are two wins behind eighth spot and takes the momentum out of their mid-season charge up the ladder.
After Penrith skipped out to an 8-0 lead, the game turned on a dime when Souths captain Sam Burgess and Panthers winger Dallin Watene-Zelezniak were sin-binned for slapping each other in an all-in push-and shove.
When Matt Moylan threw a looping cut-out pass, Watene-Zelezniak wasn’t there to clean it up and Johnston ran 90 metres to score the first of his first-half hat-trick.
Braidon Burns leaped over Penrith winger Josh Mansour, who looked reluctant to jump for the ball having just returned from a knee reconstruction, just as he did when North Queensland’s Kyle Feldt flew over the top of him for the match-winner last week.
Johnston crossed from a Reynolds bomb and to rub salt into Penrith’s wounds, Leilani Latu was put on report for a shoulder charge on the Souths No.7 as he kicked the ball.
The 22-year-old crossed for three tries either side of halftime with his four-pointer two minutes after the resumption blowing out his side’s lead to 30-8 and all but sealing the game and taking his career haul to 64 tries from 76 appearances.
Johnston was denied a club record by the video referees when Cody Walker was ruled to have knocked on in the lead-up to what looked like his sixth try.
