Craig Fitzgibbon walked into the sheds at Cbus Super Stadium on Sunday afternoon eight points down to a Titans side whose season had already collapsed, watching his top-four hopes evaporate in real time.

Cronulla won 30-22, and the second half belonged almost entirely to their No. 7. Cameron McInnes crashed over from close range and Hynes converted. Addin Fonua-Blake bashed his way through and Hynes converted again to reclaim the lead. Then came the part that mattered most, a long ball to Sione Katoa in the corner that the winger finished with a full somersault to evade the tackle, followed five minutes later by a cut-out pass that put Ronaldo Mulitalo over for his second and effectively ended the contest. Four second-half tries, and Hynes had his fingerprints on all of them.

None of this was inevitable. His first half was ordinary, he hit the post with the opening conversion and coughed up a simple ball to kill Cronulla’s last attacking chance before the break. The Sharks trailed 16-8 and looked like a side that had lost to St George Illawarra and Canberra in consecutive weeks because it deserved to.

The context sharpens everything. Braydon Trindall dislocated his shoulder scoring against the Raiders in Round 24, and his return date remains unknown. Niwhai Puru has now deputised four times this season and won all four, but Sunday exposed the limits of the arrangement, his back chat handed Gold Coast a penalty, ten metres and the field position from which AJ Brimson scored. He was serviceable. He is not a co-pilot. With Trindall in a sling, Cronulla’s attack has become a single-point-of-failure system, and that point is Hynes.

This is the uncomfortable truth about the Sharks in 2026. They have a genuinely elite forward pack, a winger in Mulitalo who just passed David Peachey on the club’s all-time try list with his 111th, and a defensive structure that holds up under Fitzgibbon.

What they do not have is a second organiser. When Hynes is flat, as he was for forty minutes on Sunday, the whole thing stalls. When he plays like he did after the break, they look like a side that could beat anyone in September.

The maths is brutal from here. Cronulla likely need to beat Parramatta next week, then Melbourne in the final round, and then hope the Dolphins drop one of their last two. No side in the game’s history has won a premiership from outside the top four, which is why Sunday’s two points were worth so much more than the performance that earned them.

Hynes has spent four years being told he goes missing when it counts. He was quiet when it counted on Sunday, and then he wasn’t, and Cronulla’s season is still alive because of it. Over the next fortnight he will have to do it without the flat forty first.