Friday’s game between the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Sydney Roosters was supposed to be the season decider. The two best teams of 2014 going for broke on the first Sunday in October. But someone forgot to pencil in a Penrith upset into that script, which has fast-tracked this game a week earlier than expected.

The clubs have met twice this season and shared the spoils. Sydney is the reigning premier and Souths has fallen to the sword at this point in its previous two campaigns.

They meet for the first time in a final since 1938 and the Rabbitohs are looking to end a premiership drought that stretches back to 1971. The Bunnies go in as favourites in what is arguably the match of the season. But Fairfax journalist Michael Carayannis told Neos Kosmos that the Roosters shouldn’t be written off.

“The Roosters have been a bit patchy, in terms of the way they’ve played this year. They haven’t repeated or replicated their feats of last year. They still finished as minor premiers, and if they’re not playing well and they still finished as minor premiers it just goes to show how good they can be and how good they are.”

He said that the game may be won or lost on finals experience.

“They’ve [Sydney] got that finals experience, and the grand final experience of last year, compared to a South Sydney side who have lost the last two prelim finals. Whether that has any effect, whether there are any mental scars that carry over, I’m not sure but I think it will be a really good game.”

The Bunnies had the week off last week after a comprehensive 40-24 win in their qualifying final match over Manly. Whilst the Roosters were lucky to escape a late North Queensland surge, to win 31-30 last week, and set up a mouth watering preliminary final.

“You’ve got probably two of the best forward packs in the NRL going up against each other and two of the best players in the NRL in terms of Sonny Bill and [Sam] Burgess playing.

“There’s key match ups everywhere, and I think it’s going to be whoever dominates the forward pack, which will give their outside backs a bit more space and give their halves a bit more space. That’s probably where we’ll see the winner come from,” Carayannis said.

When asked whether the Roosters are prone to choking, on the back of a few close calls this year, including last week having led the Cowboys 30-0 after 34 minutes, Carayannis said it was simply a matter of momentum.

“No I don’t think so. It’s just been the way that the finals series has happened, which is bizarre. I haven’t seen anything like it before where we see the game ebb and flow like it has, so it’s not really a sense of the Roosters switching off or becoming complacent.

“We’ve just seen momentum shifts and once we’ve got those momentum shifts teams are really hard to pull back. We’ve seen it in all finals except for one this year, where we’ve had that large amount of points scored by one side, so I don’t think the Roosters have an attitude problem or anything like that. They just have to work out a way to stem points when they’re on the back foot a bit.”

Saturday night’s game, on the other hand, features an inspired and balanced Penrith, which earned a week off after knocking the Roosters off by one point in the qualifying finals, and a Canterbury side which has rejuvenated itself in the last two weeks, after some ordinary form toward the end of the regular season.

“I think everyone, unless you’re a mad Panthers fan, has been writing Penrith off for the last month and they just keep on turning up and performing. They’re a really good side in the sense that they’re a team, there’s not too many flashes of individual brilliance. If someone’s a little bit off in that side they’re going to struggle, they don’t rely heavily on anyone,” Carayannis said.

“There is a lot of hype around [five-eighth] Jamie Soward, because he’s their only playmaker, considering all the guys that are injured, so he’s probably got the most pressure on him. But there’s not that pressure on Soward to come up and make those big plays because he’s got other players who can come up and do that for him.”

And Canterbury is just as hard to gauge he said.

“After they [Canterbury] walked from the field in round 26 against the Titans you thought they were gone for all money. They were terrible that day and they really squandered a lead and they had to go play Melbourne in Melbourne. I honestly thought it’d be a regulation win for the Storm, but they’ve showed that anything can happen and to their credit they performed really well.”

For Canterbury to win, Carayannis said that the game will come down to the likes of prop James Graham, who’s arguably the in form player of the competition, and the most important Bulldog out there. For Penrith it was impossible to pinpoint one feature stand-out, rather it will be a case of maintaining the team’s balance.

“Obviously Jamie Soward’s their man. If he’s kicking’s on and he controls the game and he keeps his nerves about him, he’ll have a decisive say about how the game plays out.”

Carayannis picked the Roosters by one and the Bulldogs by six.