Melbourne Storm bosses make telling confession amid no-try controversy in NRL grand final

The Melbourne Storm's CEO and chairman have both reportedly acknowledged there was nothing untoward in the decision to deny them a controversial try in the NRL grand final. The Panthers' 14-6 win over the Storm has been marred by controversy, with fans convinced Melbourne were wrongly denied a try to Jack Howarth in the second half.

A photo has gone viral on social media that appears to show the point of the ball on the ground, but the NRL has since come out to prove it was actually Howarth's arm. The NRL has released new camera angles to show Howarth never got the ball to the ground, which was shown to media members and executives of the Storm on Sunday night.

According to leading reporter Brent Read, the Storm's CEO Justin Rodski and chairman Matt Tripp were both shown the new footage immediately after the game on Sunday night, and conceded the Storm weren't robbed. The images going viral on social media are somewhat of an optical illusion, and what appears to be the ball is actually the point of Howarth's arm.

The NRL's head of football Graham Annesley said on Sunday night: "When I saw it live I was saying what everyone else was saying, I thought I saw the ball on the ground. It's only when we go back and look at it clearly that you can see the different colour between the arm and the ball. The ball is sitting on top of the arm, which then gets lifted up.

"[The Bunker officials) are looking at this over and over again before they announce their decision, while we generally have one replay. We don't have time to clinically examine it like this but the bottom line is that the decision was correct."

Melbourne Storm bosses concede they weren't robbed

Speaking on NRL 360 on Monday night, Read provided more details on how the NRL took the media into a room at Accor Stadium after the game to clarify what actually happened. "There's a room just outside the press conference area," Read said. "The NRL took some journos into that room, they had a big screen set up and they replayed this (new footage)."

Crucially, Read revealed Rodski and Tripp both acknowledged the Bunker official made the correct call, after they were initially unhappy. Meanwhile, the Storm's General Manager of Football Frank Ponissi has conceded they probably didn't play well enough to win anyway.

“At the end of the day, it wasn’t the reason we lost, even if we scored a try, it would’ve been a big moment but we didn’t," he said on SEN radio. “We still had opportunities after that try, whether it was a try or not, to get in front and we didn’t. That’s how you have to look at it."

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But Ponissi did reveal that Howarth thought he'd scored. “I asked the player, he said he got the ball over the line,” he said. “It was a big moment in the game at 10-6 down, we could’ve gone to 10-all then potentially 12-10 up, it could’ve been a key part of the game.

“We’re not going to waste our time (worrying about it) for a simple reason, I think we’re going to work on what Craig (Bellamy) said to the players yesterday, ‘We want to look at exactly why we lost the game, why we didn’t play at our best’.

“We want to learn from it, we’ve got our team backing up next year, it’s very rare for us to go into a season with basically the exact same side. We’ve got a great opportunity next year, so we’ve got to spend most of our time in the pre-season why it just didn’t happen yesterday and working on those areas rather than looking back and (asking) why it wasn’t a try.”