Anaesthetics over aesthetics: welcome to rugby league’s painkiller knockouts

September 18, 2026 — 1:30pm

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

We’ve arrived in rugby league’s painkiller knockouts, when the winner will be decided less by aesthetics than anaesthetics.

Injuries are no longer what we normally think of as injuries. Isaah Yeo’s pectoral rupture, usually requiring months of rehab, kept him off the field for four weeks. Nathan Cleary’s foot and Brayden Trindall’s shoulder can be needled into the never-never. Even Sam Walker’s season-ending syndesmosis injury looks like it might only be season-pausing.

It’s the finals. Needle up. The future be damned.

These are just the miraculous recoveries we know about. Barrels of powerful painkillers have enjoyed fabled triumphs in rugby league history. Liam Martin played almost every week of Penrith’s last premiership with injections in his shoulder. Cleary stopped feeling his excruciating hip after a needle during this year’s Origin series.

Famously, Andrew Johns played the 1997 grand final with a punctured lung and broken ribs that he only began to feel again after the injections and the celebrations wore off. Cameron Smith played his last match, the 2020 grand final, with painkilling injections for broken ribs. Cooper Cronk played the 2018 grand final with a broken shoulder blade and a brain switched off to the agony via ultrasound-guided drugs administered 15 minutes before kick-off and again at half-time.

We don’t hear so much about the failures, not since the........

© WA Today