Nathan Cleary weaves magic as undefeated Panthers run riot against Broncos

Penrith has a testing few weeks coming up with games against the Eels, Storm and Roosters on the horizon - but who can stop them at the moment?

It was a game that looked like an arm wrestle with the Brisbane Broncos for almost an hour, before an explosion of points late on gave them a 40-12 win.

There were plenty of highlights, but probably the most special came from the boot of Nathan Cleary, who drilled a low kick halfway across the field for winger Taylan May to make a smooth one-handed pick-up and score.

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"That was like a soccer corner, where they just drill the ball in low and hard," Andrew Johns said on Nine.

It marked 20 consecutive wins at home for Penrith, who remains the only undefeated team in the NRL this year, and it's now the first team since the Storm in 2012-13 to win its first six matches in back-to-back seasons.

"It was a tough game, especially at the start," Cleary said.

Brisbane struck first through a moment of magic from Kotoni Staggs to put Tesi Niu away, before Jarome Luai answered back for the hosts.

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As good as Staggs' effort was on that opener, it was the strike centre's failure to ground the ball on a grubber late in the first that proved extremely costly.

Instead of going into half-time at 12-6 up, it was the reverse scoreline as Scott Sorensen split some lazy defence just before the siren.

"There was a period there where it got pretty ugly for us," Brisbane captain Adam Reynolds said.

"They're the premiers for a reason."

The game did get spicy towards the end, however, with Dylan Edwards and Keenan Palasia sin-binned for exchanging open-hand strikes to the face.

Cleary could be in trouble for a tackle where he left the ground and wrapped his legs around the ball-carrier Billy Walters, while an incident between Koby Hetherington and Jarome Luai saw the former grab the latter's hair.