The Storm led the Roosters 16-4 with nine minutes left in a low-scoring Round 13 NRL match in Melbourne, after Moses Leo sprinted the length of the field for a try that stretched the gap to eight points. The scoreboard had tightened and then cracked open in the final stages, with Melbourne controlling the last stretch of a tense contest.
That late lead mattered because the game had stayed on a knife edge for most of the second half. With 26 minutes left, the Storm were up 10-4 after Jack Howarth was denied a try by the bunker, and they pushed the margin to 12-4 with 20 minutes left before Leo's runaway effort changed the shape of it again.
The sequence around Howarth summed up the night. The referee awarded him a try on the field, only for the bunker to overrule it, and the Roosters were left chasing a game in which every break seemed to be cancelled out by the next error. Billy Smith had already spilled a Jahrome Hughes bomb, and Salesi Foketi later grabbed the ball from an offside position as the mistakes kept mounting.
It was a scrappy match by any measure. The error count was 14-7 against the Roosters, and the missed chances matched the scoreline: Sua Faalogo missed another conversion attempt, while the Storm kept finding just enough field position to keep the pressure on. Cody Ramsey was at the heart of one of the night's rare attacking bright spots for Melbourne, taken over the sideline by a brilliant Sua Faalogo cover tackle after a rare foray into Roosters territory.
The broader picture is simple enough. In a low-scoring battle in Melbourne, the Storm found a 12-point scoreline late and carried an eight-point buffer into the final nine minutes, while the Roosters were left with six points to find and little room for another mistake. The unanswered part is whether Melbourne turned that control into the result it had earned, because the live update stopped short of the final siren.
