It was a game that marked Ruben Wiki's 300th first-grade match and emotion helped them sneak home 28-26. The players then dedicated the rest of the season to the retiring Wiki, and grew beards in honour of the respected front-rower - although players still refuse to confirm why they went grizzly - and eight wins in their last 10 games carried them into the finals.
They qualified eighth and were drawn to play the Storm at Melbourne's Olympic Park, a venue where the home side had lost only twice in the previous three years, and caused one of the biggest upsets in NRL history. Their 18-15 triumph, secured with a late Michael Witt try, was the first time a team ranked eighth had upset the minor premiers in the first round of the NRL playoffs. It saw them qualify to host their next match at Mt Smart Stadium, when they dispatched the Roosters 30-13, but they then ran into an unstoppable force in the shape of Manly, who beat them 32-6 in the preliminary final.
"The biggest thing from 2008 was how easy it felt to play and how effective we were," said prop Sam Rapira, who was one of three Warriors players who appeared in all 27 games that season. "Things just happened for us. What we are building at the moment has the same feeling as previous years. Things are falling into place and it's feeling good now but we haven't achieved what we want so far so we have to keep taking each game as it comes."
2011
What started with three straight defeats ended with a second grand final appearance in a bizarre year of winning and losing streaks.
Rarely did wins or losses come in isolation and it was complicated by the fact that it was announced midway through the season that coach Ivan Cleary would be leaving at the end of the campaign to join Penrith.
Five wins on the trot were followed by four straight defeats which were then, quite amazingly, followed by four consecutive victories but the Warriors stormed into the grand final on the back of nine wins from their final 12 games.
It looked as if it would count for little when they were thrashed 40-10 by Brisbane in the opening week of the finals and they were on the brink of elimination before Krisnan Inu scored a spectacular, late try to snatch a 22-20 win over the Wests Tigers in Sydney.
They followed that up with a classy 20-12 win over Melbourne, with Shaun Johnson starring, to earn a grand final encounter with Manly.
The Warriors ran into a Sea Eagles side at the top of their game at ANZ Stadium and went down 24-10.
Vatuvei scored a try in the grand final, and 12 in 19 games that season to maintain his extraordinary strike rate, and had flashbacks to that season last week when the club celebrated his 10 years with the Warriors.
"We started really slow like this year," he said.
"It took time for us to gel and, when we got the rhythm, it was hard to stop us.
"When we won two in a row, we felt like we could go on a run and we won four or five in a row," the big wing said.
"But it was a topsy-turvy year."
