He is the NRL season’s leading light, hidden in plain sight. The halfback Jahrome Hughes has propelled Melbourne to the NRL minor premiership and a grand final showdown with the era-defining Panthers. He might even take home the Dally M medal this week.
But those living in the city he represents largely wouldn’t know it. “If you pick up a paper here, you’re not reading about the Melbourne Storm or Jahrome Hughes,” says the Storm captain, Harry Grant, who believes Hughes’ brilliance has gone “unnoticed” and been “underrated”.
Until this year, that is, when his form has started to turn heads in rugby league’s heartland. His fellow players have voted him as the league’s best halfback for the first time, as part of the RLPA’s Dream Team this month. And the Storm’s form has made Hughes’s growing powers one of the season’s key storylines.
“He has definitely got a lot more accolades or rewards outside the club this season,” Grant says. “But over the last four years, five years, he’s been so valued in our team.”
Over that period most agree he has been among the competition’s leading halfbacks, as Melbourne have regularly gone deep in September. This year, statistics suggest Hughes has gone to another level. He has recorded a career high in try assists, has run for the most metres in a season since his move to halfback, and has also improved in his role as the team’s primary long kicker this season.
Yet the NRL career of the 29-year-old (he turns 30 next week) was never a sure thing when he struggled to crack first grade at Gold Coast and North Queensland. His first tentative steps at the Storm were at fullback but, since locking down the No 7 jersey in 2019, he has steadily risen to become the team’s most dangerous player. Given that his side includes Cam Munster, Ryan Papenhuyzen and Grant, and are widely considered an even chance against the Panthers this Sunday, reaching that status is not insignificant.
But Melbourne’s ongoing apathy towards rugby league, together with the dominance of Penrith in the years Hughes’s influence has grown, has somehow kept the New Zealander largely out of the spotlight. Grant has watched the dynamic play out since the hooker debuted in 2018 and is glad the rugby league world is finally waking up.
“He’s probably just been overshadowed, or unnoticed down here in Melbourne, in Victoria,” Grant says. “So it’s good to see that he’s getting some recognition, and I think he’s just playing his game, he’s backing himself, and we expect no different this weekend.”
The halfback himself has heard it all before. “I feel like that’s something that comes up a little bit but to be fair, outside of these walls, it doesn’t really bother me too much,” Hughes says. “Inside these four walls are the opinions that I most care about.”
Hughes’s stunning season reached a crescendo with a hat-trick against the Roosters in the preliminary final. Afterwards, Storm’s coach, Craig Bellamy, said the performance demonstrated his playmaker’s uncanny range: “He always comes up with the game that we need from him. Sometimes it might be a really good kicking game, sometimes it might be really good running game, sometimes it might be just organising and passing. He just seems to be able to pick what the team needs.”
Grant says Hughes has expanded on the strengths that made him a good fullback, and is now an elite all-around threat. “He’s such a great runner of the ball but he’s really built on his game, with his kicking game, his direction, his control, his leadership.”
Against the Panthers on Sunday, Hughes’ role will have a major bearing on whether the Storm can end the Penrith run of three straight premierships. His opposing halfback, Nathan Cleary, is widely considered to be the best player in the world and showed against Cronulla, despite a serious shoulder injury, that he can still bend the game to his whim. “I don’t see it as a battle between me and him,” Hughes says. “It’s a battle of two great teams going head-to-head and hopefully putting on a great game.”
Hughes believes targeting Cleary and his seemingly brittle shoulder would be a mistake, citing the Storm’s failed attempts to leverage Cooper Cronk’s broken scapula in the 2018 grand final loss to the Roosters. “A few of the boys played in that ’18 grand final,” he says. “They bring up that they probably focused on Cooper too much, more than they needed to, and it probably come back to bite them. So we probably learned from that as a club.”
One of the most anticipated NRL grand finals puts at stake bragging rights for a generation but Hughes has nothing but respect for the Panthers’ No 7. “The influence he has on that team, and just his play is so skilful and he can do pretty much everything, so he’s the full package. And yeah, if he’s not the best in the game, he is definitely top two.”
