Stats the spirit: Running the Round 9 numbers 📊📉
The Warriors head into their first bye with some impressive stats behind them.
Keeping pace with the best of yesteryear
Finishing strong: Five clean sheets in final 20 minutes
Dally M follies
Lofi heights — AKP smashes quickest to 20 doubles record
Searching for a Magic Round hat-trick
The Warriors have navigated a tricky trio of games as warm favourites to head into the bye on a four-match winning streaks — completing the run with a fast-finishing 36-14 victory over Parramatta.
It was just the Warriors’ second win in eight games against the Eels, but their second straight between the clubs at CommBank Stadium.
The result was partly built on several of the Warriors’ key 2026 tenets. Achieving a better completion rate (86 percent to the Eels’ 70 percent) led to a 52 percent possession advantage.
That contributed to the visitors’ overall physical dominance, racking up 1,812 run metres to 1,498, while the Warriors’ average set distance was 41.19 to the Eels’ 36.55. Line-breaks (8-4) and tackle-breaks (38-27) finished in the Warriors’ favour.
The Warriors — the second-least-penalised team in the NRL — won the penalty count 8-3, though they gave away eight set restarts to Parramatta’s six.
Andrew Webster’s 7-2 outfit are keeping even pace with their 2002, 2018 and 2025 predecessors for the club’s best record after nine games. The Warriors remain in second place, meaning that the 2026 season accounts for six of the 22 weeks in their history that they have finished a round in the top two.
