Here’s a party trick. Picture a side with a Wallaby in the engine room, a goalkicker who’d punish you from his own postcode, and a run home spent knocking over teams with everything to play for. Now find them on the table. Go on, guess. Higher. No - lower. Keep going.

Ninth.

The Marlins in 2026 were the dinner guest who brings the good bottle, charms your mum, fixes the dishwasher, then drives off before it’s served. The talent was never the problem. The landing of it was. Ask any skipper who’s run the blue water off Piñas Bay: the cruellest moment on the ocean isn’t the empty horizon, it’s the marlin lit up and thrashing boatside that throws the hook a metre from the gaff. Manly spent all season raising fish nobody else could raise, and all season they watched them slip the leader. This is a year that needs the fine print read aloud.

One fish neither boat could land

Start in Round 2, because the whole season is hiding in it. Manly hosted Norths and drew 24-24. Will Kaye, fresh in from Gordon, barely had his boots laced before he was over, and Billy Dickens and Meli Dreu had the Marlins out in front by more than a converted try in the second half. Then they stopped scoring. Norths clawed it back through Matt Ryan and a Matt Minogue penalty to level it, Manly had chance after chance to put it to bed and couldn’t, and Norths knocked the ball cold after the bell. All square.

Here’s the kicker. That was the only drawn game in the entire 2026 Shute Shield. One deadlock, all year, across the whole competition - and it belonged to these two. Manly had it in hand with time to spare, and simply couldn’t put the lid on it.

Beaten at the weigh-in

Look up one rung. The Two Blues finished eighth on 47 points. Manly finished ninth on 45. Seven wins each. Manly had a draw on top of theirs - two points the Two Blues never earned - and still came out below them, because Western Sydney banked 19 bonus points to Manly’s 15.

Two competition points, the length of a season. This is the fella who brings the heaviest stringer to the ramp all day and still loses the tournament, because he let two keepers slip back into the drink before the weigh-in. Ninth by the small print, and Manly spent the year refusing to learn the lesson about finishing the job.

All the tackle in the box

None of this is a talent problem, and the numbers back the eye in. Will Kaye, in from Gordon, finished the year as the most accurate goalkicker in the entire Shute Shield - 84% across all goals, top of the competition off the tee, and level best for conversions at 85%.

Billy Dickens, a scrum-half, poached 12 tries to come fifth in the whole competition for try-scoring, outscoring nearly every specialist winger in Sydney from the base of the ruck.

Add a Wallaby lock in Cadeyrn Neville, and at Coogee in Round 16 you saw flashes of exactly what this side could be - Nik Foliaki stepping over to open it, backrower Dally Bird motoring down the sideline with no earthly right to that kind of toe, Neville storming into the corner off a slick Bird link, Dickens somehow crossing off the maul, Manly only four down at the break against a red-hot Randwick.

Meli Dreu’s feet did things feet shouldn’t, and hooker Ben Chapman danced through traffic no front-rower has any business dancing through. On their day, the Marlins were champagne footy - the kind of catch you get stuffed, mounted over the bar, and fitted with a battery so it swings its head round and belts out Elvis at anyone who walks past.

Slack line after the hour

Here’s where the fine print turns brutal. Through the sixteen rounds the trend report covers, Manly saw less of the ball than any side in the competition - 46% possession, flat last. Doing more with less is a fine trick, and for an hour each week they managed it: across the first sixty minutes of footy, the Marlins were level with the field, three points the wrong side of even and nothing more in it.

Then the final twenty arrived, week after week, and the line went slack. In the 60-to-80 window Manly scored their fewest points of any period and conceded their most - outscored 155 to 88 across those sixteen rounds’ closing quarters, coughing up 29% of their entire points-against in the last push to the whistle. The tries said the same thing: 22 shipped to 12 once the clock ticked past the hour. They didn’t get beaten by better teams so much as by five o’clock.

The tape just illustrates the spreadsheet. At Coogee, four points down and in the arm-wrestle, then the Wicks - Kellaway and Hendren in full flight - reeled the Marlins in and ran away 60-35. Round 3 in the Battle of the Beaches: the best start Manly had managed in years, the Rats genuinely stunned, before two trips to the naughty boy chair, Dickens first and Joe Dillon later, let Warringah off the hook. Round 17: level with Norths, hot every time they touched it, then a loose pass went the other way and McIntosh raced 50 to turn it. Build the lead, blow the lead, back on the bus.

The fish nobody wanted on their line

And yet. For a team going nowhere, Manly were nobody’s easy afternoon. Already out of finals contention by the final round, they rocked up to Round 18 and knocked over Gordon 29-26 - a Gordon side scrapping for third - snatching a turnover inside their own 22 at the death to deny the Stags and very nearly blowing up the top end of the table on their way out the door.

They’d already accounted for Sydney Uni along the way. A hooked billfish doesn’t stop being dangerous just because the day’s done - get one green alongside and it’ll still put its bill through the gunwale - and the cruel irony of Manly’s year is that the one team they reliably sank was the one wearing the same jumper. They ruined plenty of weekends. Their own, most of all.

Learning to land them

The club clearly looked at ninth and decided the answer was a new hand on the wheel. For 2027, Harry Fehily comes in as Director of Rugby and head coach, and he’s brought Brian Melrose alongside him as co-first grade coach - a man whose CV runs to three Shute Shield premierships and whose last proper spell in Sydney club rugby turned sides into winners in a hurry. The fish, as this season screamed from first cast to last, are already in the water. The job at Manly Oval is narrow but stubborn: learn to boat the ones they hook, and turn all those nearlys into the real thing.

Because a side this good has no business finishing ninth. They spent a year proving it, one that-got-away at a time.