Welcome to the Phin Review, a regular, independent newsletter about The Dolphins that is not the Australian Financial Review.

This chart would normally be behind the paywall but it neatly demonstrates a point I would like to make:

It feels very much like praising the Dolphins for their turnaround since the last edition of the Phin Review would be ringing the bell at the top of the market. That is the typically silly behaviour we engage in for these club newsletters, signalling the apex of the season with our exuberance and the nadir with our melancholy. Nonetheless, like Kurt Donoghue claiming a loose ball during a seemingly dead play against the Cowboys, I am going to plough ahead.

The Futures on The Almanac have the Dolphins at a near-certainty of making finals and gives them the third best odds of winning the premiership, albeit Penrith are currently twice as likely and this assumes the Phins maintain their current level of form.

Over the course of the season, Redcliffe have scored 0.8 tries more than their opposition per game but over the last six weeks, that number is +2.7, the second best in the league. Their recent form is the second best in the league for net metres and fifth best for net line breaks.

The advanced metrics haven’t caught up with the avalanche of points that are likely to come, now that the team is fit and firing, but has caught the Dolphins’ stingy (or efficient, if you prefer) defence. As it stands, the Dolphins are not quite at the Panthers’ or Warriors’ level but sit in the next group with the Roosters and Sea Eagles, facts reflected in Almanac tables and on the NRL ladder.

Those are all good numbers. They do not quite reach the heights of the back half of 2025, where the team was somewhat better again, but eclipsing that should not be a challenge if the Dolphins are going to have top four aspirations. While the line on the first graph may not continue to rise, if they can keep it going sideways, they’ll be on track.

The run home is full of pot holes, which the Dolphins love to fall in and wallow about (as per rounds 19 through 23 last year), but if they are serious, then they will need to find a way to deal. The three key opponents are the Roosters, the Knights and the Broncos.

The Roosters are putting together a similar resume to the Dolphins. They have similar points difference, Sydney have one more win than Redcliffe and both are competing for the top four on a pile of shootouts. While this most immediate clash will not be the blockbuster we need, thanks to Origin sludge, the return match towards the end of the season will be far more insightful. The Dolphins’ only win over the Roosters came in their very famous first encounter.

The Knights have been bad the entire time the Dolphins have been in the league, but other than their first encounter in 2023, the Knights have won every meeting between these two teams. Their criminally dull style of play seems to put the Dolphins to sleep in defence and the Red Fish sway slowly side-to-side when on the attack and fail to break the Novocastrian line. It is boring and it is infuriating. Put the frauds to the sword.

The Dolphins have only beaten the Broncos once, in a smashing that ruled Brisbane out of the finals in 2024. A reverse smashing in 2025 all but ended the Dolphins’ hopes of making the post-season for the first time. The Broncos are in very sick shape right now and are ripe for another pantsing.

A focus on these three key matches, adding a second win to where only one exists, and a high level of performance across the rest of the schedule and we can start thinking about how far the Dolphins can go in September.

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Quper League

(with a chapeau to Rooner Matty for that one)

It’s the news of the weekend:

Broncos chairman Karl Morris defended the club’s decision to invite Roberts-Smith to the Dragons game.

“He is able to come to watch the Broncos anytime,” Morris said.

“He is like any other citizen out there.

“That’s within his right (to attend a Broncos match) and that’s all I want to say.”

Cool stuff, mate. Doesn’t like something a snivelling weasel would come up with at all!

Actually, that wasn’t the news of the weekend, nor was V’landys’ dithering on the same topic, nor was the Broncos failing to beat the two worst teams in the NRL in back-to-back weeks, extending their losing streak after inviting a man charged with war crimes into the dressing room sheds, nor was failing to explain why such a man’s family was extended any preferential treatment in the first place.

No, we found out on Friday night that it was two tribes going to war; it was Quper League:

This masthead can reveal a rebel Queensland Super League has been discussed in what would represent the biggest political bombshell in the 104-year history1 of the Sunshine State’s premier competition.

Several executives have met over the past month to discuss breaking away from the Queensland Rugby League’s famous Hostplus Cup competition and setting up a rebel 12-team league.

The 12-team Super League proposal includes clubs from Burleigh, Brisbane Tigers, Wynnum Manly, Norths Devils, Ipswich, Townsville, Northern Pride and Papua New Guinea.

Brian Canavan, chairman of the QRL, responded on Saturday morning via press release:

The Queensland Rugby League (QRL) categorically rejects suggestions that a breakaway “Super League-style” competition is being established in Queensland.

Any rugby league competition played in Queensland is to be administered by the QRL as stated in the Australian Rugby League Members Agreement.

…

The scenario described in today’s reporting has not been discussed with the QRL and does not reflect any sanctioned process.

The QRL established a Statewide Competitions Working Group to consider the future structure of the Hostplus Cup, including the potential involvement of the Queensland-based NRL clubs.

Wynnum Manly, Ipswich and Easts all issued denials via social media on the same morning. Then:

One of the Queensland Rugby League’s most respected board members has tendered his resignation in the wake of revelations of a proposed 12-team rebel competition.

This masthead can reveal QRL director Brendan O’Farrell suddenly resigned on Saturday - just 24 hours after it was revealed some Hostplus Cup club officials had held secret talks on a Super League-style breakaway competition.

Also a member of the Broncos Leagues Club board, O’Farrell joined the QRL executive in 2024 and was understood to be supportive of a proposal for the Queensland Cup to be expanded from 15 to 18 teams in 2027 or 2028.

My god, the drama of it all! Except… we have one person writing these stories: Peter “Stinky Pete” Badel.

His original article cites two (2) anonymous club sources to describe the frustrations (some? most? few?) clubs are feeling in the alleged push for Quper League. His story about O’Farrell’s resignation is based on a single leaked email, whose text is quoted below.

In both stories, Badel conflates these events with each other and with Micheal Luck’s recent $2 million bombshell (Luck apparently had nothing to do with Quper League) and/or the REAL REASON Ikin resigned as QRL CEO (Ikin got a different offer from a tech company, one I assume that paid much better). Sometimes reporters do this because they’re hinting at a story that they can’t fully report yet but in this case, when you strip back the hyperbole, it all starts to look thin. Consider the reported facts:

• The QRL began a review of its statewide competitions after last season.

• We have not heard anything further about that process and it is now June.

• Some clubs may or may not have had a discussion about breaking away from the QRL but if they had, they hadn’t worked out who was going to pay for it or any of the other important logistics of such a decision (more on this in a second).

• The QRL does not support a breakaway competition and four of the eight clubs publicly denied their involvement.

• Ben Ikin recently resigned as CEO.

• Brendan O’Farrell also resigned from the board.

That’s about it. Here’s what we don’t know:

• How the QRL’s review is going, when the review was planned to be finished or what the review’s findings are likely to be.

• How a Quper League would be funded or under whose auspices it would operate.

• Whether the other four clubs are sitting pat ahead of an announcement or did not see the value in denying it or did not have the resources available to deal with it on game day (e.g. the Blackhawks issuing their denial on Monday night).

• Whether Brendan O’Farrell is resigning for the stated or for other reasons, and whether that actually matters.

Here’s O’Farrell’s leaked email:

“I have made the tough decision to step down from the QRL Board as the Statewide Cup representative, effective 6th June, 2026,” O’Farrell writes.

“I wish to thank you for the opportunity to represent the Statewide Cup Clubs as a director on the QRL Board.

“It has been a privilege to be entrusted with this role, and to act as your voice on the Board.

“Unfortunately, my time commitments across my other responsibilities have reached a point where I can no longer give this position the attention it deserves.

“I appreciate many who have relayed frustrations to me, and I can assure you that the QRL Board is aware of these concerns and are committed to addressing them.

“Until such time as a replacement director is found the best point of contact will be the QRL chair, Brian Canavan, who I have copied into the email for transparency.”

That can read as someone who is fed up with the QRL fat cats taking forever to make a decision and preparing to become Quper League CEO, and I think that is the impression that Badel wants you to have because it is more interesting, or it can be read as someone who needs to move on from this position - for personal reasons or because they’re sick of people whinging or whatever - while in the middle of a delicate stakeholder negotiation and wants to make a professional, but quick, exit.

I’m not saying this is nothing - smoke, fire, etc - but I’m also not going to spend a lot of time considering the implications until it is more substantive. By the time you read this, Badel may have added another chapter before it runs out of steam, just like they managed to spin the Ipswich Jets would like a NRL licence, please into a week’s worth of content. Look: more 20th team chat, this time for 2029.

To the extent that it exists, it is as likely that Quper League is a negotiating tactic from some of the more fed-up clubs to extract more money, in the mould of the Grand Prix Manufacturer’s Association, as it is a plan to revolutionise rugby league in Queensland and capture all this cash left lying on the table (grand total: 15 cents).

Now, let’s spend a lot of time considering the implications. You can tell this plan wasn’t well thought through. This shouldn’t be a quote that can be given:

“They are clearly not happy with how the QRL is running the game,” said one QRL source. “But who is going to run the rebel comp if the NRL won’t fund it?”

That’s the kind of thing that should be worked out before anyone talks to the Courier Mail. The other source expounded:

“Clubs are taking the matter into their own hands,” he said. “We would want the NRL to govern a Queensland Super League competition. They provide most of the funding to the QRL anyway. This is not a move that will be taken lightly but the QRL is running dead on the future of the competition. The QRL set up a working group last October and have now disbanded that group with nothing to show for their work. Hard decisions need to be made and the QRL won’t make them. The QRL is doing rugby league a disservice in Queensland.”

Given that the QRL has a vote on the ARLC, and the ARLC runs the NRL, and the “interim” CEO of the NRL would very much like the Commission’s support to push through some significant changes in governance, how do you think the politics of that is going to play out? Seems like an inopportune time for this gambit. You might also want some advanced assurance from V’landys, despite him showing precisely no interest in non-NRL rugby league, other than one off-the-cuff comment about directly funding the statewide clubs back when the NRL and QRL were feuding.

Continuing:

“The Hostplus Cup has to stay a second-tier comp and it can do that with the NRL clubs fielding teams. If the QRL keeps the doors closed to the NRL clubs, they increase the risk of an NRL reserve grade reforming. That will mean the Hostplus Cup is history because it will be a third-tier league – and there will be no funding to fly teams around the state. The QRL needs to have the Cowboys, Titans, Dolphins and Broncos in the Queensland Cup to safeguard the competition for the long term. If an NRL reserve grade starts up, the Queensland Cup is essentially dead.”

This is all true. I’ve been saying it for years but without making such a mess of my underwear. While some have switched sides, the front remains exactly where it was.

Quper League isn’t going to solve this. Partly this is because no one has addressed what happens with junior and women’s footy - worth remembering that neither the Dolphins nor Blackhawks could scrape a women’s team together for this season but they think they can pull this off? - but the mix of clubs is wrong. The mooted eight would be the ones who see themselves as above league average but they don’t have what a Quper League needs.

If you wanted to have a theoretically commercially viable Quper League, you wouldn’t bring the Norths Devils and Bishop Park with you. Last year’s grand final attendance, played just down the road from Nundah at Redcliffe, between the very successful Devils and the Burleigh Bears, shows that the fanbase just isn’t there to sustain a key place in a smaller league. It wasn’t that much better in 2024 when they were playing the Dolphins. Further, no one cares about Easts. We all know you’re going to drop the Brisbane thing eventually. Shane Richardson is gone and you aren’t going to the NRL. The Broncos and the Dolphins will soak up any Brisbane-based attention in this competition.

What you want are clubs with a defined catchment, and the possibility of turning out a crowd, and a half decent place to play, so it looks like a real semi-professional league with a view to developing some broadcast revenue. Why does that matter? I was recently reading Nate Silver’s recounting of his time running FiveThiryEight:

The core mistake, though, was that almost nobody was thinking about how to make FiveThirtyEight a viable business. We had essentially no dedicated business people or “product” people or anyone else whose job description depended on the site being economically viable. We never developed the muscle memory or the infrastructure to be a commercial product.

Relying on the largesse of a better capitalised overlord leaves you exposed when the winds of fortune change funding priorities. A slimmed down QCup should be built to be able shoulder some of its burden commercially, even if it is mostly funded by the NRL.

There’s no planned team between Redcliffe and Townsville, which is a drive of 1300km that would take you past at least half a million people, and there’s no team between Wynnum and Burleigh, a much shorter drive through much denser suburbia, albeit that is a deficiency of the current competition but one that the status quo will find easier to address.

The Sunshine Coast Falcons are playing in a soon-to-be Olympic stadium and are based in the third largest city in the state but couldn’t make the cut. The state government just spent tens of millions rebuilding Browne Park and you’re immediately going to put the LNP offside by ditching the Capras. So much work was put in to get the Clydesdales back on the field, with their history older than the entire Gold Coast, they just got the lease on the ground from the government and we’re going to put that in the bin, apparently.

Papua New Guinea just got tens of millions of Australian taxpayer dollars for rugby league. If the Chiefs wants to use QCup as reserve grade, that’s fine, but from a Queensland perspective, if the choice is between a country that already has the resources and a town that would serve our strategic purposes, I don’t think that’s that a hard choice.

Meanwhile, Burleigh, whose suburban ground is named after a Country politician who was premier for all of seven months and played union, and Townsville, whose field is taped onto a pub-slash-casino, are included despite the fact that they would be directly competing against the Young Guns and the reserve Titans, who play in the same towns.

What are we doing here?

There are formats that could address the unwieldiness of an 18 team Cup. Consider promotion and relegation. The usual failure of such systems is either the commercial gulf between leagues (as in the PL) and/or the shallow depth of the labour market (as in the SL). Considering these facts in advance would help design a system that reduces cost, sharpens the top end while maintaining heritage and representation across the state.

A ten team Queensland League 1 could play 18 rounds with a more focussed talent pool with six teams going to the finals for the Cup, while the winner of the eight-team Queensland League 2 would get promoted for the wooden spooner of QL1 after a 14 round season and there could be a fun play-off between the QL2 runner-up and the QL1 ninth team. We’d also have the benefit of laughing at the Twotans and Twoncos being relegated.

Less travel, less games per club, putting players in more competitive situations, putting clubs where the need to be and more inventory to sell Kayo to pad out their September schedule: there’s food for thought.

We (well, I) here at The Maroon Observer are always looking for ways to improve the end user experience for you, the reader

Once upon a time, it was possible to create some profile for yourself by simply being an above average poster on NRL Twitter. While I still like posting, now to Bluesky than Twitter because I’m a lib, it does not have the same cut through. Notwithstanding that, I’ve been doing this for a while now and the fact that no one has pointed out how old that schtick has become, tells you something about the potential audience.

Fellow traveller posted a… I don’t even know what Substack calls them… a note? identifying other pillars of the extended Rugby League Perverts Substack Network. At least, that’s what I called it. I never sought anyone’s permission to call them “perverts”.

This is worthwhile doing from time to time because it is impossible for anyone to find everything that’s going on, even in the narrow world of rugby league writing on the internet.

I was taken aback with how much better Substack’s social function has become, even though this presages an imminent enshittification of the platform, and that real human beings, and not aspiring Linkedin influencers, seemed to be using it. I will be trying to post more notes (…?) in future.

Between that, Bluesky, which is more for me than you, and an Instagram account that I am getting the hang of, that’s the social media footprint of this operation. I refuse to engage in camera facing short form video, even though that would likely put this newsletter on a rocket to the stars, and there is also a Youtube channel that I do not have time to do anything with that, in theory, I could also post Reels to as Youtube Shorts™ but often forget to do so. There are too many places to be, none of them “good” unless you want to play by specifically ambiguous, esoterically precarious rules.

I do not and this is all tiring, so that’s what I recommend that you subscribe to the newsletter direct. You won’t miss anything and all the good stuff goes in the newsletter. The rest are tidbits to lead you to this box.

Around the grounds

Country 20 defeated City 18 (W). Country took the early lead, going 20-4 into the half time but forfeited their right to the ball through most of the second half, between errors and penalties (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), and letting City back into the game. The Mets blew through the line and could strip the opposition for numbers but left themselves too much work to do and ran out of time.

Country 34 defeated City 30 (M). After an early run of scoring for Country, it looked like it would be their day. City were not making the defensive efforts, however, once they got off the bus and got to work, City levelled the scores. Country still controlled the game through the middle of the field and managed to find more scoring opportunities. City staged a late comeback, as was the theme of the day, but ran out of time. Country complete the double, reversing their fortunes last year.

Devils 18 defeated Tigers 16 (W). This is the Tigers’ first loss since May 2024. Norths and Easts traded blows all game in a high quality affair before a binning of Narikah Orchard for a silly shot on the Devils’ kicker tipped the match in Norths’ favour. It almost looked like they’d blown the advantage before Tayla Sykes sprinted down the field for the winning score. Great tone setter for the competition.

Statewide split screening. The women’s Magpies kept the Pride at arm’s length all afternoon without completing dominating. A worthwhile first round performance. The Dolphins kicked the crap out of the Clydesdales, as expected and ending any shortlived speculation that Western had turned a corner, and Tweed did something likewise to PNG. Dudley Dotoi exploded out of the blocks to score first for Townsville and got the second try going, on the way to the Blackhawks dusting the Tigers. As much as Norths-Easts was high quality, Western-Tweed was a drag with the Clydesdales coming up on top.

Dolphins 40 defeated Cowboys 14. Did someone say, “finals footy”? Anyone? No? Look, we may just be past the mid point of the season but this is Origin sludge, so time has no meaning so I can look forward to finals if I want. The Dolphins look great and can now win tough(ish) games. That wasn't quite what this was, with six points awarded by the bunker out of insanity and another dozen from laziness (there's those Cotter habits Billy loves). The Cowboys look like a team thats going to scrape into the eight. Again, something like an achievement given where they were.

Titans 28 defeated Broncos 20. The Broncos’ sparkly jerseys made it look like they were staring in a Rock Eisteddfod production about rugby league. While my initial instinct is to belittle the Titans for not acting like they’ve been here before, the Broncos deserve what they get for this one. Brisbane had superior ball and yardage but pissed away every opportunity, and their season, while Gold Coast played their grand final. Since 2020, the Titans are 7-7 against the Broncos. That’s the third best record the Titans have against any club in that period, behind the Tigers (6-2), who have gotten three spoons in that time, and their other rivals, the Warriors (7-4).

Falcons 29 defeated Bears 22 (M). If the Falcons are the luckiest team in the QCup, then they look good while doing it. Mason Peut, Taine Couper, tip of the cap to you, gentlemen. Lots of long range production and incisive play near the line, the Falcons are exciting and fast and the Bears couldn’t keep up.

Super League highlight sprint, round 13. Leeds beat St Helens after David Klemmer got himself binned with the scores levelled and less than 10 to go. Remember Kyle Feldt? Mapapalangi was a bright spot for Cas as they fell short against Leigh. Warrington won a spiteful, referee-filled encounted with Hull FC, the latter really struggling this year. Bradford beat York with some extra polish in the battle of newly promoted teams. Jim Lenihan’s tenure at Huddersfield is off to a poor start, crushed by Toulouse with the first try scored by Ethan Quai-Ward for his new club. Wakefield and Hull KR played another aggro affair with two send offs in separate incidents - dunno why everyone in Super League is so cranky - but Wakefield had some superlative touches in attack to pick off the upset. Only (?) 12,000 turned out for Wigan’s visit to Catalans in Paris. Huge swathes of the field were covered in confetti, the main broadcast angle was weirdly high and the Warriors crunched the Dragons with some globetrotter shit. As a consolation, Sol Faataape’s mullet is outrageous.

Intermission

If Zac Laybutt gets any worse, it's going to be RONALDO (Philitonga) TIME.

Book club

Unless you’re a Dolphins fan, or maybe a very exuberant Cowboys fan, it is clearly not Queensland’s year. As a result, I am beginning mental preparations for an 8-0 wipeout across the full spectrum of State of Origin. This is mostly planning the evasions I will have to employ to avoid incurring permanent psychic damage from tedious Queensland is in crisis takes online.

The Ashley Klein debacle came very close to being one of Queensland’s great victories. Had the Maroons a better option than Jojo Fifita, the Blues wouldn’t have had such an easy time down the right hand side in the late game and that might have been enough to stop one of the tries. C’est le sport.

On one hand, having come so close, it makes sense to run it back with the same team. The baffling exception is the promotion of Briton Nikora to cover the reshuffle caused by Pat Carrigan’s absence but at least, Finefeuiaki seems to be on the bench now. On the other, if this team gets a case of the 2025 Canberra Raiders finals (which is where I am), then we’re in trouble. Slater is probably sufficiently skilled at vibes management to avoid that (I would not be) but that’s the test he has to pass.

A brave showing is not sufficient. That card has been played in game 1. The Maroons have to win. If they don’t, there may be nothing standing in the way of a Blunami.

History provides some perspective. I have spent the last few weeks working my way through The Greatest Game Under the Sun, a solidly detailed history of Queensland rugby league written in the late 80s in the style of Haddan’s Our Game or Heads and Middleton’s Centenary of Rugby League.

The focus is primarily on Queensland’s representative fortunes in interstate and intercity games and hosting tourists, as well as Queensland’s impact at the international level (highly variable), while the BRL and other club leagues are given minimal attention. There are scattered details about off-field matters, which are fascinating and support my various long-run hypotheses about the history of Australian rugby league.

The main takeaway is that Queensland really stank in some decades, regularly losing games by 30 points when that was like losing by 50. When rugby league first started, and all of the international calibre players were based in Sydney and supplanted by 15 freshly professionalised Wallabies in 1909, Queensland didn’t have much of a response in the interstate series. It took until the mid-1920s to find a foothold. In the 1960s, as the wheels start to fall off and talent migration becomes a flood2, Queensland could not compete. This was killing the Interstate series long before Origin was mooted.

With 15 of the last 20 series under our belts, it pays to remember that sometimes New South Wales has to win. Even more rarely, they have to win a lot, to feel like they’re still part of this, even if they don’t get it. You can’t win 100% of the time. Maybe this is a year we take some medicine and make it 15 from 21. If you want your children to have this too, then what comes is for the greater good.

The other thing is you don’t have to do is watch the disaster unfold.3 The Expanse comes in book form and TV form, both of which are good (I am rewatching the latter now that For All Mankind has finished, while two-thirds of the way through book 4) and either may be preferable to watching annihilation.

Upcoming slate

The NRL is in peak Origin sludge, so even the highly rated Dolphins-Roosters match will be skewed by team list announcements, especially if Katoa is in NSW camp. Titans-Tigers might be fun but it is far more likely to be bad. Then again, if Gold Coast can win, we wonder if they can close in on Brisbane on the ladder, who don’t look like winning another game this year.

As usual, the other leagues have more interesting match ups that aren’t sludgified but you’ll have to ferret those out at odd hours or different platforms. I like Cutters-Magpies in the QCup for chaos potential, Devils-Bears in the QDub and St Helens-Warrington for a who is going to lose in the semis preview.

Support The Maroon Observer

I wrote about the Cowboys. They’re not the most interesting in team in the league right now but in a pretty good spot nonetheless.

I will write about the Dolphins later this week and then, if I can muster the fortitude or get a response to my email to the club (subject line: Broncos host accused war criminal), the Broncos.

The club newsletters feature plenty of neat charts and notes on the NRLQ team (which I eyeball the Cowboys as the second best of the four) for the paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get full access to the Pony Pic, Bov Bull and Phin Rev, The Almanac and The Dataset™, and commenting privileges.

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If you don’t want Substack clipping your ticket or to commit to an ongoing subscription, Ko-Fi is also available for one-off tips.

Stats pop

On the off chance that you were paying close attention to the Super League Elo ratings, I have added ten seasons of pre-modern matches (1986/87 through 1995/96 seasons) to seed the Super League era ratings. This follows what has been done with the NSWRL/NRL ratings. If you see a substantial change, that’s why.

Nickelware

Pretty good chance that the Dolphins take their first pennant this year, after three consecutive years in second place.

Read this

• Campo - Rugby league must rise to Kane Evans’s level of courage

• SportsIndustryAU - Boomtown for the NRL! The Networks & Streamers come out to play

• Storm Machine - Game 755 – S29E14 Review

• Rugby League Writers - Panthers Scrum Try, How Ponga Beat The Storm Slide & Roaming Ronaldo

• 🎧 Panic World - How the internet destroyed TV (and itself)

Notes

• Former NRL enforcer Kane Evans comes out as gay, reveals dark 20-year internal battle with his sexuality. The thing that always strikes me about people coming out as gay, trans, queer is how much better they feel about themselves and life after: “I’ve had people blackmail me. I’ve had people try to throw me under the bus, I’ve had people try to deflect their problems by trying to out me. And it just built up a lot of shame, and fear and guilt within myself. Now I’ve spoken about it, I’ve shattered all those chains. They’ve lost their power. I feel like coming and speaking to you today, fear, shame, guilt – all of that, I’ve cut ties with all that. I feel peace within, and I feel like a weight has lifted off my shoulders.” Great stuff. He won’t be the last.

• Maroons U19 teams announced: men and women. Off an undefeated QDub campaign with the Tigers, Enah Desic headlines the women’s team at halfback while we’ll see what the Cowboys’ Taj Lateo, who kicked the game winner in the Mal Meninga final for Townsville, has to offer for the men. A reminder that Darius Boyd is the U19s men’s coach.

• Trai Fuller extends to ‘27

• Margin watch: through 13 rounds, 2026 has fallen behind 2021, even with the Tigers’ thumping, 18.2 plays 17.1. Still in front of 1995 (17.0).

• I enjoyed my first experience of watching City-Country live, so think the QRL made the right move taking it off the grand final day agenda. I think it’s a compliment to everyone involved that both games seemed to be played at a level comparable to the senior statewide comps.

Welcome to the Bovine Bulletin, a regular, independent newsletter about the North Queensland Cowboys.

At the risk of setting myself up for even more failure of augury where the North Queensland Cowboys are concerned, it looks like the Cowboys are much better than expected this season. They may even qualify as decent.

It is an even numbered year, so Todd Payten has the team running well and has been doing so for long enough that it no longer qualifies as Payten’s Patented Purple Patch and seems to be real.

The Cowboys are hardly a steel curtain of defence, as evidenced by the failed shootout with the Eels, but they are a team with a high floor (best in the league) and a high level of median performance (currently second best in the league, and third best over the last six rounds).

The ruleset has simplified game plans and the Cowboys can run fast and in a more or less straight line down the middle of the field and then wait for asphyxiation to take its toll on the defence. It doesn’t require a great deal of skill or creativity, which are in short supply, unless Scott Drinkwater is feeling frisky.

This is not foolproof, especially if the opposition de-friskifies Scott Drinkwater and as Origin takes its annual toll, but it is easy enough to execute and punch a ticket to the finals. After the Raiders loss, the Cowboys are still two-to-one odds of making the post-season (68%). While this may seem like a low bar to hurdle over, it is a lot higher than it was looking in February.

What has tended to separate North Queensland from the NRL’s good teams, of which there are very few this year, has been their lack of seriousness. Even this has been improving as the season has progressed - witness the Roosters win.

As it stands, the Cowboys are 8-5. This is only good enough for ninth on the ladder with the bye points factored in, and the Bovine Boys are somehow still a week away from their first bye. This will be welcome ahead of the two toughest asks on the calendar and then another bye to recuperate.

To play the schedule game, the Cowboys have 11 games left. Of these, chalk up Origin-period losses to the Panthers and Warriors, split the Dolphins series, and drop one or two against the Seagles and Roosters and you have a realistic path to 15-9 or 14-10. With a helping of luck, they might even approach 2022’s 17-7 season. Irrespective of how the Cowboys arrive in September, it will likely be carrying more wins than losses.

All teams have strengths and weaknesses in their gameday lineups. According to the advanced stats, the Cowboys’ back five is one of the most productive in the league. Of the crop of young backs that's come through in the last few years, Tom Chester was not the one I expected to make the step up to solid first grader but he has. This has the added bonus of providing some cover for Jaxon Purdue’s sophomore slump. Purdue has only posted one Z above 30 since round 7 while Chester has consistenly batted over 100.

In fact, every Cowboys platoon is above league average by Wins Above Reserve Grade, and combine for the NRL’s best total, but the eye test suggests there is room for improvement. It is far too late in the season to consider this but the gap between where they are now and a premiership is probably one more good forward. Tom Mikaele has been playing that role and long may it continue, with support from Jason Taumalolo, and Heilum Luki is coming along, but one more mean bastard could put this side over the top. Maybe there’s something to consider if Payten would like to put together back-to-back good seasons.

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Rugby league doesn't love you

A while ago, when my eldest was four and the youngest was a toddler, we were leaving Bunnings. It was a ten minute drive home and the youngest was upset. Operating in a base state of exhaustion and frustrated that I was being yelled at for something I could do nothing about, I lost it: yelling, slamming the steering wheel, real jerk-off behaviour that lasted maybe 30 seconds. I stopped when I heard my eldest trying to soothe her sister, exactly what I should have been doing. It is a sobering moment when a four year old shows more emotional maturity than you, the ostensible grownup.

Parenting, it seems within my limited experience, is an unending series of small humiliations until you are blessedly shuffled off this mortal coil. There is love and triumph and relief but mostly, it is humbling yourself before the human condition. Do you have any idea just how much shit I have had to clean up? Worse, I feel like I have gotten off lightly on the fecal front, so if nothing else, this experience lends itself to a degree of self-awareness, a wider perspective on life and a deep understanding of the effects of fatigue on the human body.

From time to time, the NRL causes me to, using the parlance of our times, “crash out”. This is not merely being upset or frustrated but finding yourself on the express train to a psychotic break. The 2023 grand final was diappointing in the extreme but that was the kind of disappointment you sign up for when you get into sports. This kind of crash out is much worse. The emotion overwhelms and threatens the tether to reality. We are beyond rationality. Many a radicalisation has started here and when you contemplate retributive acts of terrorism against Phillip Street, it is time to take a deep breath and have a lie down.

When you spend as much time on this as I do, it is very easy to get too wrapped up and lose sight of the forest for the weird-looking parasitic plants harvesting all the nutrients from the idiots that thought we were all in this forest together for the betterment of the ecosystem. The 2019 grand final was such a moment, as the Roosters’ trainer was man of the match. The postponement of the 2021 World Cup, with the background of the godawful six again season, was another. The 2021* NRLW semi final similarly triggered me for reasons I don't even remember. Ashley Klein sending off Kalyn Ponga was the most recent.

Within a day or so, I was concocting conspiracies of V’landys’ very real influence on the media, the denial that the NRL issues specific instructions to the referees on how to manage games, Ash Klein’s insane commitment to the bit and the Assassination of Archduke Tolutau Koula. I realised that while this may have some truth to it, it is also too crazy to be able to express, even in this newsletter of crankery. Declaring open season on referees was probably not going to be productive. I recalled my own maxim: rugby league doesn’t love you.

It was time to have a lie down.

The time spent away varies. I got over the Broncos being “dudded” in 2021* by not watching the women’s grand final and that was it. I took the last eight weeks of the 2021 regular season off but watched the finals. The Klein incident was likely in the ballpark of I am too pissed off and I don’t want to hear any of your stupid fucking opinions about this and normal business could resume after the weekend once everyone else had moved on to something else.

This enforced vacation only applied to the professional tier of the sport. I don’t have an issue with the community game. The Ipswich Jets’ roadshow was coming to Dayboro, one of a dozen cosy towns on the limits of the Southeast that delineate city from country, and an easy half hour drive from home. Following the kids nagging me about going to the footy1, this seemed ideal.

On a cracking Sunday, we had lunch at the bakery in town, went to the game, had the easiest time in the world parking thanks to the pleasant volunteers from the Dayboro Cowboys, sat in an amphitheatre at the foot of Mount Mee and watched a catastrophic upset. One of the worst teams in rugby league overcame one of the best teams in Cup, a stunning victory in the mould of Tsushima or Midway, masterminded by their former coaches, the Walker Brothers.

The Cydesdales held the ball for most of the first thirty minutes and decided the game then and there. The Jets’ Lachlan Ilias, showing the skill that has brought him to Dayboro, took nearly forty minutes to engineer a try by repeatedly running his edge out of space. Julian Christian cussed out the opposition loudly enough to hear it from the sidelines. Western’s backline had one of those games they’ll tell their kids about.

There are worse ways to spend a weekend than letting your children safely run around somewhere not near you, enjoying a flat white and surprisingly high quality football in peace and quiet, with green vistas and fresh air. With a semblance of balance restored, it was time to return to the NRL and get into the content mines. Now to take a big sip of water and check the news:

Broncos host accused war criminal, Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith after shock Dragons defeat

Ben Roberts-Smith was a surprise visitor to the Broncos’ dressing room after the club’s shock loss to the Dragons, with the Victoria Cross recipient revealing the touching reason for the invite.

Excuse me?

What a week

A lesser writer would make an appeal to you to subscribe to improve their mental health. I am lesser still than that and won’t even link it to my mental health.

The Broncos have crossed that line between everyday villainy and cartoonish super-villainy

Being a Broncos fan requires a degree of making peace with evil. The Broncos are the richest in a sport whose politics do not venerate the wealthy. Worse, the club is owned by the Murdochs, whose own politics have made the world a worse place to live in ways unavailable even to the average billionaire.

On the substrate of grime, cheating and violence against women commonly associated with the National Rugby League, add strata of success and arrogance, the Super League thing, getting every Friday night game, rehabilitating Matt Lodge, Ezra Mam and yeah, we get it. It’s a real shit tiramisu. They hate us.

Friday nights are scheduled the way they are because the Broncos are the most watched team in the league, something like Super League had to happen, I wasn’t thrilled with Matt Lodge, he sucked, he’s now been at six NRL clubs and everyone has forgotten why they were pissed off in the first place, and other than the cosiness with the Courier Mail, News’ ownership is so arms-length that it barely has an impact on the day-to-day. We all make moral compromises somewhere. That’s life. No ethical consumption, etc, etc.

Having “war criminal” in the same headline as “Broncos” is a depth that even the White-Seibold era did not manage to plumb. The whole story, as reported by the Courier Mail, as follows:

Former Australian soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has made a surprise appearance at Suncorp Stadium.

Roberts-Smith was spotted in Brisbane’s dressing room after Sunday’s shock 30-26 loss to the Dragons.

The Victoria Cross recipient has a relationship with Broncos welfare manager Adam Walsh, who is also a former SAS soldier.

The Broncos became the first team to lose to the Dragons this season.

Roberts-Smith was invited into the sheds after the game and said he was grateful for the Broncos’ hospitality.

“The Broncos invited my daughters today because of all the things they have been through and we were very grateful,” he said.

Roberts-Smith has been charged with five counts of war crime murder. The former soldier is expected to fight the charges.

The Ninefax papers followed up with:

The Broncos refused to comment on the matter, but sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed Roberts-Smith had not been a guest of the club, did not visit the club’s chairman’s lounge during the game, and that most of the players had no idea he was in their inner sanctum.

Senior figures at the NRL were unaware Roberts-Smith had been invited into the Broncos’ sheds, but later said it was a matter for the club who they wanted to invite to their dressing room.

Setting aside the culture war, the absolute best case scenario for the Brisbane Broncos’ front office is that they don’t have control over who is around the players. At some point, long before game day, someone should have asked what this guy, who is charged with several counts of homicide-related crimes, would be doing here - imagine how anyone on a murder charge would be treated! - and who approved his kids getting passes. It’s not like “Roberts-Smith” shouldn’t ring alarm bells.

Note the carefully curated non-comment from the club that specifies the places he wasn’t, suggesting access to other places that fans who aren’t accused of war crimes aren’t usually allowed.

The worst case scenario is that the club is supporting an alleged war criminal through his trial and, by association, so are the fans and sponsors of the club. I, for one, did not sign up for that. The courts will rule what they may but I would humbly suggest a man who fought multiple defamation cases, backed by the richest and most powerful people in the country, and lost them all so badly that he is now the target of a criminal action, may not be a PR slam dunk.2 If his children have suffered, I can think of one man directly responsible for that.

I consider myself smart and I spend a lot of time around people who are also smart, so despite my self-conception as an irony-poisoned cynic, I find myself floored by acts of stupidity more often than I would like (sometimes by those very same smart people). This genre of idiocy more galling to me than just about anything else.

Cast your mind back to 2019 when bushfires ravaged the nation. Scott Morrison famously claimed that he, in fact, “doesn’t hold a hose, mate,” and refused to return from holiday in Hawaii. Eventually, he was badgered back to Australia, where he was the most hated man in the country.

What was infuriating about this historical footnote is how stupid it was. We all understood that you personally do not fight the fires, Scott. We all understood that your presence in Australia is purely symbolic. We also expect our leaders to show empathy and provide reassurance in times of crisis. How does a man, whose background is in marketing and has risen to the top job in the country, not understand this?

In 2021, two years after this incident and as Morrison’s government was in the process of fumbling the pandemic off to the states, the Parramatta Eels tried to steal the then-Prime Minister from the Sharks, in a widely panned post that is still up on Twitter. The Eels would later sign Jack de Belin, who had been recently acquitted of rape, and be sponsored by James Hardie, who fought paying out compensation to victims of asbestosis. They’ve made some shocking decisions there.

This example of the Eels’ stupidity is ordinary, run of the mill, NRL idiocy, like writing a character reference on club letterhead for Brett Finch. What the Broncos have done is worse by several orders of magnitude.

Morrison was the prime minister. De Belin was found not guilty before being signed by Parramatta. James Hardie are at least paying money to launder its image. What is Ben Roberts-Smith or his kids bringing? Who is that for? How did you let this happen? Do you have a basic understanding of what’s going on? Am I taking crazy pills here?

As a result, I did something I never do: I emailed the club to complain. It would be nice if everyone involved in this fuck-up was fired but I expect this is the last we’ll hear about it.

I need a lie down.

Intermission

The broadcast didn't pick up the kid doing sick wheelies on his ebike down the sideline.

Around the grounds

New South Wales 12 defeated Queensland 4 (W). Pick your poison: series sweep with a total margin of 17 points compared to a 2-1 series with a 36 point margin. It’s probably about the only thing you want to take away from this particularly low ebb. That and I can’t believe it’s taken the Blues this long to get here. Not expecting much different next year.

Dragons 30 defeated Broncos 26. This was entirely foreseeable, if on the unlikely side, and anyone trying to sell you on this being the biggest upset of the season doesn’t know ball. I didn’t watch the game, because I have self-respect, but was annoyed at having to delete my snarky question as to whether the men’s Dragons or women’s Dragons would win a game first. The men managed it, by the same score, in equally annoying fashion, as they did last year.

Raiders 26 defeated Cowboys 12. Let’s hear from the fans:

It was equally pleasing to see this defence put the clamps on Scott Drinkwater so clampingly. He’s given better sides more difficult times, but Canberra controlled him in two ways. Firstly their middle did not quit in defence. The Raiders worked hard to win contact and reduce the chances he had to run. They remained aggresive throughout, and their ability to fill in to the backrow spot when Young or Hosking had to make an extra effort was pleasing. The centres and wingers too were extremely effective at identifying Drinkwater as the ‘out-the-back’ man in defence, and jumping him as he got the ball. Timoko and Tamale should be hailed for this.

Upcoming slate

I am undecided how much NRL I can stomach this weekend. Oh, Saturday is all Queensland derbies? Presumably for Queensland Day, which I'm guessing the state government had a hand in, what with Mega Round and other cringe (they massacred my idea). Christ, they got the AFL and netball on board too. Great, that’ll be fantastic during the Origin sludge fest, especially Broncos-Titans. Fine, I’ll probably watch that.

The Queensland women’s premiership also gets underway this weekend. Last year, Easts Tigers swept the women’s statewide competitions and they’ve already won one of the junior comps this year. Burleigh won the other and Souths Logan have been strong, so expecting some combination of those three with a North Queensland team to be in the mix.

Keep an eye out for Wigan, fresh off their Challenge Cup annihilation of Hull KR, smashing the everloving piss out of Catalans in Paris. The Stade Jean-Bounin holds 20,000 people and is next door to freshly crowned European champions, Paris St Germain.

Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer

Asking if you enjoyed reading this newsletter seems bold, given I had an awful time writing it. Nonetheless, with a round of club newsletters about to drop over the next couple of weeks, you may want to consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get full access to the Pony Pic, Bov Bull and Phin Rev, The Almanac and The Dataset™, and commenting privileges.

UPGRADE TO PAID

If you don’t want Substack clipping your ticket or to commit to an ongoing subscription, Ko-Fi is also available for one-off tips.

Thank you to Rebecca for upgrading to an annual subscription this week. If I’d known there were women reading, I… wouldn’t have done anything different. The newsletter is what it is. Welcome aboard.

Stats pop

The NRLM, QCup and NSW Cup now have advanced metrics pages that are available to paid subscribers through The Almanac. The women’s will come about during their respective seasons when half a dozen rounds have been played. If the pages haven’t been updated to round 13 by the time you read this, they will be shortly after.

For the Big M, I have also included a link to a spreadsheet that has a lot of detailed season-to-date data with some simple filters if you feel inclined to make some historical comparisons, e.g. “with a net possession flow of -4m34s, since 2019, only two NRLM teams have given up as much ball through 12 rounds as the 2026 Broncos: the 2020 Broncos at -6m22s and the 2021 Bulldogs at -3m37s” (this is bad) or “since 2003, the 2026 Panthers have the ninth best net metre flow at +292 in the NRLM through 12 rounds but the 2026 Roosters are ahead of them in seventh, gaining, on average, 321 more metres than their opponents. By comparison, the best non-Vlandoball mark was set by the 2007 Sharks, at +234” (this is good).

Next will be to work on player ratings for Super League and see if I can find a useful way to do international rankings3. Club pages will get an overhaul during the off-season to incorporate proper WARG calculations and advanced metrics. An Origin page will also make an appearance at some point. Maybe once Wikipedia is updated with Queensland-NSW results from 1893 to 1907.

Nickelware

One of the great things about maintaining your own stats is that you can tabulate what’s important to you. That’s really what nickelware is all about.

The other fun thing is that if you don’t like the way something goes, you can just delete it from the record. Want the Storm to have two extra premierships to annoy people? Done. Want to take even more premierships away from the Storm because you think there’s still something fishy going on? Sure. Ashley Klein has an AI hallucination about how workplace health and safety operates4 during a game? Struck from the record.

With innovations like this, I still can’t believe I haven’t been considered for any of the going CEO roles.

Read this

• Eye Test - Brisbane’s discipline is digging a hole they can’t attack out of

• The Sportress - Six, Again: The Vlando line

• Storm Machine - Game 754 – S29E13 Review

• What You Get Is What You See - The best day of the rugby league year is here

• Rugby League Writers - Fa’alogo In Defence, Young Down The Shortside & The Footy People Want

• Our friends at have started a Substack. One to check out if you want gripes about data inconsistency in Australian sport or a history of Docklands stadium.

Notes

• Contrary to previous reporting, QRL’s City-Country is this Saturday with the women’s game kicking off at 11.30 and the men’s at 1.30 at Sunshine Coast Stadium. Up the Metropolitans.

• Don't forget to get in early for your Queensland Day shopping. The shops are going to be total chaos if you leave it to Friday.

• Record TV Ratings for Origin I. It didn’t break 4 million but people clearly love their slop. It ain’t changing any time soon. Conversely, Origin III hits big ratings, but series falls slightly year on year. Maybe finding the ceiling for the women's game? Or do they just need some set restarts to get going?

• Welcome to the hotseat, Kieran Foran.

• Phins: Molo powers on with new two-year deal

• Titans extend Jets affiliation to ‘27

• Country week venues announced: Ayr, Blackwater, Clermont, Gympie, Innisfail, Roma and Warwick.

• As noted above, Wigan beat Hull KR in the Challenge Cup. Googling it the week before, one of the first results were concerns about the crowd numbers, which it turns out were justified, hitting an 80 year low.

• Reliably informed that Bob's Bulk Booze does exist in Brisbane. Fans of cheap liquor rejoice.

• Dunno what this means: “Some of the Gold Coast Titans' biggest stars have joined forces with principal partner, The Lottery Office, in a new TV Commercial for FutureBall, which recently launched as Australia's most 'winnable lottery.'“

That was a travesty

I am going to need some time. Probably a week or so will do it, with a few deep breaths, maybe a long run and a couple of beers. Perhaps I will read Nick Campton’s column about the game needing a good Origin.

Because that was an all-timer by Ash Klein.

Oh well, no one will worry about how Queenslanders feel.

As a result of my needing to practice self-care and distance myself, you will not be treated to me making fun of Ethan Strange’s Hitler mustache or Mat Thompson replacing Spencer Leniu with Victor Radley in his awful pre-programmed patter or offering a grovelling apology to Sam Walker. I will not even attempt to riposte comparisons to Sualili’s send off a couple of years ago that will be as dreadful and poorly thought-through as the Blues’ offence was for 60 minutes of that game. Nor will I insist that this being the Blues' greatest comeback, along with 2021 as their greatest series win, says something about New South Wales.

Everything after this point was written before last night, so cue whiplash change in tone in 3… 2… 1…

Remember to click on things

My oldest man gripe is that no one bloody clicks on things anymore. This may not seem like a problem for you, the satisfied forcefed algorithm enjoyer, but for those of us in the content mines, we would really like it if you clicked and explored the internet under your own power and curiosity to find new things, broaden your horizons and generally become better people.

If the rumours about what Google is planning to do to search are true, then we’re all fucked:

First, yes, this would be the final nail in the coffin for digital media as we know it. It would effectively wipe out search traffic, and by extension, ad revenue for basically every website that relies on those things to exist. For those who have never had to care about internet traffic, in some for or another, it is the only way online businesses make money. While Google has continued to tweak what it requires from websites to rank in their search algorithm, it has stayed remarkably consistent as a metric and there is no real replacement for it. Even during the peak Facebook traffic era, search was good enough for entire publications to rely on it — and keep their ad-based businesses running — in between viral hits. Now that social traffic has dropped to zero, Google Zero would wipe out everything else left.

This newsletter is not my day job and I don’t get ad revenue, so this is not strictly speaking the end of the world for me, even if it ushers in a period of cultural decay and informational stasis that may threaten what makes us fundamentally human.

I prefer to rely on subscriptions for my side hustle because the only intermediary between me and the reader is the email service they use. That is why every single edition of The Maroon Observer includes this box:

It is hard to get attention in a world where Google doesn’t function, social media elevates slop and no one wants to do the work to find something novel. Your subscription, free or paid, goes a little way to pushing back against that.

Around the grounds

Dolphins 30 defeated Raiders 22. Even if we weren’t entering the sludgiest part of the calendar, I didn’t think a whole lot of this game, mostly for Vlandoball reasons, and don’t think there’s a lot to take away here. Brad Schneider should not have been allowed to score that try in a first class match and I like Tevita Naufahu. Instead, let’s hear from the fans:

The right side was the most problematic. Four of the five Dolphins tries came on that side of the uprights, and most involved a torture of Daine Laurie that seemed so cruel that Isaiya Katoa decided to inexplicably not attack the weakness for near 30 minutes of the second half. Thank Christ for the Geneva Convention, otherwise this could have got messy.

Dolphins 36 defeated Capras 16. The Dolphins were far and away the better side, running faster, looking sharper and tackling harder. Redcliffe took an early 20 point lead and then opted to manage Central in the second half, picking up a couple of quick, late tries to tamp down any thoughts of a comeback at 26-16.

Falcons 38 defeated Wynnum 30. The margin is reflective of the difference between the teams but does not reflect the road taken. The Falcons looked in control, leading 20-10 at the half, but a resurgent Seagulls side took it to them in the second half, even taking the lead at the hour mark, but the Falcons turned on the jets and ran them down.

Sea Eagles 12 defeated Titans 8. Those are some paper-ass Sea Eagles. After an hour of play, Manly’s completion rate began with a 9 and the Titans’ with a 6, and yet the Sea Eagles only led by 10 points, had a helping hand from the refs and still nearly lost the game to the worst franchise in rugby league. Woeful. Manly are on the express train to September disappointment and probably another few years after that.

The Titans, at least, are now good enough that their severe, acute and chronic problems are diagnosable. The pack sucks: it is not built for the current rules and cannot move fast enough to make any space for the backs. Campbell and Kini can’t do anything because they don’t have any room to move and even when they do, there’s no teammates standing in even remotely the correct position to profit. Harrison goes sideways and there’s nothing left for Brimson, Sami and co but the touchline. The Titans also drop the ball a lot, a problem afflicting a lot of the league in 2026. There’s maybe one or two teams in the NRL that can tackle and until that number increases, worrying about the defence is a waste of time, but Gold Coast have the boys that can generate points if only the slugs in front of them would hurry up.

Tigers 24 defeated Devils 16. At 24-0 with a lot of time remaining, you start to wonder what the point of playing that game is and whether a mercy rule might present a better use of everyone’s time. Norths struck back, showing that they are at least capable of that, but I don’t think Easts were worried at any point in proceedings.

Jets 22 defeated Tweed 20. If you wanted to argue that putting all the fringe first graders into a single team wouldn’t affect the competitive balance of the competition, you could show them this game and everyone would furiously agree with you. The titanic showdown between Gold Coast’s feeders delivered no thrills, poor defence and even worse conversion attempts.

Cowboys 30 defeated Rabbitohs 12. When the score narrowed to 18-12 after the Cowboys blew two near-certain tries, I felt the gorge rising in my throat. Fortunately, Souths’ resolute commitment to giving the Cowboys more opportunities worked in North Queensland's favour, which the Cows finally took advantage of to extend their lead in the last quarter of the game. Souths’ team of unloved losers made Reed Mahoney look likeable. That's a huge culture problem that should result in the Bunnies’ relocation to Yekaterinburg. Why don't we have Bob's Bulk Booze in Brisbane? I like cheap liquor.

Andrew Abdo is dead (sure about resigning from the NRL)

The king has left the building:

Andrew Abdo has resigned as chief executive of NRL.

Abdo, who was appointed as the head of the NRL in April 2020, is believed to have taken up a position with Tennis Australia after the departure of their chief executive Craig Tiley.

That seems like not an ideal start to broadcast negotiations. The AFR had a write-up to this effect in a surprisingly lack lustre effort that was out-written by the fairly-maligned Bevan Shields. To wit, no one “walks through a pressure cooker,” alone or otherwise, and fans of losing and winning teams are complaining about the rules.

Two facts were worth noting: Amazon seems likely to make a pitch (one guesses they will go for a Monday night football-style product) and the insiders seem to think the FTA market is not real healthy, which I was saying in 2019 so its nice to see everyone catch up.

This does pave the way for PVL to install himself as joint chairman and CEO, a role he has already been effectively occupying and is now doing on an “interim” basis that will surely become permanent. At least the savings and quality product will be delivered to me, the loyal NRL consumer. Failing that, an ex-cop or a flunky from Racing NSW will be parachuted in.

Abdo has been fortunate to go out on his own terms. I thought for sure he would be sacrificed to protect V’landys after it became clear how badly the covid broadcast negotiations had been botched by the latter. I, for one, am glad I did not buy his dad’s book for a bit. Looks like I’ll dust off my QRL CEO cover letter and CTRL+F for NRL instead.

We’ll always have the great interest you showed in the 2023 under 19s Origin.

Farewell.

Intermission

It is strange to see Rimbu in a Tigers jersey. Still waiting to see if he’s going to wind up at the Bears or the Chiefs or both.

Sunshine State-wide

We’re not only halfway through the NRL season, we are now halfway through the Queensland Cup season. With the women’s premiership starting in a little over a week, it’s time to recap where each club is at before our attention is split.

Teams are ordered by ladder position, which includes the hated bye points. More stats can be found in The Almanac.

1. Falcons (8-1). Surprising early clubhouse leaders of the competition, the Falcons are good. Sunshine Coast are also the luckiest team in football, outperforming their Pythagorean expectation by nearly two and a half wins with only the fourth best points difference. That luck doesn’t have to run out in the regular season but teams are often found out in the finals. Liking what I’ve seen Tom Casey brings to the team at five-eighth.

2. Dolphins (6-2-1). My personal pick for the title this year, the Dolphins have re-established themselves as the essence of competence. Other than a round 1 loss to the Bears, Redcliffe threw away a game against Sunshine Coast with +8 net errors (21 total). Since then, it’s been a series of crunchings of the opposition. Look out for the spurned coach Dave Elliott coming to get what’s his.

3. Jets (6-2-1). It is not terribly surprising to see Ipswich where they are. The recruitment drive, changes to the roster and the overhaul of the entire Jets operation after that 0-20 season has left them only one way to go. Tye Ingebritsen should be celebrated for this but we’ll see if they can go deep into September. I’m not betting against it.

4. Bears (5-2-2). The defending premiers have had something of a lack lustre start to the season by their own standards. The two most recent results are a loss to the Capras and a last gasp victory over the Cutters, two teams that are rarely in the same ballpark of the competition as the Bears. Nonetheless, it would be silly to rule Burleigh out from here.

5. Tigers (6-3). Easts sacked Matt Church in the off-season, replaced him with Jim Lenihan, who has now departed for England, and been replaced by Ben King on an interim-basis. That’s a lot of disruption in 12 months for a club still trying to work out the shape of their post-2023 rebuild. Counterbalancing that is the coming alignment with the Bears and the turnover of the roster. Might be too much talent for the interim to really mess up though.

6. Pride (3-2-3). The Pride have had few gimmes on the schedule so far, having to face down other Northern rivals as well as Sunny Coast, Redcliffe and Burleigh. We might expect the Cairnsites to have a better second half with more games against the cellar dwellers and the mid-table to establish themselves.

7. Capras (5-3-1). We wondered if the Capras post-covid golden run might have come to an end after an innocuous 2025 campaign that ended in 13th. That seems to have been premature, although Central’s points difference is negative and the offence is a couple of points per game off the pace. Whether that will see the Capras slide down the ladder in the second half of the season or if they can keep their heads above water is one of the things to watch.

8. Cutters (4-3-2). A hot start has not precisely sputtered out but the Cutters are finding the going tougher. An emphasis on speed, a lack of other opportunities for players to matriculate and the competition coming back to their level for structural reasons have all benefitted Mackay greatly. There’s a better than even chance of them breaking a finals drough that dates back to their 2013 premiership. Jimmy Ngutlik is still up there in the Guy charts.

9. Magpies (4-3-3). The coin flip team. It’s just a shame that playing exactly at 50% is not good enough to make top eight in a 15 team league. Can beat the best on their day but can also throw away entire halves of football. Tom Duffy is fitting in well, Anthony Milford has it and Callum Eggerling might be having a breakout season.

10. Wynnum (4-4-1). The Seagulls are singularly unimpressive, in the literal sense. There is nothing about them which impresses itself upon the mind.

11. Blackhawks (3-6). Townsville should divorce permanently from the Cowboys. It only brings them down. While there were some hints of fraudulence in 2025, it should not have regressed to the mean quite this hard. Probably would’ve liked to have seen more out of Jacky Campag.

12. Tweed (2-6-1). This doesn’t seem to be heading in the right direction from a win-loss perspective, or from a schedule perspective where the only win over the Falcons so far is cancelled out by giving the only win to the Clydesdales.

13. Devils (1-7-1). Any doubts you may have had about aspects of the Devils dynasty have been amplified massively this year. The team just cannot get it together. The Devs are currently running as the least fortunate team in football, playing at 2.2 wins under their Pythagorean expectation, so there is a slim chance that may turn around.

14. Hunters (2-8). Roster turnover was always going to make 2025 hard and Darren Lockyer personally made it worse. There are always some worthwhile players in the mix, they just need time and experience.

15. Clydesdales (1-8). It’s a bad team with poor coaching. They look like they have no game plan, other than stupid gimmicky tactics. Christopher Woodbridge has been a bright spot.

Upcoming slate

The Challenge Cup final between Wigan and Hull KR might be the pick of the bunch.

That’ll just about do it

Putting aside the hacky backs-against-the-wall, Queenslander mentality for a second, the Maroons have lost three players to injury, including Upton and Robinson, and are already down 2-0 in the series. It is hard to imagine the Queensland B-team beating the Jillaroos tonight but stranger things have happened (1959, 1995, 2020, etc, etc).

That makes now an appropriate time to talk about the potential for whitewash. The last Origin series sweep was the Maroons in 2010 and the last Blues’ sweep was way back in 2000, which is potentially before some grown-ass adults reading this were born. Presuming the southern aristocrats prevail, whether you want to chalk this up as an historic achievement by the New South Wales, the state with the media, money, demographics and rugby league political-cultural complex biased in their favour, never mind managing to avoid decimation by injury, or just another thing that should happen more often but they fail to do because of their innate shortcomings, I will leave up to you.

I am less interested in the result than I’ll be looking for the margin in this one. The last series was lost by a net of 36 points. Queensland are at risk of being swept but are only down by nine so far. Even a 12 point loss in game 3 would be a net improvement on last year. While a 26 point (or more) beatdown is not off the cards, it seems less likely based on how well they’ve run the Blues so far. I think if you want to look at something from the ashes of this series, it’s that the gap is wide but not as wide as many pundits will make it out to be.

Tip: Queensland 13+

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Nickelware

Read this

• Jack Snape - Andrew Abdo leaves NRL as a punchline for Peter V’landys

• Campo - Why Queensland rookie Sam Walker is the great unknown of State of Origin I

• Eye Test - NRL 2026 mid season advanced stat leaders

• Rugby League Writers - Dolphins Attack The Middle & Monitoring The Rabbitohs Left Edge

• Storm Machine - Game 753 – S29E12 Review

• The Sportress - Six again: Mess

• 🎧 Rugby Reloaded - What Was The Original Derby Match?

Notes

• Jai Arrow drops NRL retirement bombshell after motor neurone disease diagnosis

• Cowboys sign Katoa and Ramien

• World Rugby launches bold new six-year strategy to shape the future of the game. This is not interesting. There’s a lot of use of “grow”, “invest”, “strategic” and not a lot of detail. There’s a single oblique hint to the financial crisis that their top flight clubs have been dealing with in England, Wales, Australia and elsewhere but mostly what’s surprising is how much of a parody of itself it is. As anyone who has worked in a large orgnisation knows, the release of strategic plans have less impact on the day-to-day work at the coal face than just about any other change (c.f. changing a filing system or implementing a new procedure). World Rugby are very excited about the WCs in the USA but don’t seem to have allowed for America splitting into five separate republics as a result of the looming second civil war.

• The Titans will play the Eels at Vegas next year. More when it matters (it doesn’t matter).

• French clubs push back on summer plan

• The sporting spectacle of the Enhanced Games was underwhelming but the financial rewards were not. “Doping bad” seems to be an extremely old fashioned view to have, and there is no way to have unregulated doping unless you want 12 year olds pounding EPO, HGH, T and steroids, but doping bad. It shouldn’t be allowed. The organisers of this stuff just need to fuck already. Will the people of the 2120s look back at this like we look back on amateurism? Perhaps.

• Berlin’s state parliament approves bid to rehost Olympics on or after 100th anniversary of Nazi-run Games. Not going to be hard to outperform LA28 while ICE is ripping people off the street and the centennial of the Hitler games.

• Australian tram patronage by route. GC is pretty up there. Now to see if the current state government is planning on funding any extensions.

Welcome to Stats Drop, an inundation of rugby league numbers.

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Who is going to win game 1?

We rate players based on their ability to accumulate useful counting statistics. We call this accumulation production and then do some maths on it to convert different stats to one footy currency. Taking account of positional play, time on the field and the general milieu of the season, we can create a lot of numbers that we can use to assess individual performance. In theory, summing up the individuals should give an indication of team strength.

First, the year-to-date form of each player selected for Origin:

The only area Queensland’s individuals have collectively outperformed NSW’s in 2026 is in the back five. The Blues’ second choice centre pairing has a lower rating than their very capable equivalents in the centres for the Maroons (even if Tabuai-Fidow is out of position - we make no allowance for this) but Queensland are also carrying the lowly rated Jojo Fifita. Ponga makes up some significant ground on Tedesco, thanks to his red hot start to the season, but you’d be hard pressed saying that makes him definitively a better player.

Elsewhere though, the form of the platoons leans, in some cases very heavily, blue and the overall team rating is strongly in the Blues’ favour. If anything, the poor record of the Eels, and to a lesser extent Mitch Moses, so far in 2026 underrates his capability.

The primary advantage, and likely what will decide the game in the Blues’ favour, is in the starting pack. This won’t be news to anyone, just as it will be obvious that part of that gap could be closed by selecting Finefeuiaki and Luki over Cotter and Capewell. The impact of bringing those two in and pushing Cotter and Capewell further down the team list and pushing Nikora - who’s Z rating is 7, not 77, not 107, just… 7 - elsewhere altogether, speaks for itself and would be the simplest way to improve the Maroons by the numbers. Bringing in Reece Walsh and slotting Kalyn Ponga into the three-quarter line is another, but more difficult to demonstrate with certainty.

Second, the career-long experience accumulated by the Origin players:

The Blues lineup is significantly more experienced than Queensland’s. James Tedesco remains one of the highest rated players in the NRL era by this metric, and is getting on in years, so naturally flatters the Cockroaches’ numbers.

The disparity in the forwards is once again extremely concerning, not least because the Blues starting five all have careers that puts each of them in the top decile of all players in the NRL era. The corrollary of experience is age, so there is perhaps some hope that the theoretically younger, less experienced Queensland team can run rings around the old dogs.

Finally, the production that these players have put together in Origin games:

This chart is a bit deceiving, as Origin rookies count for precisely zero but we would expect them to still make some sort of impact in 2026. Compare the previous career experience, where Addin Fonua-Blake brings 12.6 WARG, the third most of the Blues, but zero previous OFTy. If you are particularly interested in the mechanics of Origin FTy, there is some detail after the paywall.

In the olden days, I would have a means of turning these numerical disparities into a approximately quantified probability of winning the game. The Blues tended to have a 5% advantage in win probability and it was very rare for their to be a surplus of good Queensland players at any time.

This series appears to be no different but the results speak for themselves.

Where do Maroons come from?

In 2022, after the first men’s game, Lion Co took the four Xs off the left sleeve of the Maroons’ jerseys and replaced them with postcodes. The postcodes were notionally meant to represent the communities from which the players had emerged.

For game 3, XXXX and the QRL changed these to highlight other communities and this is how you get Kalyn Ponga dropping the 4740 of Mackay for the 4725 of Barcaldine, a town of about 1,000 people that is a six hour drive from Mackay and eight hours from Mt Isa, the two towns that Ponga seems to have grown up in.

This promotion tied-in with limited release cans with a single digit printed on the label - the idea was to assemble your own postcode with XXXX cans and share a picture on social media - and proved so popular that Lion brought it back for 2023 and then extended it to the women’s team in 2025.

For a marketing campaign by a Japanese-owned corporation, this still manages to break through the thick crust of irony and magma layer of cynicism to reach my heart (and my wallet). Not just in a sense of pride that this vast and inhospitable landscape that we call home creates and moulds people who come together to do extraordinary things, but also because this is data we can analyse. We can start to sense where Maroons come from by the places they choose to shoutout on their sleeves.

A few years ago, I theorised that the state government’s priority development areas of Ripley, Yarrabilba, Greater Flagstone and Caloundra South would be the wellspring for future Origin talents. It is too soon to tell if that will definitely be the case but we can see what the current Maroons were up to ten or twenty years ago.

While we could easily pull the birthplace of every player, being a Queenslander is not strictly about being born here. Junior club records are not well defined and can be confusing to trace but a postcode at least indicates there is something about that place that is likely to have been formative to that player.

Rather than trying to plot the density of shoutouts in individual postcodes - most of the Brisbane ones are tiny against the scale of the state - or even local government areas, I’ve classified players by their health service. Strange as it sounds, this is the best system for regional divisions across Queensland that is also readily available. While there is some stolen valour (Gympie, and Tino Fa’asuamaleaui, should be in Wide Bay, not Sunshine Coast), the major towns tend to be grouped appropriately.

In the age old river city rivalry, northern Brisbane (12 shoutouts for Metro North) seems to be at a disadvantage to the southern suburbs (19 for Metro South) and even the Penrith of Queensland, the Gold Coast (17).

Surprisingly, Mackay (16) has been much more productive than the other North Queensland regions. Even Central Queensland is on par with Cairns and Hinterlands (9 each). This is partly a function of the narrow window in which we are looking - over long enough, density of Maroons should reflect population - but also there are several stalwarts and walk-up selections of the current Maroons, including Cherry-Evans, Cotter and Dearden, that just happen to originate in Mackay, Sarina and surrounds. Similarly, Upton, Munster, Grant and Hunt form the Capricornia contingent while only Val Holmes and Gehamat Shibasaki have wanted to rep the Townsville region (4). Only Ali Brigginshaw has picked a postcode in Ipswich, although I expect this will increase once Sam Walker and Ezra Mam takes on their first non-replacement assignments.

Unsurprisingly, there aren’t a lot of inner city postcodes. We don’t see any 4000, 4006 or 4101, like we might have in the first half of last century. Julia Robinson opted for St Lucia (4067) in this year’s series, while Pat Carrigan and Christian Welch represented the eastern suburbs of Holland Park (4121) and Camp Hill (4152) respectively, and Makenzie Weale and Lindsay Collins both selected the Stafford area (4053). These suburbs are all about an eight to nine kilometre drive from the CBD.

Robinson’s selections of Samford Valley (4521) and St Lucia seem strange - no one is “from” St Lucia, it’s a place you live while you go to/work at UQ - given she was born in Ipswich (4305) and went to school in Ferny Grove (4055), and if nothing else, reminds us that this is not a precise science, the players might not be taking this super-seriously and we shouldn’t either. Consider Destiny Brill playing with 4124 (Greenbank) in 2025 and changing to the adjacent 4118 (Browns Plains) for 2026. Was that a mistake, are there two sides to her family separated by the Mt Lindesay Highway, or did she just move house down the road? Does any of that actually matter when it’s all north-west Logan with Mo Fotuaika and Jaydn Su’A?

Tarryn Aiken was born on the Central Coast in NSW, played some junior footy with Wyong and later moved up to Tweed Heads, where she moved from touch to rugby league in 2019, and played for the Seagulls and the Broncos. You will notice that, while Aiken resided in the greater Gold Coast region, there isn’t a great deal of Queensland residence in that synopsis. Aiken could hardly be expected to run out with 2259 (Wyong) or 2485 (Tweed Heads) on her sleeve, so she opted for Coolangatta (4225), which is as far south as you can get while still having a postcode start with a four. We can only imagine the furore if it was a two.

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Should Tarryn Aiken play with a 2485 sleeve? It would be very funny if nothing else. We should bring back Greg Inglis to play with 2440 while we’re at it.

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He’s doing it again

Men’s Origin teamlists are out: Maroons and Blues

The Blues’ lineup has its problems but this looks like par for the course for them. The pack looks imposing, the squad has polish and experience. While there are some questionable interchange choices, these are merely unpalatable and reflective of the coach’s mores but not the end of the world.

The Maroons are in a much more concerning state. After years of questioning Billy Slater’s decision-making and arrogance in his justifications, only for him to win three of the last four series, I have decided to not criticise the selections. You can argue that bad process outs eventually until you’re blue in the face but the results are what they are.

I won’t be criticising the exclusion of Reece Walsh, the incumbent Australian fullback and carrier of the most recent premiership winners through an all-time finals run, for no apparent reason. I won’t be criticising the inclusion of Selwyn Cobbo, who is having a terrible season by his own standards, let alone the rest of the league, and who could not get a run when he was playing well.

Despite all available evidence, Trent Loiero will be fine. No problems there. Rueben Cotter has been mediocre for a while, plays his club footy at lock and won’t have Dearden coaching him home but is nonetheless, selected on an edge. Queensland has both Heilum Luki and Kulikefu Finefeuiaki available and only one of them is in the squad and the latter does not appear to be preferred to the husk of Kurt Capewell. This is good stuff to me, the Billy Slater appreciator.

I will get over the fact that Slater picked a slew of Cowboys when they were bad and barely any now that they are good. None of the defending premiers are starting. The Titans’ Jojo Fifita got a bath from Newcastle’s Fletcher Sharpe and got a cap. There are more Storm players than Munster and Grant. This is all beyond reproach.

There is so little to critique, I keep forgetting Sam Walker, a player I hate and who should, at most, get one Maroons jersey in a dead rubber before never being seen again, is the new halfback.

I won’t comment on his Seiboldian excuses, like I did in 2024:

I will instead defer to my grovelling apologies issued in 2025:

But I can’t get past Lindsay Collins. He stinks.

Slater’s genius is that he arrived in a position where the chalice held by his lone opponent is so toxic, that only Brad Fittler and Laurie Daley were stupid enough to be seen holding it. Cleary’s entirely foreseeable arrival in 2028 should put an end to Slater’s tenure, where selecting the best Blues team, using them in an appropriate way and not giving a halftime speech that seems to give the whole team the ick about the idea of winning, should see the Blues become the dominant state for a while.

Until then, we may as well win a few more.

This insult will not stand (it will stand)

Unbelievably, not a single member of the QRL board reached out to support my application to become CEO. Looks like I’ll be doing the newsletter for a bit longer then.

Around the grounds

I did it. I watched almost all of Magic Round (I missed a few halves here and there). I almost never get to watch the whole round, because of constraints on time and interest, but I indulged this weekend and what a weekend it was! If you wanted to know what National Reserve Grade would look like, this was not far off the mark.

Sharks 38 defeated Bulldogs 16. An early, insurmountable lead, a slew of frustrating errors (25) and then some late tries for the loser to make it slightly more respectable is the Vlandoball formula. The Bulldogs win the fraud-off.

Dolphins 32 defeated Rabbitohs 10. An early, insurmountable lead, a slew of frustrating errors (28) and then some late tries for the loser to make it slightly more respectable is the Vlandoball formula. Really needed this Latrell game in Origin.

Sea Eagles 46 defeated Tigers 18. An early, insurmountable lead, a slew of frustrating errors (25) and then some late tries for the loser to make it slightly more respectable is the Vlandoball formula. Weird that the refs decided to start blowing penalties after this? Can't imagine why when the rules are so good and functional.

Pride 40 defeated Clydesdales 12. When you were at school, there was at least one kid that would get the ball, dick around and showboat with dummies, show and gos, steps, goose-steps and so on, none of which would deceive, go anywhere or impress anyone. I am too old for my peers to have pretended to be Benji Marshall but its something like that. Half a dozen Clydesdales play like this.

Cowboys 18 defeated Roosters 12. Finally, some real football. “The North Queensland Cowboys are winning this on defence,” is an actual sentence said by Dan Ginnane. While it is true, and this was a high value but not entirely unexpected win, it might be the first time anyone has said anything like that about the Cowboys in a decade. Considering the blatant cheating from the referees - throwing Sam Walker around is not a binnable offence and it actually should be rewarded because he keeps throwing forward passes the refs are too cowardly to call - the Cows did well to keep their heads and keep pointed in the right direction. Mikaele looked completely done. Luki made some pleasing defensive plays. Enjoying what Tom Chester is bringing. The ragdoll in a washing machine is good now.

Bears 14 defeated Cutters 13. This was a moral victory for Mackay, as the referees did their best to hand Burleigh the win. A spurious binning of the Cutters’ Sean Mullany at 67’ sapped the Cutters of the last remaining strength, hanging on against a Bears side that didn’t seem to have a lot of ideas. Guy Hamilton took advantage, sped past a spent defence and went over at 74’ and that was game. A disappointing end to an otherwise quality contest of fast running and hard hitting. The Cutters have a lot to recommend them and have shown they can go toe-to-toe with the big dogs.

Storm 34 defeated Eels 8. This didn’t feel like a 20 point win for the Storm but on review, what did the Eels have to offer? Parra have two gears: coin flip shoot-out or being squished out of the game while looking like they’re trying. I guess that’s something. The Storm are working their way back into form. Wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see them rack up wins over the lower half of the ladder but still not clear if they have the talent to take on the top half.

Knights 36 defeated Titans 12. Gold Coast played in a way that befits the jersey that got everyone so excited. The Titans under Hannay have a game plan and by god, they’re sticking to it. It’s good enough that the first third of the game is enough to convince you that there might be something there but then the Titans wilt, and then collapse, and the margin blows out past 20. Unlike what feels like the rest of the NRL, the Titans don’t make a lot of handling errors and some players have their moments, but it doesn’t add up to much.

Magpies 30 defeated Hunters 20. Souths Logan got off the plane, didn’t get out of fourth gear and handled the Hunters in a way a 10 point margin does not reflect. Jason Demetriou was on ABC’s Pacific Beat and mentioned that because of the lack of pathways infrastructure in PNG, it takes new Hunters a year or two to adapt to Cup. Given the London Broncos, of which Demetriou is coach, had a big hand in decimating the Hunters’ roster, that goes a long way to explaining why the Hunters’ lack polish (balls passed too hard, basic handling, can’t recover short kickoffs, etc) and why they’ve gone from a reliable week 2/3 finals team to bottom four. But mostly, Anthony Milford kicked them to death. Liking what Byron Johnson is doing; it’s been a while since we had a fast whiteboy fullback in Cup. Welcome to Hercules Kondo, who joins the Rugby League Hall of Fame for Names, along with other inductees Denver Ford, Memory Paitai and Adaquix-Jeramiah Watts-Luke.

Warriors 42 defeated Broncos 12. That one stung a bit. I didn't expect the Broncos to win but I also didn't expect to get completely reamed by Ash Klein. People like to defend the referees by saying they just follow orders but they have a huge amount of discretion as to how they go about their work. Klein decided to be a complete dipshit. Carrigan got binned for a regulation Panthers tackle. Klein calls a strip for a clearly dropped ball. Khan Pereira is binned instead of sent off. Tuaupiki got a set restart for a leg pull instead of a bin, followed by another set restart on the next tackle, the only two the Broncos got all game. You win some, you lose some and sometimes the referees decide for you out of misplaced crankiness. The only upside is that the Warriors will overvalue this result, setting their fans up for another disappointing September that they'll tell themselves they're in the mix for.

Panthers 28 defeated Dragons 6. In a game that the Panthers treated like I treat Fridays at work, the absolute worst call of the weekend went against Damien Cook and the Dragons. Brian To’o did not have possession. How is it possible that you refereed enough rugby league to get into the Bunker without learning anything about the sport? Imagine taking that away from fans sitting in the rain at the end of Magic Round. Sociopathic. What's worse is you made my sympathise with St George. We’re going to have to unretire Buzz Rothfield to sort you little shits out. Fix it.

Intermission

Callum Eggerling hit the Hunters home crowd with the Judah Rimbu celebration. Great stuff. Also surprising there's a dedicated Souths Logan cheer squad in PNG.

Women’s Origin II

Queensland spotted New South Wales a hundred expected points from errors and were extremely fortunate, partly courtesy of the May Magic Round weather we’ve all come to love, to be in reaching distance of the win.

Jasmine Peters had two match winning opportunities. The first, she didn’t drive hard enough to the line and looked terrified of being tackled and losing the ball and that’s exactly what happened. The second, she didn’t keep her feet out of touch and the lacked the spatial awareness to know she’d blown it again.

It is not fair to blame one player for a result but, to deploy several cliches, the Origin arena is built on getting specific moments right and when the state needed her to execute, she did not. Peters did not have that dawg in her.

Fortunately for Peters, there is plenty of blame to go around to the rest of the team. Lofipo had an off night. The halves were fine but not excellent. Three different hookers were given a go. Too much burden is placed on Upton and she is, at the end of the day, only human. The pack erred and did not dominate.

The bright side is the future. I have never really noticed Rory Owens, in either the NRLW or previous Origins but she really stepped up to the plate. Kiria-Ratu looks like, at worst, a good second fiddle. As Gus noted during the early phases, the Maroons are around 24 years old and the Blues are 28. The Blues’ dominance of women’s footy has at least one, maybe two, more series to run. Then they will be old and we will be young.

What this series shows is how thin the depth is at the super-elite tier, especially for Queensland. Peters’ critical moments reminds me of Emma Paki, who I compared to a deer skating on ice in the wet games of 2024. Paki had no business being out there and Peters might have been the best pick of those available but it shows it is a long drop from Robinson, then to Hippi, to Peters in the winger depth chart (dunno what Emily Bass did to get her card marked). If Queensland is to take advantage of its future, and noting we are missing Aiken, Pelite/Isa’ako and Jorgensen off the top of my head, and Ciesiolka is out of form, then having a better second tier of player to plug gaps when they inevitably occur is going to be crucial.

But here and now, only pain lies ahead. It took 15 years for Queensland to overcome structural disadvantages, adapt to the new interstate rugby league and actually win a series. It probably won’t take that long this time, but it might be a while.

Upcoming slate

They’re call it one of the worst weekends of rugby league TV in history, folks. Just absolute trash.

Hull KR vs Wigan, Super League, Friday 5am AEST, Craven Park

Hull KR, after an abysmal start to the season, have won five on the trot and have looked good doing it. The stats love Rovers. Wigan are Wigan but had some dud games a few weeks back but might be finding form again. Interesting yardstick game. I probably won’t be getting up at 5am to watch it. Tip: Hull KR

Capras vs Dolphins, QCup, Saturday 5pm, Browne Park

This will be my first opportunity to see the new Browne Park in action but from what I’ve seen online, it looks like a huge upgrade. Putting aside the Dolphins Derby, this should be an ideal timeslot for a Rockhampton sunset, provided the weather cooperates. The forecast looks good at time of writing. I am increasingly of the opinion that the Dolphins have some flaws but no team in the league seems capable of exploiting them, a la the Devils in 2024. In lieu, Redcliffe are going to continue to dominate. Tip: Dolphins

Cowboys vs Rabbitohs, NRLM, Sunday 4pm, QCB Stadium

This is our next look at the post-Dearden Cowboys. There’s minimal impact from Origin, with just Cotter going to camp, it’s an opportunity for Clifford to step up again and for Sutton to establish himself as a bona fide first grader. The Rabbitohs aren’t necessarily going to be a sterner test than the gritty win over the Roosters, as Souths are currently on Fraud Watch, but more wins makes the future of 2026 more secure. Tip: Cowboys

Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer

If you enjoyed this newsletter, or a 4,000 word treatise on the history of club rugby league in Australia dropped the day that everyone spent talking about Origin lineups:

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Read this

• What You Get Is What You See - Ultra-processed rugby league is a big problem for broadcasters (and the NRL)

• Eye Test - BOOTWATCH 2026

• Campo - Why Gold Coast’s retro Chargers jersey is already the toast of the NRL’s Magic Round

• Nick Tedeschi - Ivan Cleary begins long goodbye with a legacy built to last well after he leaves Panthers

• The Sportress - Six again: Magical?

• Storm Machine - Game 752 – S29E11 Review

• Rugby League Writers - What Is Foz Ball? How The Dolphins Used Their Speed & Croker’s Passing On The Up

Notes

• Mike’s piece above is very good but I am struck by the use of the food metaphor. Ccompare also homogenised rugby league. I wonder if we’ll see a cultural rejection of this highly processed, homogenised, factory fast food approach to sport, as we did with food and drink in the 2010s, in the coming decades or are the zoomers too cooked? Given the 10s was led by Instagram and the 20s by Tiktok, perhaps it will hinge on the next evolution of social media. So, no, we’re probably not going to get a mass rejection of footyslop.

• Margin watch: 2026 has edged slightly ahead of 2021, 17.52 plays 17.45. The margins of the last two rounds are in the 94th percentile for all rounds since 1988. So far only round 4 and round 7 were in the bottom half.

• Queensland secures NRL Magic Round in mammoth deal locking it in until 2032, which includes the wonderful turn of phrase, “…in a golden runway to the Brisbane Olympics in 2032.” What does that mean? English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?

• One million viewers average for women’s Origin 2

• Actual, for realsies, turnstile attendance at Vegas was down 1.5%, from 38,107 to 37,557. Hmmm. I assume factors outside of the NRL’s control will be blamed, to the extent that this is given any airtime whatsoever, which it won’t be! We cannot question the narrative of ever increasing popularity when a broadcast deal is being negotiated.

• SANFL kicking goals with growing viewership as AFL draws criticism

• Arama Hau extends

• Tyson Smoothy is coming home… to Perth. I’ve often said Perth is the Wakefield of Australia. Good for him. Sucks to be Wakefield but then it always sucks to be Wakefield.

• We did an entire cycle of this ‘Dolphins roster is terrible and it is definitely going to finish last’ four years ago and looks we’re just doing it again. There is always a bigger fuck up in the league. The irony will be when the Chiefs don’t get that treatment because of Luai, Johnston, Watson and Rudolf and end up last in 2028.

• XXXX Queensland City v Country team lists

• IOC: No sports cut yet [for 2032], but a process for cuts by discipline; Youth Olympic Games 2030 on hold

• ‘[Brisbane’s Lord Mayor, Adrian Schrinner] explained he drinks 30 to 60 millilitres of high-polyphenol extra-virgin olive oil from shot glasses immediately after waking up for health reasons. “I’m kind of into biohacking.”’

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It was a banner week for News Corp content. In addition to Badel threatening bombshells with a giant head, we got this:

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Welcome to Stats Drop, an inundation of rugby league numbers.

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Here’s a question: do the Perth Bears get to claim North Sydney’s two premiership titles from 1921 and 1922? American sports franchises have some confusing legacies, e.g. the Cleveland Browns of today have the legacy of, but are not continuous with, the Browns of the past, who are now in Baltimore, trading as the Ravens, but this is not typical for Australian sport. There will be over a century between the North Sydney Bears winning the 1921 premiership with a 7-0-1 record and the entry of the Perth Bears into the NRL.

Here’s another question: when the Fox chyron flashes up under an ex-player, noting that they played so many “premiership” games, which premiership are they referring to? The answer to this one is obvious but leads to a follow-up question: how many premiership games did Wally Lewis, the finest player of his generation and one of the all-time greats of the sport, play? Is the answer 80, 166 or 256? You have to wonder how the vice-captain of the 1982 Invincibles and captain of the 1986 Unbeatables would have been selected without having played a meaningful club game.1

Here’s a final question: are we sure that Alex Johnston has scored the most tries in the history of Australian rugby league? I didn’t want to ask this question when the record was broken, because it would have come off as churlish, and I am also confident that for any given value of Australian club rugby league, Alex Johnston is the all-time greatest try scorer2 but there are a range of values for what constitutes the history of Australian rugby league.

The records set in the first grade premiership of the New South Wales Rugby League and later the National Rugby League, are treated as exclusively synonymous with the records of Australian rugby league. There are four reasons for this:

1. The NSWRL first grade has been the highest quality club competition in the nation since at least the end of the second World War and if not since 1908. It is based in the country’s largest (or second largest, depending on the era and statistical method) city, had the biggest crowds, the richest clubs and most of the best players.

2. The rugby league media in this country predominantly originates in Sydney and is almost entirely based in Sydney. Owing to the inherent parochialism of Australia, rugby league and Australian rugby league, this gives the NSWRL pre-eminence in the minds of the people who are responsible for the sport’s news, history and myth-making, which is then adopted by the audience.

3. The Sydney competition’s record keeping was much better than anywhere else. The availability of records automatically gives the competition more weight than its counterparts that lacked a David Middleton or suffered data-destroying disasters at league offices.

4. It is narratively far less complex than the reality.

These are somewhat valid reasons for Australian rugby league to be Sydney-centric but presents a history of Australian rugby league that is very narrow, restricted to a single metropolis that most of the rest of the country hates on principle. If you read the official works and have a lack of curiosity, it is as if rugby league emerges fully formed in Brisbane, Gold Coast and Newcastle in 1988, a gift of beneficence from our superiors in the imperial capital.

As anyone familiar with my work will be able to guess, I contend that the history - distinct from the mythology required to sell subscriptions to Kayo and unread books bought for Father’s Day - of the sport should have a wider view.

A wider view of the history of Australian rugby league is messy. One thing we can do to address this is to draw lines in the history and treat sections differently. After the line, Australian rugby league occurs and prior to that is pre-history. You may have noticed that this newsletter prefers to work on an NRL-era basis for its statistics. 1998 provides the cleanest delineation between the suburban, amateur and semi-professional club competitions of the 20th century and the international, professional club competitions of the coming 21st century.

Depending on your view, you could shift this back to 1995, when the competition rebranded as the Australian Rugby League (despite adding a team from New Zealand), to 1988, when Queensland teams joined the New South Wales Rugby League, or even 1982, as the Sydney competition expanded beyond its city walls for the first time.

The question then becomes, what to do with everything that happened in pre-history? It is rugby league and it is history and it took place in Australia but the tyranny of distance and other challenges of the times make it difficult to coalesce tens of thousands of matches into a neat concept of the history of Australian rugby league. If you’ve noticed the awkwardness with which the NRL media treats the Dolphins’ history or the Super League split, that dissonance originates here and the preference for simplicity overrides.

The question may seem academic but it is important. Today’s rugby league institutions derive their legitimacy by claiming direct descent from the pioneers of the sport of the 1900s. The early players and administrators that got the sport off the ground in Australia had trophies and awards and cups named after them. Today’s administrators are their rightful heirs, descendant in an unbroken line that even the World Wars could not disrupt, and that is why the Broncos winning the premiership in 2025 is treated the same by our governing bodies and broadcasters as the Bears winning in 1921.

We are not going to overturn a large portion of rugby league’s culture in today’s newsletter but it has been something that has weighed on my mind for the better part of a decade. Happily, we can have a higher quality of discussion thanks to Rugby League Project, in collaboration with Redcap’s BRL, adding the scoreline for every Brisbane Rugby League premiership match to the RLP site.3

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For the purposes of this analysis, we are setting the line of pre-history at 1988. This is contrary to the editor of the Brisbane rugby league premiership Wikipedia article, who writes:

Although the Brisbane Rugby League took a significant financial and competitive downturn, it did not become a second-flight competition when the Brisbane Broncos entered the Sydney Rugby League in 1988. Rather, it officially lost top-tier status after the 1994 season, before the advent of the Australian Rugby League, in 1995.

I do not believe this is a widely held opinion or have any official bearing and I will not support the top flight status of a competition whose 1988 champion was something called the Seagulls-Diehards. The 1987 merger between Fortitude Valley and Tweed Heads is telling in its own right about the strength of Brisbane’s historic but dying rugby league clubs and the forces causing their demise4, lending weight to the decision to bring in the Broncos to the NSWRL and set the line accordingly.5

In Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere, there are myriad club cup competitions that accompany the main premiership, whose importance to us now is different to the importance of the people at the time. Largely, we have diminished this silverware in the face of an anachronistic hyperfocus on the premiership, which in turn maintains the unbroken line of inheritance. For example, the second half of the 1921 Sydney season was played as the City Cup, because of the Kangaroo tour, and so has been consigned to the dustbin of history as irrelevant.6

To provide some structure to the endless sprawl of rugby league competitions in pre-history, we need a taxonomy. Let’s set a definition that first grade strictly refers to the highest level of competition within a given league which occupies a specific geographical area, whereas first class refers to specific, elite first grade premiership games at specific times. This does have the annoyance of shifting the goal posts to, “What constitutes ‘elite’ or ‘first class’?”

The NRL has attempted to answer this in the Hall of Fame, but seems to be tripping over both its own insistence that the best players have to play in the (singular emphasis) elite rugby league premiership7, what it refers to as the “Metrics of Excellence” - no detailed description of these is included on the website - its own lack of records and that it has to retrospectively justify the selection of the first 100 inducted in the centennial of rugby league, while maintaining a sense of consistency with future inductions.

Consider Herb Steinohrt and Eric Weissel. They are both in the Hall of Fame but never played in the elite rugby league premiership. Weissel played 18 seasons in the Riverina as a fixture of country footy. Steinohrt spent his career in Toowoomba, representing that city in at least 70 (according to RLP) and up to 125 (according to the NRL) games.8 Both are examples of players who could reach the highest levels of the sport without playing in Sydney or Brisbane. It will surprise no one to learn that all examples of this kind of player in the Hall of Fame pre-date the second World War.

After 1945, every Hall of Famer spent major parts of their careers in Sydney or less often, Brisbane. Only a handful, including Barry Muir and Duncan Hall, never played in Sydney. Most of the best post-war Queensland players either migrated to Sydney clubs or the Sydney competition expanded to create the Queensland clubs they played for. Some, like Lewis, played the best part of their careers in Brisbane and gained selection for the highest representative honours from there, while others, like Beetson or Meninga, set themselves up for future success in the Sydney competition after beginning their club careers in Brisbane.

The outlines of what could constitute a first class club game prior to 1988 start to emerge. Before World War II, you could have a lucrative career in the country and still expect a reasonable, if more difficult, route to representative honours. By the 1970s, with some exceptions, you had to be in Brisbane or Sydney, and preferably Sydney, to have a crack at the summit.

On the 1952-53 Kangaroo tour to Europe, players based in Toowoomba and Newcastle (4 each) outnumbered Brisbane-based players (2). After the 1973 tour, Kerry Boustead in ‘78, then playing for Innisfail South before heading to the Roosters the next season, and Rohan Hancock in ‘82, a Toowoomba stalwart9, were the only selections from outside the Brisbane and Sydney competitions. Boustead played in all five tests against England and France (Australia lost both games against les Chanticleers) but Hancock was only selected for the test against Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, en route to Europe.

While the leagues were never at parity in quality10 or finances11, this suggests any district first grade game prior to 1945 could be considered first class, while after 1945 and before 1988, first class club games in Australia should be restricted to Brisbane and Sydney12 and after 1988, Sydney (and then the ARL and NRL) alone.

We will set aside whether to include city cup competitions in this definition of first class13, or restrict it to premiership games only, but if there’s a first class, there can be a second and third class. We will also set aside the question of whether a first class representative game is strictly an international, as the highest level, or is defined by the quality of the league that the players are selected from (i.e. a first class rep game is one played by first class club players, so could include the Bulimba Cup).

South Sydney’s status as the club with the most premierships in Australian rugby league history comes into question. Naturally, the 2014 NRL title puts Souths on a level pegging with Valleys and given that the resurrected Valleys club plays in the BRL, which is now in the third tier of the sport, it is inevitable that the Rabbitohs will claim that title outright.

Valleys, despite playing fewer games, have the best historical points difference in the table. The Brisbane clubs seem more evenly matched than Sydney’s, with Valleys the clear leader, then Norths, and the next four having between 500 and 600 wins and seven and ten premierships, an observation that has been made and speculated on in previous analysis. Redcliffe and Wynnum, being later additions, have fewer premierships and less time to compile wins.

What is apparent to me is not the unearthing of any statistics that revolutionise our understanding of the game’s historical hierarchy but that the presence of Brisbane clubs in this concept of first class offers a new dimension, another couple of splashes of colour and detail, on the portrait of Australian rugby league. Sydney’s historic marques are one thing but add Brisbane’s Big 8 and we have a more complete, more attractive picture. Were we able to add Ipswich, Toowoomba, Newcastle and other results14, we would have a more comprehensive picture again.

These tables are not in and of themselves terribly interesting and serve as trivia, rather than history. What to do with 4,500 BRL results and 7,200 NSWRL results? What are the important questions? How would, say, post-War Balmain have stacked up against post-War Southern Suburbs? Or which 1923 champion Eastern Suburbs clubs would be victorious: Coorparoo or Bondi? Or 80s Wynnum against Parramatta? Or Norths’ 6-in-a-row in the 60s against St George’s 11? Is there a way to approximate this?

Let’s start by plotting the class Elo ratings of these clubs. Brisbane’s rugby league history is significantly messier than Sydney’s, so we will focus on the clubs that people are most likely to be familiar with - the four cardinals, Valleys, Brothers, Wynnum and Redcliffe15 - and their antecedents, alongside Sydney’s traditional dozen and their two late stage expansion teams.16

Sydney’s wider spectrum of competence becomes very apparent. St George recorded a rating of 1841 at three points in the 1965 season. No Brisbane team eclipsed 1721, set by Brothers in 1957. At the other end of the scale, Parramatta bottomed out at 1274 in 1962 while final rating of the Mud and Bloods, 1337 in 1987, a season in which Wests finished equal last with one win from 16 games, bettered Wynnum’s previous low of 1344, reached twice in 1973 and 1974.

We can theorise why this might be. The structure of the Brisbane season, tending to be shorter than Sydney’s and necessarily involving more repeat fixtures, would have an influence. Having fewer teams would not spread the talent as thinly, and Brisbane would be less prone to the sharp discontinuities caused by the emergence of true superstars, who tended to congregate in the Sydney competition or head overseas. While there is less of a gap between the best and worst, the overall mean would be lower.

This disparity also presents a problem. A 1700-rating in Brisbane is not likely to translate to a 1700-rating in Sydney, on a like-for-like basis. You would expect to have to de-rate Brisbane club ratings to account for the generally lower standard of play. However that is derived, it is not going to close the gap between a Northern Suburbs team rated in the high 1600s in the late 1960s to a St George club rated over 1800. Brisbane’s Norths would likely struggle to compete with Sydney’s Wests at this time, the Magpies serving as the perennial runners-up to the all-conquering Dragons dynasty.

For a single Brisbane club to be competitive with the top end of Sydney, that Brisbane club would have to be substantially better than its compatriots and that never seems to eventuate. Even Lewis’ mid-80s Seagulls never quite kick clear of Meninga’s Magpies or a declining Tigers or a resurgent Brethren.

I had thought that I could use the results of the interstate series as a proxy for the relative strengths of Brisbane’s and Sydney’s competitions but there are two problems with that. The first is obvious.

The two bright spots for Queensland are noted and the rest was a very long descent. There is a reason that Origin rules were brought in after all.

Ironically, the much more successful Queensland Origin sides of the 80s, who won the one-off games in ‘80 and ‘81 before winning the ‘82, ‘83, ‘84 and ‘87 series, were predominantly selected from Brisbane-based clubs. Of the 300 Maroons caps awarded between 1980 and 1987, 59.3% went to players plying their trade in Brisbane. Three out of five of the BRL’s best were capable of competing with Sydney’s best but they needed more help from the other two to close the gap between the states.

The second issue is that Queensland residential selections are not necessarily a proxy for Brisbane’s best talent. While Maroons selections tended to heavily skew towards the southern end of the state, Brisbane was not necessarily the strongest of the three main southern leagues. In 1933, Toowoomba won their first two games of the Bulimba Cup and it was proposed that, ‘the Downsmen [Toowoomba] deserved the honour of meeting the Rest [of Queensland]… if successful, they should go to Sydney intact to play New South Wales.’ Shockingly, this idea was approved and Toowoomba duly beat The Rest, 22-7, before rebadging as Queensland and then being destroyed by New South Wales, 24-zilch. The QRL reverted to a more traditional selection process thereafter and lost the series 3-1. This was only the Blues’ fourth win in 12 years.

If we restrict our analysis to the period from 1960 onwards, after Brisbane has gotten a stranglehold as the strongest league in Queensland, in that period Queensland lost the interstate games by an average of 12 points. We can translate that - very approximately - to a 150 point Elo rating handicap17. We can then take the end of season ratings for each club, add 75 points to the Sydney ones and deduct another 75 from the Brisbane ones and then rank the teams in a hypothetical combined league.

Unsurprisingly, it is not pretty for the Brisbane teams. The “league” starts with 18 teams in 1960 and grows to 22 by 1982. I’ve marked 4th, 8th, 12th and 16th on the charts as proxies for premiership contention, qualifying for finals, qualifying for an expanded finals series and the competition cellar, respectively.

No Brisbane team ever makes the top four. Norths is highest ranked at fifth in 1963 and 1970. Norths would make finals for a decade, and Valleys, Wynnum and Souths a couple of times each but, unless this hypothetical ARL decided to implement a 12 team finals system, the Brisbane clubs would largely have been also-rans. Given the lack of commercial viability of these clubs as it was, removing any sense of success would have only hastened their demise.

Whether the Brisbane competition could have been strengthened by incorporating the Ipswich league (or Toowoomba) is an interesting thought experiment but one that is unlikely to yield an alteration of the long-run trajectory of the sport in the Southeast. Given one would expect the Bulimba Cup to have provided sufficient iron-sharpening opportunities that rarely seemed to translate to the interstate level, it is unclear if this would have a marked effect at the club level. Notwithstanding Ipswich teams playing in the Brisbane league from time to time, including Langer’s Jets joining the BRL in 1987, the headwinds from demographics and economics would have still been too powerful to overcome.

Mergers of competitions with a consolidation of the number of clubs may have proved a more viable strategy, as Duncan Thompson demonstrated in Toowoomba in the 1950s, but that is two very politically sensitive propositions laid on top of each other. It also starts to look a lot like entering a combined Brisbane team into the NSWRL. As Marx noted:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

I never thought they’d eat my face

The NRL tripping over it's own dick coming into Magic Round is a tradition like no other. The high point was 2021, when in the week leading up, Peter V’landys lost a defamation case, the sport was dying under an overload of set restarts and a head high tackle crackdown had been laid over the top.

In 2026, Peter V’landys is in court for a defamation case, the sport is dying under an overload of set restarts and I don’t know where this crackdown on pushing, escorts and other aerial ping pong nonsense has come from but here we are.

Given the average fan operates on a significant delay from us sickos on the cutting edge, I doubt any of this will get much of a mention during Schoolies for Dads. Instead, the final match of the weekend, featuring the Dragons and Panthers, will be treated with the appropriate respect as a blockbuster whose quality is reflective of where the NRL is right now. In the absence of anything meaningful to cover, like panicking about moving Magic Round because of torrential rain, and before they are allowed to fully restrict their attention to Origin for two months straight, the media turned on the expansion franchises this week.

Nine sent Zac Bailey to PNG and found the same things I told you about a few years ago. Much of this has been obvious for anyone that hasn’t been feted by the NRL and the PNG government into writing out-of-touch PR for James Marape.

While I agree with the sentiment, I've also made my peace with what's going to happen. That there’s a hole in the ground where the resort extension is going, 18 months out from when it will need to be completed, is as good a sign that something is going to be built and as presenting it negatively is a reflection of the average journalist’s lack of construction knowledge.1

Another op-ed in THIS MASTHEAD went after the Chiefs’ tax-freedom: PNG’s tax breaks make a mockery of the salary cap. And you’re paying for it. No way! I’ve been saying this for ages and other than future Prime Minister Pauline Hanson, no one gives a shit. It is disgusting that each of the NRL clubs are getting $4 million of taxpayer funds to wave through the Chiefs. No one cares.

When I was a kid, a million bucks was a lot. Being a “millionaire” meant being wealthy, not just owning your own home.2 It is now 2026 and a million bucks is both a lot of money - that would be a life changing for almost all households - and nothing at all - what difference does $5.4 million over four years make to the federal budget? Perhaps this is the source of the apathy.

That apathy should be mirrored by a disinterest in the program’s overall spend. The Commonwealth of Australia is a country whose budget expenditure last year was $785 billion. The Independent State of Papua New Guinea is another country, whose expenditure last year was $9 billion. $60 million would be less than a rounding error on either budget statement.

If Albanese backtracked on the Chiefs tomorrow, the proposed spend on rugby league in the Pacific will not be re-deployed to solving any social problem you could care to name. There would be no hospitals or schools, or even doctors or teachers, here or there.

Labor does not respect the intelligence of its electorate and desperately wants to be seen as serious by unserious, unthinking people who are bred to hate them. Witness the seemingly endless parade of cuts to social welfare.

If the LNP was in power, they would refuse to spend the money to make society better on the principle that they hate you and instead hand it over to mining companies to further exploit PNG. We wait with bated breath to see what stupidity ONP introduces into this heady, unstable mix.

What would a redeployment even look like? $60 million per year does not go very far among the millions of people experiencing a cost of living crisis. Offering ten bucks would be insulting more than anything else. Perhaps we could focus on not sending the US billions upon billions of dollars for submarines that are somehow both non-existent and obsolete, and not support US foreign policy that is the direct cause of global economic instability? Just a thought.

Guess what else you’re paying for:

$570 million in 2024–25 for a budget support loan to Papua New Guinea (PNG) to address the PNG Government’s estimated 2024 budget shortfall, with associated repayments totalling $128 million within the forward estimates to 2028–29.

You’ll be shocked to learn that this is not a one-off and a figure of half to three-quarters of a billion dollars has been handed over - sorry, “loaned” - to PNG every year since at least covid. That’s the price of regional security and not having a brutal civil war on our doorstep.

What’s another $60 million? At least we get footy out of it. If the money is going begging anyway, you may as well pencil in a couple of easy dubs in 2028.

Meanwhile, in Perth, Coach Mal Meninga reveals why Perth Bears have been unable to land a big-name signing. That was written by Dean Ritchie so I actually didn’t read it to find out the why. Adrian Proszenko’s piece, ‘It disappoints me’: Meninga breaks silence on Bears exit rumours, didn’t offer anything you wouldn’t have been able to guess at, other than there’s some friction in the Bears boardroom, which is downstream of the NRL’s captain’s picks and micromanagement, Meninga reluctance to move to Perth to do his million dollar a year job and hyperbole of the usual travails of getting a new franchise off the ground.

On one hand, “A crunch meeting between Perth Bears powerbrokers and NRL supremo Peter V’landys has reportedly handed the new franchise a boost in their bid to recruit big-name stars,” and on the other, “NRL clubs are set to demand compensation if the Perth Bears are granted salary cap relief to bolster their efforts to build a competitive roster before their 2027 entry into the competition.”

As you may gather from my tone, I am less interested in the merits (incoherent as they are) of these arguments, which is primarily clubland types panicking and hyperventilating to the media, than the timing.

As we know from the secrecy around Payne Haas’ defection to South Sydney, the reporters have very little to offer if it isn’t fed to them. The nature of these tracts then suggests discontent somewhere in the machine. It doesn't take a genius to guess that it's rooted in existing clubs not being happy the new clubs will be given any advantages.

The time to complain about these franchises was before the clubs voted to admit them to the NRL. But then the existing clubs wouldn’t have gotten their money. What were they supposed to do? Quite the dilemma.

Re: QRL CEO position

Dear Mr Canavan and board members,

With the resignation of Ben Ikin from the position of Chief Executive Officer of the Queensland Rugby League, I am writing to you to express my interest in the soon-to-be vacant position.

After two decades as a professional engineer and nearly a decade of writing about rugby league, I have no proven skills or experience that would make me a suitable c-suite executive. I was recently turned down for a very similar role to the one I currently occupy at a more prestigious institution because I was an insufficiently impressive candidate. It’s fine. I didn’t even want the job.

I do not understand marketing. I have no idea why payroll has to be so complicated. Accounting and balance sheets? Dunno. Let the lawyers run the legal team, I just want the lawsuits to go away. Governance is a buzzword and communications does not require any skill or expertise.

I have only ever managed small teams but as I move into middle age, I have a greater appreciation for the boomers trying to set completely arbitrary standards on millennials entering the workforce, even if those standards were stupid (the standard I set is obviously correct and always will be).

I have little-to-no interest in cultivating the kinds of relationships with the media that made Ikin a well-known and effective CEO. I have met a handful of rugby league figures, none of whom have wanted to meet with me a second time. Ditto podcasts.

I think the six again is a blight on the sport. I have never even played rugby league and did not follow the sport for some of the 2000s and most of the 2010s. I am reluctant to travel, especially to anywhere like Mount Isa. I could probably manage to approve the budget for a good Christmas party.

However, I am blessed with a gift for holding short, and to the point, meetings. I tend to equivocate so that I always sound like I was pretty close to being right. I like to frame all risks as a catch-22 with no solutions that don’t involve spending a lot of money. I find most KPIs to be a meaningless waste of time, so there’s one efficiency I can offer, along with a distaste for engaging in unforced small talk. I can operate Teams with a minimal of fuss.

I can think through a problem like few others and do have a genuine ability to plan strategically, although my main tactic would be to ensure that I am surrounded by people who understand the topic at hand better than I do and ask them questions like, “What do you think? Why?” and “Is this political?” and “If you were in my position, what would you do?”

Understand that I am writing to you on a public journal which demonstrates all of my failures of foresight. This newsletter also contains repeated, and frequently immature, criticism of Peter V’landys, Andrew Abdo, David Crisafulli, various NRL clubs, referees, broadcasters, Pete Badel, the Walker Brothers, future Dragons halfback Brodie Croft and other important stakeholders that would make my presence completely untenable. My only saving grace is that the audience for this newsletter is so small that it is not worth suing me for defamation.

Like many rugby league administrators, I would have no idea what I’m supposed to do or why I’m supposed to be doing it. I think this would make me the perfect candidate for the role. I look forward to hearing from you to discuss the remuneration package. I will not work weekends.

Yours sincerely,

Liam Callaghan

Around the grounds

Dolphins 44 defeated Bulldogs 12. This was not a polished performance from the Dolphins and I think it’s pretty clear now that the Bulldogs are a bad team (boy, that was a season and a half), so let’s not get too excited about this. However, the Phins have won two after losing four in a row, so the team is at least pointing in the right direction and showing signs of recapturing the things that have worked well for them in the past. While they are unlikely to become world beaters, Redcliffe might find enough to beat the bad teams on the way to 13 wins. Jonathan Sua: very bad.

Roosters 28 defeated Titans 12. The classic Vlandoball game. While it was more decided on skill than referee beneficence, the inflection point of the game, where it ran away to an inevitable conclusion, came around 25-30 minutes in the game. After that, Gold Coast may as well not have been on the field. The decision to award the Roosters their first try was horrendous and no one will care because it was against the Titans in the 6pm game. Olly Pascoe didn’t embarrass himself and does Zane Harrison have something? Quick, pile all the possible pressure on.

Eels 33 defeated Cowboys 30. Eighteen errors. And I spent a bunch of time in the first half writing up how good the Cowboys have been for the next Bovine Bulletin. First sentence: “At the risk of setting myself up for even more failure”. Referees had a blinder, as we’ve come to expect, inventing pushing penalties and enforcing a pointless shot at goal after golden point had been decided. Losing Tom Dearden is not ideal for Queensland, north or otherwise.

Knights 44 defeated Dragons 10. I guess I hate myself then. Just adding a note that it’s been 60 years since a top flight club team went winless (1966 Roosters, 0-18). Those Roosters were the first for 20 years in any league. You know, just in case it comes up.

Sea Eagles 32 defeated Broncos 4. Jake Trbojevic looks like he's wearing a bubble wrap condom on his head. I don’t know whose pleasure that is for but it ain’t mine. He should be suspended for a few weeks for bringing the game into disrepute. The only upshot of this game is every win for Foran's Manly is another embarrassing loss for the legacy of Seibold, and everyone who pumped his tyres to get the Sea Eagles job. Looks like Foran is Jeff Saturday if it turned out Saturday was Alex Ferguson.

Clydesdales 28 defeated Tweed 24. The Walker Brothers, who coach the team I told everyone to stop tipping last week, won a game before the Dragons.

Cutters 26 defeated Hunters 24. If you were watching Storm-Tigers instead of this, you don’t know ball. The Hunters began the game up 12-0 after ten minutes. The Cutters levelled at 14-14 by half time. No one could make a conversion and the game hinged on several, frankly insane, plays. The Pietzner try (see below). The Bawase try. Rivett kicking Lama in the face. Brilliant stuff. That’s why we watch Cup. Impressed with the Cowboys’ Mason Kira in the red zone.

Panthers 30 defeated Raiders 18. I had this on but between kids and being the end of the weekend, didn't get to watch it so intently that I could provide my usual searing insight. I did tune in at times to hear Andrew Voss desperately try to sell us that the first half was sufficient evidence that rugby league is not broken. Buddy, they pay you whether the game is good or not, you don't have to carry water for those losers. Rugby league rises above its dickhead administration time and time again. It succeeds despite, not because, of them. Dipshits like Malcolm Knox, who is a rugby union writer and therefore wouldn't know good rugby if it bit him on the ass, need not apply.

Intermission

What to do when the cutout pass doesn't work? Luke Pietzner of the Mackay Cutters gives it just the right tap with the left foot and it's try time.

Hotseat

☠️ Seibold

☠️ Flanagan

🔥🔥🔥 Ciraldo

🔥🔥 Payten

Kieran Foran has whatever the opposite of a flame emoji is. 🧊? ❄️? Whatever it is that Stuart, Bellamy and Bennett get by default. It’s been a very disappointing season so far for those of who demand blood.

Fortunately, the carousel is firing up early in the lower grades:

The Brisbane Tigers can confirm that Head Coach James Lenihan will depart the club following this weekend’s Round 9 clash after accepting an opportunity to return to full-time professional coaching in the Super League.

He has been UNLEASHED at, or possibly on or by, Huddersfield. The most promising thing about this move is not the likelihood of Lenihan being able to turn around Huddersfield’s structural off-field issues, which are remote, but that the pipeline from QCup to Super League was not closed after Rohan Smith flopped at Leeds. The career trajectory for the ambitious coach is changing to something like: QCup head → Super League head → NRL assistant → NRL head coach. Super League isn’t just feeding players up, but coaches as well.

Upcoming slate

Obviously, all eyes will be on the biggest competitions of the weekend: round 4 of the NRLQ premiership and also maybe women’s Origin. The second Origin does not seem to be attracting the kind of buildup that it has in the past, being swamped by Fox going all out on their promo for Magic Round, and so I wonder if this says Something About Women’s Sport, or if its just my imagination? For the record, I am tipping Queensland 13+.

Rabbitohs vs Dolphins, NRLM, Friday 8pm, Magic Round

To paraphrase one Dolphins fan, the loser of this game will be outed as a pack of frauds. My money is on the Rabbitohs to get it done and a Fraud Alert will be issued for the Dolphins post-game. Despite a baffling surge in some stats backing the Dolphins in as one of the middle of the table teams, Souths are clearly in the upper echelon. Redcliffe may have forgotten how to play in front of a big crowd. Tip: Rabbitohs

Hunters vs Magpies, QCup, Sunday 3.30pm, Port Moresby

While you’re waiting for the Broncos game and instead of the interminable dreck of Titans-Knights, can I interest you in the local PNG commentary team that does the Hunters game? They get piped in on Hunters home games on Qplus, which is always a delight, and will be the only game with some degree of production in this split round. One expects Souths Logan is the higher quality of the two but there is considerable variability in performance, so the result hangs in the balance and may well take several severe changes in direction during the game. Anthony Milford is killing it at this level. Tip: Magpies

Warriors vs Broncos, NRLM, Sunday 4pm, Magic Round

One of the worst experiences I’ve had at a Broncos home game, excluding the ones against the Storm, was getting pantsed by the Warriors. As is well understood, there is a large Kiwi contingent in the Southeast. They will be out in force for this one. Ironically, given the other two games have precisely zero draw, the stadium might not be big enough for the Sunday slate. Anyway, Adam Reynolds returns so that might make the Broncos slightly more functional but perhaps not functional enough to carry the second string backs and J. Hunt starting. Tip: Warriors

For your consideration, I offer a five point plan for my administration

1. Elimination of all bye points from rugby league.

2. Removal of all salary caps as un-Australian.

3. Establish statewide programs in southern Logan/northern Gold Coast, Wide Bay, Darwin, Noumea and Guangzhou.

4. Demolish Davies Park and secure the construction of a new 25,000 seat stadium with working toilets on the site on the basis that I will personally flip South Brisbane to the LNP.

5. Recognition of Palestine, West Papua and Taiwan by the QRL.

If that doesn't sell you on this publication, then check out these new advanced metrics (this is a first draft - feedback welcome) in The Almanac.

These are only available to paid subscribers, so you may want to consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get full access to the club newsletters, The Almanac and The Dataset™, and commenting privileges.

UPGRADE TO PAID

If you don’t want Substack clipping your ticket or to commit to an ongoing subscription, Ko-Fi is also available for one-off tips.

Thank you to Rob for becoming a paid subscriber last week. Welcome to the Rooner Gang.

Nickelware

Read this

• Campo - Ahead of his record game for North Queensland, Jason Taumalolo is still forging new legends

• Eye Test - Justin Holbrook unlocked the attacking potential of the Newcastle Knights

• Gavin Willacy - The new 14-team Super League is working. Why not add London too?

• The Chronicle - Outback rugby league roars back to life uniting devastated towns

• The Sportress - Six, Again: Excitement and Administration

• Rugby League Writers - Knights Look The Goods, Four From 50 & Storm Win

• Storm Machine - Game 751 – S29E10 Review

• Ant’s Slant - Schuster’s Redemption Pitch - Who’s Buying It?

• Stuckness - The Millennial Song (can’t argue if I’m honest, even though Black Fingernails, Red Wine, a song I thoroughly hate, was my preferred, more localised answer)

Notes

• Bucking the trend and refusing to believe in any aspect of the Newcastle Knights. Sorry, not happening. Now did Ponga, Best, Marzhew and Young max out at 250 on Z and combined for 0.75 WARG? Yes, but we all know statistics are flawed. (Dane Gagai looks a bit out of place on the spreadsheet)

• We’ll talk more about men’s Origin after the lineup is announced but I am kind of enjoying the swirling together of Billy’s hare-brained selection scheme, Queensland’s relative depth at most positions except halfback and the tension that we can’t possibly fuck this up while Daley is on the other side (but could we?). Sam Walker is already on the outs. Should they unleash Munster with the 7 jersey?

• Townsville Blackhawks have won the Mal Meninga Cup (U19) for the first time since 2016, defeating Wynnum, 21-20, with a last minute field goal. Taj Lateo kicked the winner after earlier going through the ad hoarding chasing a grubber. Townsville lost three straight MMC finals from 2021 to 2023.

• Kalifa Faifai Loa is playing for Atherton and Townsville Brothers in the same weekend

• Clifford re-signs until the end of 2028

• Pauline Piliae-Rasabale recommitting to the Titans for the 2026 season

• North Wales Crusaders update (it’s not good)

• $1.5b Trump Tower deal on Gold Coast scrapped, developer says. What? No way. “Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else, the Trump brand was increasingly toxic in Australia,” he said. “Some time ago we knew it was time to part company.” Uh-huh.

• These election results don’t mean tacking left or right, but delivering for the whole country. UK Labour got smashed in local elections over the weekend, turning traditional red areas into the light blue of Reform. Some of that is the UK’s criminal first past the post system and it’s only local elections but think we can say Workington Man is, at best, resting.

• In other seemingly irrelevant elections that double as a harbinger of doom, Farrer By-election post-mortem – Where to now for the Coalition?

Some content

Intuitions

Every now and again the blogosphere hits it out of the park. This analysis from Rugby League Eye Test may seem bereft of the usual charts and paraphenalia that get the nerds excited but it’s hard to overstate just how critical these three paragraphs are:

A traditional set (no set restart awarded), has a try scored 8.9% of the time. Assuming that try is worth 5.5 points based on a 75% goal conversion, the expected point value of a normal set is 0.52 points.

An adjusted set that includes a set restart sees a try scored 22.5% of the time, and multiplied by 5.5 is worth 1.24 points.

Yes, a single set restart being called in an adjusted set is worth 2.4x the expected points than that of a traditional set with no restart of the tackle count. That’s a substantial benefit. Assuming 8 set restarts are called in a game with four given to each side, that is worth an extra 5.8 points per game over a match with zero set restarts.

This made my jaw drop for two reasons. One, that is an astonishing advantage for the NRL to hand out such little consideration. Two, I can’t believe I didn’t do this first.

We’re finally getting to the underlying mechanisms of why the set restart has altered rugby league for the worse. We understand it qualitatively - the pile-on of aerobic effort caused by set restarts drives the defending team above their lactic acid threshold, from which they are unable to defend effectively and over the course of the game, fatigue compounds, causes errors, leading to more defending, creating a doom loop of pain that is inevitable and boring - but the quantitative aspect - why margins don’t correlate with a straight count of set restarts and why the impact is non-linear - remained less clear.

Many years ago I took a stab at expected points for rugby league and if you re-read that piece from 2018, you’ll see just how far ARLAF have come in the eight years since. In the pre-set restart rugby league of the late 2010s, a set that started 35 metres from the team’s own goal line would covert to a try at a rate of approximately 9.5% or 0.52 expected points. A set that starts 70 metres out (or 30 metres from the opposition goal line) converts at 16.6% for 0.91 expected points. While those numbers are precise but not necessarily accurate due to the sample used, that means the lift downfield from a typical kick for touch given for a ruck infringement penalty is worth something like 0.4 expected points. Any set restart, which was intended to supplant those penalties and stop them from slowing the game down, is worth 0.7 expected points.

Congratulations, you invented a super penalty to bring the little man back to satisfy the readership of a now-retired alcoholic dinosaur. Great stuff.

The beautiful thing about the set restart is no one knows why they’re given. “Ruck infringement” could mean any number of a thousand things. This gives referees a huge amount of discretion to deploy set restarts and an even bigger influence on the outcome of the game. One team getting as few as three more set restarts than the opposition is worth two expected points, which is enough to lift that team’s winning probability to around 60%.

This seems to confirm my suspicion that the outcomes of games in 2026 are hard to predict pre-game but very easy to predict in-game. One team gets an early leg up through set restarts and the rest of the game follows through on the physiological consequences. The outcome then depends on who gets the favour of the referee and that looks a lot like a coin toss. Because the referees employ the Nuremberg defence at every opportunity, they will decline responsibility, although I think there’s plenty of blame to go around for everyone at NRL HQ for this.

Developing an intuition for what was going to happen when this rule was introduced seemed straightforward enough in 2020, we’re now six years into this and there’s more nuance to consider. While I admit that I don’t have a good feel for these second order effects, do you know who should? That the changes in the area that set restarts that can be given and the way the set restart is deployed passed through without any stakeholders - the committee it originated from, the coaches, players, administrators and club officials - sending up more than a cursory concern, says a great deal about the amount of expertise in charge of the sport.

If only there could be some accountability for this. Oh well.

We’re so back

I have returned to Australia, where people talk normal.

While battling the worst jet lag I’ve ever had, and that of my young children which makes it ten times worse, people ask me if I enjoyed my holiday and I shrug, which is the most concise way I can communicate that I am thankful that I can watch footy again without it taking place at an extremely weird time (the morning) and am glad my children are sleeping in their own rooms again.

I don’t have the time to go back and catch up on the games of the last four rounds of the NRL (I have watched the QCup feature games of the last few weeks though, and boy, is the defence bad) but similar to 2021, when I didn’t watch the last third of the season and I missed nothing, I don’t think any team’s season is going to hinge on what just happened. If that makes me a hack and a fraud, so be it.

Women’s Origin

The Blues defeated the Maroons, 11-6, last Thursday night in Newcastle. The difference was a pair of Origin plays. Booo, hiss.

The Maroons hasn’t won the women’s Origin opener since 2023. 2026 was far from the disaster of 2025 or even 2024, a series that the Maroons won. In theory, that provides some hope that a rearguard defence can be put together in Brisbane and Gold Coast to reclaim the series.

However, the quality of the game makes it difficult to extrapolate forward. Queensland had control in the first half, thanks mostly to good kicking and the Blues’ errors, but lost the imperative in the second half, as Queensland began making their own errors and were slowly ground down and out of the game. Opportunities for both sides were rare, which might be the highest compliment to be paid to this, handling aside, otherwise compelling contest.

I was reasonably happy with the Queensland performance, which looks a step up from last year’s squad in disarray, even if that squad was several steps off the Blues’ pace. The debutants, particularly Hippi (who is now injured) and Kiria-Ratu, did not look out of place and it is somewhat relieving that the conveyor belt that turns over talent for the men’s team is starting to fire up for the women’s. Queensland may not win the series but if the Maroons maintain this standard, even a whitewash would not be as concerning as the performance of the first two games of last series.

The squad for game 2 has been announced with minimal changes.

It may have been my absence from Australia but I didn’t notice much of a buildup to the game until the day of. We all understand that this should not be the first game of the women’s season (All-Stars is on an island on its own in the calendar and that is what it is) and the players would be better off with some game time under their belts but until the NRL expands the Dub further, we’re going to have to live with it. Acknowledging that, this is still the earliest any State of Origin game has been played and having only just completed Anzac Round, Origin starting this early feels out of sync with the rhythm of the season.

Vibe check

Coming in to round 10, with Origin season officially open and men’s Magic Round just over the horizon, instead of going around the grounds, let’s check in on where each of the Q4 are at.

Cowboys (6-3, 6th) - Todd Payten is going to make eat a lot of shit, isn’t he? It’s an even numbered year, so the Cowboys are running well, on paper at least. Other than a very concerning opening fortnight and a supremely lack lustre performance against a Sea Eagles side that the Cowboys have struggled with in recent years, North Queensland have won all their games. That includes beating the Sharks, Bulldogs and Broncos. They’ve yet to play any of the season’s apex predators - clashes with Souths, Penrith and Warriors are through the Origin period - and the rest of their schedule looks no harder than it has been so far, so why not a finals berth, an early exit and a big fat extension for Toddo?

Broncos (5-4, 9th) - When I left, the looming injury crisis suggested that results would turn against Brisbane. Surprisingly, the Broncos are 2-2 over the last month, which is fine, and more surprisingly, the crisis has somehow gotten even worse. Players are now suffering from injuries that I have to google. Accordingly, there’s no real telling what’s going to come from the babiest of Baby Broncos. Even once the team starts to resemble something like its best configuration, it’ll take time for fitness and cohesion to rebuild. Whether there’s any season left or anything to salvage remains to be seen.

Dolphins (3-5, 11th) - None of the Dolphins’ pre-season problems seem to have been solved. Sure, they’re playing teams closer and chalked up a win over a very bad Storm team but the defence isn’t there, the attack isn’t coherent and they keep losing close games through their own stupidity. They are, once again, underperforming their Pythagorean expectation. It won’t be impossible to turn this around but when are we going to see it?

Titans (2-6, 14th) - Along with getting three byes, an absolute hammering of the Eels might be one of a few bright spots in this Gold Coast season. It is going to be a challenging start to the Hannay era but the sheer dreadfulness of the Dragons should insulate the Titans from last place. How could they possibly be under cap pressure?

Intermission

Does Micheal Luck know what a ‘justification’ is?

The $2 million bomshell:

The Broncos, Titans and Cowboys could field reserve grade teams under a controversial $2 million proposal for NRL clubs to join the Queensland Cup.

In one of the biggest shake-ups in Queensland Cup history, this masthead has been leaked a top-secret document outlining plans to expand from 15 teams to 18, including NRL glamour club the Broncos.

The proposal has been put together by Cowboys football boss Micheal Luck, who has presented the plan to Queensland Rugby League chairman Brian Canavan as the Broncos’ derby rivals ramp-up their push for a reserve-grade outfit.

This idea has been floating around for a while, with its background in the Kyle Laybutt scandal, and we’ve most recently talked about it here and here. While I could learn to live with the NRL teams fielding in QCup, the benefits being touted, for all concerned, are extremely dubious in my view and would put existing rugby league heritage in this state at risk.

There are two new bits of information to consider. The first:

The Broncos and Titans, who already have feeder-club arrangements, are said to be ambivalent about the proposal, while Redcliffe have had a Brisbane State League heartbeat since 1947.

That suggests the Cowboys are out on an island here, which we’ll get to in more detail once I’ve finished asking what the “Brisbane State League” is? In his fevered rush to drop this bombshell, Badel has conflated the Brisbane Rugby League, which Redcliffe entered the lower grades of in 1947 and joined the premiership in 1961, and the Winfield State League, which was the precursor to the Queensland Cup and ran in various formats from 1982 to 1994, which we talked a bit about here, in which Redcliffe participated in the early editions when it was run alongside the BRL.

The second is that Micheal Luck, recently promoted from football general manager to CEO of the Cowboys NRL experience and instigator of the Kyle Laybutt scandal, has laid out his proposal:

In the proposal obtained by this masthead and sent to Canavan:

* Luck proposes a 22-round format, starting next season;

* The travel and accommodation bill is budgeted to cost $2.1 million; and

* The competition will feature big-game blockbusters with NRL-style derbies involving the Cowboys, Broncos, Dolphins and Titans.

You know where you can see blockbuster NRL derbies? The NRL. Is this the best you can do? Here’s the quotes from Luck:

“We’re of the opinion that having the NRL brands in the Q Cup comp strengthens the competition and gives it more national relevance, both from a fan perspective and commercial partnership perspective. The one step in Queensland that we believe is still out of touch is that second-tier of football. Our club-contracted players can’t all be together under the same banner. We want this operational for 2027. The modelling that we have done suggests there is very little negative impact on our affiliate teams, so it’s a win-win in our view.”

The first part may turn out to be true, or is at least plausible because more people, inexplicably in my view, care about the NRL teams than Queensland Cup but I’d want to see a bit more than a napkin of business plan before committing to it.

The second part makes no sense. The quotes are joined up by me to save space but there isn’t a lot of connected thinking. Seemingly only the Cowboys think the second-tier is “out of touch” - out of touch with what? What the Cowboys want? Sorry if that doesn’t move anyone.

Good teams don’t make changes because they are good. Bad teams are bad and so need to make changes to address their problems. Looking at this and concluding that good teams are good because they don’t change is backwards. Expecting the Queensland Cup to be redrawn so the Cowboys’ juniors can play together before they are inevitably dumped onto other clubs to find success to keep cap space clear for duds and has-beens is not compelling.

As I’ve written before, an 18-team Queensland Cup is unwieldy. The quality of competition as it is with 15 teams, and the background labour market disruptions caused by expansion at home and in the UK, is at a low. Ringfencing the fringe NRL players into four clubs leaves a bunch of other spaces in rosters that have to be filled in with players from district A grade, competitions which are already under strain. Quelle surprise that was outside the scope of their modelling.

An expanded competition with more roster spots to fill will mean a lower average quality of play, which would not benefit the Cowboys reserves in any case, and the QCup is already at some distance from the standard of NSW Cup. The only way to improve the quality would be to cull teams. Luck hasn’t outlined which clubs are going to be excluded to make way for him to fumble his reserve grade roster. Perhaps it is time the Cowboys decamped for NSW? It’s going very well for the Storm so far and then we wouldn’t have to hear about this anymore.

“It wouldn’t take too much to organise. Under the wider proposal, it would create another eight to 10 big rivalry games a year. You could have Broncos versus Cowboys or Broncos versus Dolphins in the Q Cup, but we also could have derbies within our own footprint. For example, the Cowboys versus Northern Pride would be a big drawcard for Barlow Park (in Cairns). That’s not only a benefit for us, but for the Hostplus Cup from a revenue and commercial partnership perspective. At a time when the NRL are crying out for more content and going into a broadcast negotiation, I would think that the QRL would like to have something that they value to be able to add to the offering.”

The intra-NRL rivalry games are worth nothing in the second division. If they were worth something, they would already exist. If the NRL was “crying out for more content”, they could get the broadcasters to engage with QCup as is but instead let them off their hook from their FTA obligations during covid. NRLQ may have football benefits but it has had precisely zero cultural impact and it is made entirely of Queensland NRL derbies. The most likely scenario is these QCup games end up being curtain-raisers for the real deal, so add nothing to either ticket sales or broadcast revenue. Where does the revenue come from? There’s barely a market for Dolphins-Titans in the NRL as it is.

For games between NRL reserves and statewide programs, maybe there’s something there. The average Blackhawks game might get a couple hundred people and given the NRLW Cowboys don’t attract much in the way of spectators, assuming that level of interest is a reasonable proxy for the interest in the Young Guns (a debatable assumption), we’re looking at maybe one or two thousand for the really big draws? That’s generally bigger than a QCup game gets, an injection of $10k or so once or twice a year for the QCup clubs, but would they want to give up the fringe NRL players, invest in marketing to pump up the fixture and build a tradition, and admit three more sharks to the tank for $20,000? I dunno if that stacks up.

For it to make a real difference to the bottom line, you’d want a crowd that’s in the several thousands, which would require different venues for hosting QCup clubs and changes their cost structure, or equivalent cash considerations from the NRL clubs. A tripling (or more) of demand seems unlikely and smacks of Blake Solly arguing an all-Sydney conference would automatically generate 30k crowds. Again, dunno if that stacks up.

“The disconnection is a massive thing we have to work on. We have major logistical disadvantages.”

Buddy, that’s what you signed up for. Being a regional club has its pluses - the parochialism of the fanbase - and its minuses - its harder to manage and recruit players. Canberra has the same issue but instead of whining about it, they try to find solutions. Complaining about the vast, underpopulated expanse that is North Queensland is like Brisbane complaining about media pressure or Gold Coast about the lack of. It is what it is. Get on with it.

The real problem the Cowboys face isn’t their development pathways. It’s their management that - say it with me - doesn’t know what it’s doing or why it’s doing it.

Strangely, Luck hasn’t proposed any changes in this regard.

Upcoming slate

It’s the Challenge Cup semi-final weekend (Saints vs Warriors, Wolves v Rovers) so there’s no Super League on the slate.

There isn’t a lot of compelling fixtures in the southern hemisphere, although who picked Capras-Jets as a bellringer in the pre-season? Not this guy.

If you really hate yourself, there is a toxic waste dump of a Dragons-Knights game that you could take in on Saturday before Tweed-Clydesdales on Sunday. I can’t believe the Walker Brothers haven’t turned Western around yet.

Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer

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Stats pop

The competition pages on The Almanac have been updated to round 9, as has the 2026 Dataset spreadsheet (paid subs scroll to the bottom of The Almanac).

There is also a new page for Super League. I will likely do the historical tables in the next few weeks and follow up with club pages in the off-season.

While I was away, I mentioned that I had thought I had a problem with the way player ratings were calculated. I was right, I found the problem and fixed it. Apologies for the poor QA on my part.

Fortunately, only a sliver of one analysis this year used (and did not really rely on) these dodgy numbers, which has now been amended, and this now allows me to get to work on updating club pages with the correct player ratings (more a problem for NRL than state comps) and then producing advanced stats for paid subscribers, the commencement of which was how I found out there was an issue in the first place.

Maroon Observer QCup Tipping Sickoship

Don’t forget to tip if you are in this competition. The frequent draws are not helping aynone. Stop tipping the Clydesdales.

Nickelware

Read this

• The Times - Super League risks becoming part-time if it snubs NRL — no one else wants it

• Rugby League Writers - Why Standing Tackles Kill

• The Sportress - Six, again: Entertainment, baby!

• What You Get Is What You See - How to watch the Dolphins in 2026

• Storm Machine - Game 750 – S29E09 Review

Notes

• Belated statewide rep updates: Wynnum Manly defeated Norths, 26-16, to win the Cyril Connell grand final, Burleigh defeated Townsville, 30-12, to win the U17 Women’s, and Easts defeated Souths Logan, 32-22, to win the U19s. Wynnum and Townsville play the Mal Meninga Cup grand final this Saturday. Mackay won the men’s Foley Shield for the first time since 2021 and Townsville picked up the women’s title for the fourth year running, although this year’s competition was much more competitive. Gold Coast won the men’s and Brisbane won the women’s SEQ Chair’s Challenge. In the 47th Battalion, Capricornia claimed the women’s title and Sunshine Coast the men’s in Toowoomba. Players from those three carnivals will feed into City-Country seclections on QCup grand final day.

• Margin watch: 2026 is still tracking with 2021 at 17.5 points per game. I don’t really want to speak this into existence but the gimmick the NRL are looking for to end their self-inflicted blowout-a-thon is that the trailing team always receives the kick off (when tied, the scoring team can receive), not to introduce a faux-decision-making process. It would be better to restrict the set restart to the attacking 20 metre zone or, better yet, disappear it into a void but we know this not to be a realistic possibility.

• Broncos Annual Report: won both NRL premierships, dividend up from 2 cents per share to 3, profits after tax in 2025 up $2m to $7.7m (attributed to winning two premierships, increased ARLC grants ($24.4m) and “additional funding for each Club for competition expansion”, i.e. waving through the Chiefs), operating revenue up 20% on 2024 to just under $100m, ticketing and membership up 12%, merch revenue doubled and then some, board registered perfect attendance, keeping an eye on environmental risk, Donaghy makes $535k per year plus car plus a short term incentive scheme (another $300k in 2025), stadium expenses up to $10.4m, the racist owner of the Storm (Brett Ralph) is no longer listed in the top 20 shareholders.

• Separately, Stephen Mayne is running as a non-board endorsed candidate for the Broncos board. His pitch, that Australian sports clubs are community owned instead of being an asset for News Corp, is not compelling. For mine, News Corp is the ideal owner, with deep pockets and no interest in interfering with the board and letting the CEO get on with it. The Broncos don’t need to take a leaf out of the Eels’ playbook, on top of all the other Broncos-ness, and plenty of other “community” clubs are the playthings of a handful of idle rich people (see: Wests’ debenture system, how do you get a membership to Easts?, etc). At least the Broncos’ corporate operations are transparent. Mayne does not expect to win the election or have any influence.

• Rugby union’s Pacific heartlands threatened by NRL spree after Moana Pasifika’s collapse. Speaking of clueless whinging, pretty satisfying to see the shoe on the other foot. Albo’s going to have to do something about the Chinese sponsors though (proclaim the Australasian Empire, with rugby league as its imperial sport).

• Melbourne Storm insist Craig Bellamy has ‘fire in the belly’ to continue following Dolphins defeat

• Saifiti Announces Medical Retirement

• Sevens star set for code switch, signs for Titans

• Cowboys: Hifo & Veivers join Top 24, Nanai out for a month, Harrison Edwards released, Ashley Marsters signs

• RLP continues to add BRL results. Take this as a reminder to chuck some money at their Patreon and check out Redcap’s BRL site.

• PIF to cut LIV Golf funding after 2026, league announces new board members, strategic plan. Feels like we can put breakaway leagues in the bin for a while at least.

• Hung Vuong Stadium construction begins as part of Vietnam transformation plan. Sounds like something that could be aided with a NRL team.

Programming notes

While I’m on “holidays” in “England”, service will be reduced. It is difficult to write a full newsletter if you don’t have access to one-half of the newsletter’s remit.1 In lieu, we’ll keep it light and tight.

Things that happened

Mr Luai is going to Port Moresby:

The PNG Chiefs will stand for something bigger than a single country. We are also the team of the Pacific. Jarome embodies that identity, and his presence in our jersey will resonate across every Pacific community.

As attested by the ‘23 grand final Panthers, and the Blues in general, getting better without Luai, the Tigers could hardly have landed on a better first signing for the Chiefs. It will be weird for Luai to go back to the NRL after spending 2027 playing for the Magpies but he won't be the only one in that situation. See also: the guts of the London Broncos coming to PNG.

Alex Johnston is also committed, although he seems less likely to spend next year in Cup, and don’t forget the extremely normal friend-haver, Toby Rudolf. There are still hurdles ahead - the tax lawyers are rubbing their hands together as we speak - and some significant reality checks in the offing in November 2027. Still, the Chiefs seem to be landing better signings sooner than either the Bears or the Dolphins. Do with that information what you will.

Luai was flown to PNG on a private jet, was given the five star treatment, the subject of comments from the Prime Minister and witnessed grit and passion at a Digicel Cup game. Not every player is going to get the red carpet but the show makes it more real. As I've been saying for a while, this is happening. Whether it is sustainable in the medium term remains to be seen but the rivers of gold from the next deal will make it hard to fail.

NRL Physio went on Kevin Walters’ podcast, or at least that’s what I gather from some of the screen caps, and talked about the shit he cops from clubs:

Seeney received a professionally-worded response from someone within the Broncos rebuking him for sharing the information, while two more anonymous replies also arrived that were far less diplomatic.

“They abused the living hell out of me!” Seeney recalled.

Seeney puts such reactions down to a misunderstanding from clubs of what he’s trying to do.

“I’m not angling for a job in the NRL… I don’t need (clubs) to accept me or be friendly, but you don’t need to abuse me either,” he said.

“A lot of clubs seem to think I’m trying to undermine them, but I am literally just trying to educate fans.”

Brien is far too nice but I’m not. I would write in the newsletter that you got mad and I certainly would not keep your name out of it because I have even less interest in getting a NRL job than he does.

The blitheness with which the entire NRL industry treats its fans is increasingly grating. I haven’t cared about this in the past, and would often play devil’s advocate and justify decisions made in a business context because people seemed unable to see what was actually going on, but the powers that be are not even doing you the disrespect of being patronising. You've got Abdo out there telling us splitting the broadcast rights is in the best interests of the game while PVL sells set restarts as an existential panacea for the future of rugby league. Guess who didn't ask for either of those changes?

At the other end, you've got hopped up club apparatchiks chewing out an independent creator for doing their job for them. That he does it in a way a large part of the fan base enjoys only makes it worse for them. How about this: you want a different story out there? You have a comms team. Tell them to pull their fingers out and do their jobs. There aren’t many places of business where you could contact an independent person, abuse them for doing something tangentially related to that business, and keep your job. That’s why the NRL is full of employable geniuses and not just the most venomous vipers in the pit.

I make this point time and again but rugby league would not exist, certainly not professionally and perhaps not at all, without the time and money fans are willing to invest. All the players, administrators, club staff, player agents, RLPA officials, coaches, broadcasters and so on are parasites on your money and your attention. They should show some gratitude but instead, they assume you’ll be there, wallet in hand, ready to dump it out into their pockets. If fans want more injury information, they should get it because the customer is usually right.

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Intermission

Made the long, somewhat annoying journey (why are there roundabouts with traffic lights on major highways?) to Headingley to see the Rhinos absolutely crush the Dragons, 46-4, something that I will get around to writing up in more detail at a later date, once I’ve settled on a suitably patronising “here’s what I did on my holidays and what it Says about a Big Issue” undergraduate tone of essay.

Only one set restart was called but the AWOOGA sound was not piped into the stadium - disappointing - and then I had to explain to my wife why that was one special that they announced it, unlike every other penalty that I interpreted from the ref’s signals. That was something that I had never considered and annoys me more that the stupidest part of the game gets announced while real penalties do not. Some more photos on Instagram.

Upcoming slate

Read this

• Eye Test - Melbourne’s edge defense has vanished

• The Cruncher - Is the 2026 NRL season really “unpredictable”?

• The Sportress - Six, Again: Space to Breathe (see below for a point of pedantry)

• What You Get Is What You See - Ratings, Reddit and the myth of rugby league growth

• Colleen Edwards - Kiwi stars welcome Maroons call-up after Origin rule change

• Nick Tedeschi - Storm success was as certain as death and taxes. So how has it all gone wrong?

• Storm Machine - Game 749 – S29E08 Review

• Rugby League Writers - Broncos Draw Up A Beauty, Tedesco For Origin & Storm Depth Issues

• Independent Australia - Beneath the anti-Zionist Big Banana

Notes

• Last week's email has the wrong watch guide in it. No idea why because I did everything right on my end. Sorry. As always, click through on the Datawrapper embeds.

• Margin watch: 23.5 pts/game is not a record round margin. It is 33rd highest in the 946 regular season rounds since 1988 and the worst since round 16, 2024 (24.4). The 17.5 average margin so far is bang on pace with 2021.

• Drinkwater to depart Cowboys. I’ll have to think about this for the next Bovine Bulletin. What it means depends on what you think of Jaxon Purdue.

• Sami signs on with the Dragons from ‘27. I’ll have to think about this for the next… oh, right. I won’t think about this anymore, other than to confusedly wrestle with the idea that the Titans are under cap pressure. But… how?

• Brendan Piakura hurt again

• Brian McDermott appointed England Men’s Head Coach

• Missed this last week: WSOO and NRLW rules confirmed. As in, the women’s rules are the same as they always are (no set restarts, 17-player sides). Lucky for the pro-set restart brigade, if there are any, the NRLW comp is so lopsided, no one will notice if the games are more competitive than they would otherwise be.

• French broadcaster TV5MONDE to stream Top 14 for free in Ireland and UK. Brief bit of union news to note that, “The Top 14 continues to go from strength to strength and is by far the biggest club rugby competition in the world… A new agreement with Canal+ starts in 2027 and is worth an impressive €128.7 million per season.” So the biggest union club competition in the world is due to get AU$200m/yr from its domestic deal while the actual biggest rugby club competition in the world is already at ~AU$300m/yr from Australian rights (taking ~$100m/yr off from ~$400m/yr for Origin, rep games, NRLW, NZ TV deal) and is likely to climb north of $450m/yr soon.

• “The expanded memorandum of understanding will also see past Titans players recognised with their names to be honoured through the renaming of the older age group competitions - such as the Anthony Laffranchi Cup for Under 14s and Preston Campbell for the Under 13s.”

• AFL sacks appeals board chair Will Houghton after Lance Collard case

• Rare Queensland set of bells rings its first peal in three-hour ‘marathon’ effort

• Spending several weeks in close proximity with my in-laws is teaching me new things about how people use the internet (not complimentary).

Some content

Programming notes

While I’m on “holidays” in “England”, service will be reduced. It is difficult to write a full newsletter if you don’t have access to one-half of the newsletter’s remit.1 In lieu, we’ll keep it light and tight.

Things that happened

Teams for the first game of the women’s State of Origin series were announced: Queensland and New South Wales. The teams are more or less as you’d expect and Queensland have named as strong a side as possible under new coach Nathan Cross. Other than a couple of Blues changing their surnames in the offseason, the main talking point will be how well Lauren Brown and Chantay Kiria-Ratu hold up the team in the absence of Tarryn Aiken and post-rep-retirement of Ali Brigginshaw. Brown is one of the most well-rounded players in the game with significant experience as a leader and Kiria-Ratu is an exceptional talent. Given that it is possible to stymie Jesse Southwell, this is far from a predetermined battle. The first game is on April 30 in Newcastle. If I’m lucky, I’ll have returned to Australia and watched the game before the following week’s newsletter.

Peter V’Landys was once again the subject of a Media Watch segment (h/t Luke). Media Watch paints the Ninefax papers publishing criticism of Racing NSW following the findings of the NSW state government audit, which we touched on last week, is brave journalism while the silence of the Daily Telegraph is damning cowardice. Being Media Watch, they did not engage with the substance of the critique or the matter at hand, instead opting for a smug pissing contest. The findings of the audit were consistent with how PVL runs his orgniasations, a thing that doesn’t seem to bother anyone important, so what else is new? He hired the son of Lachlan Murdoch to make a puff piece of a doco that no one will see as part of a Sydney racing-media industrial complex circle jerk? Please. We did get some funny attempts from V’landys to sound both intellectual and aggrieved:

I find it inhumane that you would attempt to destroy a young man’s self esteem and worth to satisfy your agenda and ideology.

- Email, Peter V’landys CEO, Racing NSW Chairman, Australian Rugby League Commission 16 Apr 2026

[I] have learned to live with unfair reporting regarding myself. Just like I did in the last time Media Watch presented a very one sided unbalanced and unfair critique on me.

- Email, Peter V’landys, Racing NSW CEO, Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, 16 Apr 2026

Inhumane? Agenda and ideology? Critique on me? Dude should have run his email through ChatGPT first. If nothing else, it would have made him sound less like Whiny Trump.

As eloquently put by The Sportress:

It had been part of the imprimatur given to the wacky waving yellow arm guys to speed up the game through the issuance of set-restarts, extended to cover 80 per cent of the ground in the offseason. This was going to result in more tries, something that chief rugby league guy Peter V’Landys assured us would be really fun to watch, and also get him more dollars when it came to the broadcasting deal.

As you know, some people loved this idea. Like Ricky Stuart, the coach of the Raiders, who came out recently to say how important it was to increase the pace of the game, particularly between the 20-40 metre lines, exactly where Corey found himself. Of course many did not, including Canberra Raiders coach Ricky Stuart, who spoke this week of how this extension, ‘recommended’ by the competition committee of which he was a member, was tearing at the fabric of the game.

Befitting a Frenchman, Trent Robison didn’t really say anything.

Campo has a similarly eloquent piece on Flanagan’s sacking:

In a world that runs on set restarts, which did not exist in Flanagan’s glorious times, speed and athleticism are at a greater premium than ever before and young legs leave the old grasping at air or gasping for it.

Holmes has been a disaster. Gutherson was strong last season, but years of pushing himself to the limit have finally caught up to him. And while Cook still has his moments — he was in beach-sprinting mode against South Sydney on the weekend — he is not what he once was.

At their best, the Flanagan Dragons could find a fight and stick in one, but could never really nail the winning part. Last season they beat three of the top four and played in 12 matches decided by one score or less but lost eight of them.

I was never particularly convinced by the Flanagan hire but that was born largely of apathy toward the Dragons’ entire oeuvre of malaise. If they don’t care, and all evidence points that way, why should I? To save the Dragons from their own inept and incestuous club culture, the NRL may need to considering mandating a de-merger with a fan refugee resettlement program ($50 voucher per fan for the Perth Bears merch store).

Dean Ritchie did a typically lazy job of trying to summarise Abdo’s meeting with the RFL in England. Ritchie could only couch the bombshell in terms of NRL clubs buying out their Super League counterparts, something that no one really wants - as Abdo made clear - other than maybe Nick Politis, and copied the substance of a piece published in Forty20 magazine (without attribution, of course) from Leeds chairman, Paul Caddick.

As usual, Messrs Davidson and Mascord had the temerity to get informative quotes and write up a story that doesn’t leave you feeling stupider for having read it. Abdo said:

“There seemed to be a lot of focus on ‘what’s the deal’., ‘what’s the offer’. It’s not really an offer. It’s not really an M and A (mergers and acquisitions). I come from an M and A background and this is not M and A.

“This is about, ultimately: if rugby league is going to globalise and get on an even bigger platform that it is at the moment, it makes sense for the two biggest leagues in the world to collaborate and co-operate and for us to want the Super League to be as strong as possible…

“It’s rugby league uniting and working together against all other forms of entertainment and sport, not the other way around.”

This is the right tack - NRL involvement isn’t going to be anything other than stabilising in the short to medium term - but whether the English game buys it, or otherwise senses this is not going to be in their long term interest, remains unclear. We’ll get a better sense with the next issue of Forty20 and until then, the iron law of institutions continues to apply.

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Intermission

Upcoming slate

Read this

• Eye Test - Don’t let one loss sour the celebration of the Tigers’ improvement. Editorial counterpoint: sour the celebration, there was no more likely outcome than the Brisbane Busteds giving the Wests Tigers a huge reality check after a week of pundits pumping their tyres.

• Campo - After 27 years and 20 losses, can South Sydney finally find their first win in Melbourne?

• Rugby League Writers - Cowboys v Sea Eagles. Subtitled: “I watched this one so you don’t have to.” Thank you for your service.

• What You Get Is What You See - Not an accident: How set restarts are driving the NRL’s injury crisis

• Storm Machine - Game 748 – S29E07 Review

Notes

• Andrew Abdo defends the possibility of NRL TV rights being broken up. I am choosing to believe this is “we are keeping all options open” and not a deflection from something we’re all going to hate. I do love the attempt to couch this as doing the best thing for the game with no reference to what the fans, whose time and money keeps the entire enterprise afloat, actually want. As if I’m going to trust an ex-Deloitte saffa lapdog to know what’s best for rugby league.

• NRL limits contact in training in bid to reduce head injuries

• Cobbo locked in until 2027. When you have the chance to lock up an outside back that drops the ball five times a game and can’t be bothered to run, you gotta do it.

• Clint Gutherson reveals personal recruitment drive to lure fellow fullback [Scott Drinkwater] to Dragons. Embarrassing.

• Barnett Signs with Broncos as Club Supports Anderson Release

• Broncos injury ward looking like the Somme out there

• An activist’s bid [Crikey founder, Stephen Mayne] for Broncos to oust News Corp as major shareholder. I couldn’t read this so I don’t know what case is being made, however, I think it is very presumptuous that any new owner is going to do a better job of running the club, which is all anyone actually cares about. It’s not like a capital investment is required.

• U17 City and Country share spoils

• Cowboys appoint Tim Follett as inaugural Group CEO

• All Blacks great Michael Jones says rugby union losing ‘hearts and minds’ to league

• I did manage to catch some of the second halves of the Sunday QCup games. The Walker Brothers-coached Clydesdales held a 24-6 lead over Souths Logan at half time that was always going to be run down (it took the Magpies 30 minutes). Western had not one but two send offs - here’s footage of one - and both were incredibly weak. Duncan Thompson would ruin his shorts watching how badly the Walkers have bastardised contract footy.

• ‘Old bushie’ Steve Hawe has a dream to make his board game an Aussie classic

• Vanuatu denies it is about to sign a security deal with China as Australia works to ink its own pact. Would awarding a NRL licence to the Vanuatu Iguanas sort this out?

Programming notes

While I’m on “holidays” in “England”, service will be reduced. It is difficult to write a full newsletter if you don’t have access to one-half of the newsletter’s remit.1 In lieu, we’ll keep it light and tight.

Things that happened

Peter V’landys’ Racing NSW was audited by the state government’s audit office. They found that publicly-funded projects delivered under the Racing for the Regions program were not run well. Funds were comitted before being officially approved, some projects were completed before funding was made available and there were governance issues whose summation I won’t bore you with. I don’t think these count as significant and that plenty of other public departments would have a similar level of foibles in their procurement, although the lack of oversight from the racing minister and the lack of regard PVL has for justifying the work that he does is very clear. Just chuck it on the pile of PVL mismanagement for later.

In between a hilarious assumption that the lack of print coverage of the NRL in one Perth newspaper matters and news that the NRL clubs are unclear if they will have to pay tax on their PNG bribe expansion fee, NRL club bosses call for meeting with Graham Annesley over frustrations with rule changes. Unclear if this is going to be a “we just want CoNsIsTeNcY” type deal or if they are going to go after the refs or if someone has the balls to point out the obvious. That the meeting doesn’t involve V’landys means nothing meaningful will change. Wayne Bennett urges NRL to fix blowout crisis with radical kick-off rule change, so that should rule him out of being listened to.

There’s definitely something weird about the way the results are unfolding in NRL 2026 that is different to previous seasons. Individual games have been relatively unpredictable in terms of final result but the margins are still elevated (2026 is still on pace with 2021, both at 17.4 points per game through six rounds). While in previous six again-heavy seasons, the typical game has seen a team (usually from a specific handful) get on top after 60 minutes and then blown the doors off, this season rewards whichever team wins the early coin flips for set restarts with control of the game much earlier in proceedings. People will try to blame the refereeing for this, pining for a return to early 20s footy, without going back and re-watching how bad that 2020-22 period was.

Add Moana Pasifika to the pile with the Sunwolves, Jaguares, Melbourne Rebels, Worcester, London Irish, Wasps, the South African exit from Super Rugby and the disaster of Welsh mergers to the ever growing pile of rugby union failures in the 2020s. Moana Pasifika is a great example of what happens when a franchise is contingent on government and governing body funding for a set period.

Titans launch Chargers-inspired heritage jersey. Looks neat but not neat enough for me to attempt buying one. Gold Coast fans might want to look away for the next bit but this is your heritage? A team that was around for three years? That made finals once, in a second tier league? That's what you want to go with? The fuck did the Chargers ever do, other than look period appropriate?

What to do with the post-Easter lull? Speak to Shane Richardson, then Steve Johnson, then Peter V’landys and finally Ben Ikin. Slap a few million dollar price tags and a couple of bombshells on it, pull together a fantasy team and you’ve manufactured five stories from nothing while restating the obvious (another Queensland NRL team would probably do ok). Even the other guys can get in on the act.

Brisbane introduces ‘tall over sprawl’ strategy in bid to meet housing demand for next 15 years. Just letting everyone know, if you make unfavourable comparisons to world cities in Asia, it comes off as super racist. Singapore seems fine. I presume we just need an underclass of poorly treated migrant labourers to provide us (that is, white people) with the lifestyle to offset the frictions caused by increased density. Also, a bunch of towers around Carindale, or even in West End, doesn’t really compare to Asian cities.

Stats pop

The competition pages have been updated to round 5 on The Almanac. I realise round 6 has subsequently happened but go check it out anyway. Note that club pages will be updated at the end of each season.

The usual disclaimer on player stats applies: the live regression underpinning denominators is subject to sample size, so can change a quite bit later on, and may need a revision in any case as the stats seem overwhelmed by try scoring. The next couple of weeks will be working on a combination of a) nothing (most likely), b) advanced metrics to fill out the paywalled part of The Almanac, or c) Super League stats.

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Intermission

Not the biggest zoo guy in the world but Singapore Zoo gets a solid 3.5/5 from The Maroon Observer. It needs to be air conditioned though.

Upcoming slate

Nickelware

Read this

• Eye Test - The return of expected run metres and the Cowboys, plus Storm, Wahs and Tigers

• Campo - How Wests Tigers veteran Alex Twal defied the odds to transform his NRL career

• Beyond the Goalpost - Khaleesi

• One Percenters - The Buffering Wheel

• The Sportress - Six again: Another week in paradise

• Storm Machine - Game 747 – S29E06 Review

Notes

• New head coach for Fiji Bati is imminent, with Rajesh Singh now confirmed as chairman of the FNRL. Still no announcement as far as I’ve heard but interesting that at least two of the ten teams in this year’s men’s World Cup don’t have coaches in April. Depending on who the coach is, the Fiji NRL wants a team in NSW Cup either next year or year after. For reference, the Silktails are 5-46-1 in Jersey Flegg since 2024.

• Be THE Dragons. It’s the coverage that Dave Riccio brings that makes the NRL special.

• [London] Broncos keen to get more PNG fans on board, after sealing a deal with [PNG] NBC to show matches on free to air TV

• Championship can't continue in current form, say coaches

• Ben Te Kura is trying out for the NFL

• Tafito Lafaele released to union in NZ

• Scott Drinkwater to Dragons (after being turned down by Trai Fuller) to make cap space for Tom Chester?

• Jacek McLaurin breaks silence from hospital with emotional vow to walk again

• Munster & Grant Are Coming to Rockhampton for the opening of the new Browne Park

• Peter Dutton appointed to Queensland Investment Corporation board by LNP government. It would be a shame to waste the leadership talents of a man who delivered an historic landslide to the other guys.

Welcome to the Bovine Bulletin, a regular, independent newsletter about the North Queensland Cowboys.

After the first two games of the season, I was prepared to come in to your inbox and say, “I told you so.” I may still do that later in the season. For now, the North Queensland Cowboys have shown themselves not to be one of the four worst teams in the competition and that ain’t nothing.

The Titans and Dragons are definitely down there and they were both comprehensively beaten by the Cowboys. The rest of the bottom four would be two of Melbourne, Manly, Redcliffe, Parramatta or Canberra, depending on which flogging you most recently happened to catch in Vlandoball II: The Re-Vlandoing.

The win over the Storm was by far the most impressive line on the Cowboys’ 2026 resume. It may prove not to count for much by season’s end, given the Storm’s own travails, and it doesn’t really make up for 2017, but it is something.

The primary thing you’d have to be happy about was the perseverance. Down 16-10 at halftime and then conceding immediately after half time would see most teams give up. When Will Warbrick scores his fourth try, potentially ending a bubbling comeback, to see the Cowboys keep at it and eventually prevail is at the very least encouraging. To do it while Jahrome Hughes is flapping his arms about is gravy.

The Cowboys, and Todd Payten, might be up against it but they haven’t quit.

St George Illawarra are a complete basketcase on the field and off the field seem to be either considering dropping “St George Illawarra”, or possibly “Illawarra” if you believe some of the stupider people on the internet. While they only put up the defence of a particularly well paid reserve grade team, the Dragons game allowed the Cowboys to flex their attacking muscles for the first time in a while. We haven’t seen Purdue slice through the line quite that easily, quite that frequently, in 2026. In contrast to the Vegas game, Dearden and Drinkwater both looked like they had something like fresh ideas.

As I said in my recap on Wednesday, that gives you an idea of the team’s floor and it ain’t that flawed. The defence seems like a perpetual work in progress but scoring points with a bad defence is better than not scoring points with a bad defence.

Consider the big picture. With the poor results of last year, and the associated clearing out of assistant coaches, it has been very clear that Todd Payten’s time at Railway Estate is on its last legs. It is not beyond saving but the minimum for Payten to keep his job would have to be a finals appearance. A 3-2 start is a good way to get there.

The counter is that Payten’s teams always have a purple patch of form. It may be that this year’s patch coincided with the easiest part of the draw, playing two of the worst teams in the league and catching the Storm with their pants down. Only more games is going to prove or disprove that. A Broncos team hitting its stride, facing the defending premiers at a full Suncorp, could hardly provide a better test. It is time for North Queensland to decide what kind of season its going to have.

Let’s end on a bright note:

The North Queensland Toyota Cowboys have agreed to a four-year contract extension with Jaxon Purdue, running through the end of the 2030 NRL season.

Born and bred in Mackay, Purdue was identified later in his schoolboy career, signing with the club on an Elite Emerging contract in Year 11 in 2022. He would quickly emerge as one of the most elite talents to come through the Cowboys Academy Programs in the past decade.

Good signing, good player. I was wrong about the move to five-eighth, so I hope the next coach can figure out what to do with him. Or just teach him to tackle.

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Way to send the NRL to the poor house, Albo

I mean:

The plan, unveiled by Anthony Albanese during a National Press Club address today, includes capping television gambling ads at three per hour between 6am and 8.30pm and a total ban on radio during school pick-up and drop-off times.

Gambling ads would also be banned on social media and streaming platforms unless users are logged in, over 18 and have the option to opt out, while advertising using celebrities or athletes, odds-style ads targeting sports fans, and ads in sports venues or on players’ uniforms would be outlawed.

I remember the braying that rose up when that fat guy in the skinsuit with the wheelie bins came out at Suncorp for some halftime promo, a thing I am beginning to really hate. From that event alone, I say any reform of gambling advertising is going to be good for society, if for no other reason than advertising gambling seems to be the lowest possible common denominator use of the audio-visual medium. Amateur porn aspires to higher values. Expending any carbon to produce gambling ads should be considered a crime against the humanity and see Sportsbet in the dock at Den Haag.

Reducing or banning the advertising of gambling would have the second order impact of entrenching the incumbents. Hypothetically, if you came up with a revolutionary new way to fleece punters, you would not be able to acquire any customers except through word of mouth because you wouldn’t be able to advertise. You might instead have to hope that one of the established players then buys out your fleecing start-up. This is why we probably won’t see a great deal of pushback from the industry over increasing advertising regulation, as it tries to consolidate and exclude any future rivals to its own benefit.

The impact on the NRL bottom line is going to be mostly negative, but this change alone isn’t going to make a lot of difference. Gambling advertising is pretty much the only thing propping up sports coverage. Without that, it’s just McDonalds, Harvey Norman and Chemist Warehouse. If Seven, Nine, Fox, et al can’t sell airtime so ex-players can tell you about their multis, then they have less to spend on broadcast rights, but these regulations are very light on and will have the dual effect of not actually eliminating much advertising and increasing the value of that which remains, now being a more scarce quantity.

If it precedes further controls on gambling advertising, and I’d be surprised if Albo has the guts, then belts will have to tighten.

I hope they sign a deal soon, so we don’t have to keep doing this

PVL spent some time touching himself in public about the TV ratings, which I did not read. I’ve done better analysis —

— so what would be the point? Still, I blame The Sportress for bringing this to my attention:

“We’ve copped criticism for the six-again rule but only Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble don’t like the six-again. The figures speak for themselves.”

What are you talking about? Are Flintstone and Rubble meant to be easily understood as cavemen? Or are the cartoons themselves relics of a distant past? You may as well accuse people of being Denisovans or Luddites or democrats.

A reference to a show that first premiered nearly 70 years ago in black and white undermines the point I think he’s trying to make and is not the bleeding edge wit we’ve come to expect from the jester-in-chief. Remember how funny “Hello, Gil” was? Great stuff. What about “Bruno Cherry Ripe”? Or my personal favourite, “WA is a rusted-on AFL state”?

As with everything from the dumb side of politics, every accusation is a confession and I’d rather be Barney Rubble than the target of a spurious lawsuit.

If you prefer to read rugby league analysis that is both more insightful and less cringeworthy than the pre-packaged joke-like commentary from our glorious leader, you should consider subscribing to this newsletter. For one thing, I appreciated the realities of my aging husk and gave up on pop culture references ages ago.1

Around the grounds

Sea Eagles 52 defeated Dolphins 18.

Panthers 50 defeated Storm 10. The last time the Storm had a clearly losing record was round 5, 2018. It's been eight years since they had more losses than wins. That was more that year’s penalty crackdown because they still finished second that year. This year is probably different because there are plenty more stats, some reaching back to 2003, that adequately describe the gravity of the situation. Let's hear from the fans:

If you chose go short, welcome to NRL hyper rugby league, 2026 edition. Congratulations, do not pass go, concede 50 points. Give yourself an uppercut. Off with the head, on with the pumpkin.

Hull KR 24 defeated Hull FC 6. A mediocre game for the 250th derby, in which FC spent a lot of time threatening and very little time executing. Neither Hardaker nor Sezer have any creative juices left in them. When Rovers got down field, they scored. Whichever May is running around for Robins makes Brodie Croft look like Wally Lewis.

Cowboys 32 defeated Dragons 0. If nothing else, this game showed the floor of the North Queensland Cowboys. The ceiling may not be anything special, and this year’s six week Payten purple patch may coincide with a stunningly easy part of the draw, but there’s an underlying, basic sort of capability on display when Drinkwater, Purdue and co get it together to carve up an inferior team.

Broncos 26 defeated Titans 12.

This is not your grandfather’s crazy Titans. This is a staid, boring team and they’re still bad. The Titans got on the front foot for the entire first half, aided by some extremely favourable refereeing, and turned that into basically nothing. Gold Coast rolled down the field and then hit a wall and had no idea how to break it down. Even if the forward pass try had been given, the Titans were not in this game.

The lack of offence is what lost them this one and that’s one of the things that’s going to lose them lots of games. Another thing was Beau Fermor’s efforts on the Willison and Arthars tries and Chris Randall getting caught behind the ruck on the Paix-Mam double act. Those are experienced, non-QCup players that should have done better. Hannay probably needs three years to set this foundation and build into something competitive but he won’t be given that long.

Quiet news week

You know its quiet when Travis Meyn does a well articulated version of a League Unlimited expansion forum post, listing off the potential candidates for the 20th NRL team. For the record, these are a second New Zealand team, another Brisbane team, probably in Ipswich, Adelaide and “Pasifika”. Given how the Moana are going, I think we can safely bin that last idea.

In speaking with Shane Richardson, who is himself presumably at a loose end, Richardson makes the case for the Easts Tigers and Ipswich Jets working together:

“The Broncos aren’t servicing the area which is why the Warriors, Souths and everybody else is getting involved. There’s just not enough rugby league,” Richardson said.

“We had Ipswich and Easts going against each other (in 2021), but no one doubted that was the best way to go, even better than Redcliffe.

“Redcliffe have done a great job and I’m not being critical of them at all but the numbers for the west stacked up better than Redcliffe.

“There’s no doubt there should have been another team in that area to make sure we keep those great areas of rugby league alive from the west of Brisbane through Ipswich to Toowoomba.

“It’s now time that Easts and Ipswich get together. Ipswich have got the history but haven’t got the money. Easts have got the money.

If it was that obvious, you’d think the Firehawks bid would have been about Ipswich all along, instead of attempting to merge their bids a few weeks before the decision was officially announced, as a last gasp to prevent the Dolphins from gaining the licence Redcliffe were probably always going to get.

Turns out that was just a lead-in to this:

Ipswich bid boss Steve Johnson has revealed a United States private equity firm is keen to invest millions into the franchise if the NRL decides to expand to a 20-team competition.

Steve Johnson, who is chair of the Jets, was not actually quoted saying this, so who knows what that’s worth. What he did say was:

“We are 100 per cent still keen,” he said.

“We’ve gone away and worked really hard on our pathways in Ipswich. We’ve got our redevelopment happening at North Ipswich Reserve and all we need is a licence.

“We’ve got no shortage of backers. I’ve worked hard on that in the US and there’s a lot of rugby league people in Australia that have put their hand up wanting to be involved.

“We’ve had plenty of people reaching out because they see the nursery that is Ipswich, Toowoomba and the west that is lacking support.”

A later set of quotes can be best summarised as telling Easts to fuck off, criticising their lack of juniors - is PATRICK CARRIGAN a joke to you? - so that seems like a solid basis for re-drawing next year’s QCup rivalry round. There was this gem:

“We’re a risk-free option because we’ll only fail if the NRL fails. The numbers are rising and rugby league is the national sport of Ipswich and Toowoomba.

Just like Papua New Guinea.

Then PVL was asked for an opinion. If you read the story, you’d be given the impression the NRL was on the verge of awarding a 20th licence to the Ipswich Jets tomorrow. If you read the story carefully, you’ll see V’landys is saying what he always has: we’ll look at all options, including another SEQ team or another NZ team for that matter, we’ll talk to the QRL about it, it’s going wonderfully but we’re not going to rush this, we’re more focussed on the 18th and 19th teams right now and it won’t be until 2030 at the earliest. That is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Note the extensive use of future tense.

“Their efforts have got to be rewarded at some point,” V’landys said of Brisbane’s western corridor bid.

Sure, that doesn’t seem like the best way of determining the merit of potential licences but what do I know? I’ve never once expanded the National Rugby League and PVL has done it three times now.

Then again, if you were going to bring a new team in for 2030, handing them a licence at the end of 2026 would give them a long runway to get sorted. That would be an opportunity the Dolphins and Bears were not afforded and while the Chiefs get longer, they have so much more work to do.

Other than that, this is all pretty thin gruel. I thought with the advent of the Dolphins and the return of the Bears, the hacks would have to find a new story to trot out every six months when they’re running on empty. It turns out that story is “Let’s get the Jets in already” every six months from now until 2030 or 2032. I, for one, can’t wait to write up basically this exact piece in the newsletter another eight or ten times.

Because ignoring all the pablum about AFL invasions of the heartlands - how did that go in western Sydney? - to restate the case for SEQ4 in the west: it’s not just fishing where the fish are, Ipswich has a slew of demographic factors in its favour. The region is fast growing, highly suburbanised and politically contestable.

The LNP have claimed the mayoralty in the last round of local government elections and with the state government want to turn Ipswich, traditionally a Labor area, as blue as SEQ’s other exurbs, Moreton Bay, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast. One of the tactics to implement that strategy includes the current redevelopment of North Ipswich Reserve to 2,500 capacity with a view to upgrading to a modern 20,000 seater at some point. If the LNP can reasonably claim they delivered a NRL licence to the area, that’s not going to hurt them.

The counterargument is that this area is about as rusted-on for Broncos support as it gets. If Ipswich and Toowoomba are, at best, divided between the Broncos and the new team, all of the casuals, non-aligned and Broncos haters in SEQ were already swept up by the Dolphins, then the bid starts with a much smaller core of fans than either the Titans or Dolphins could claim, and the crowd numbers for both gives some pause in that respect, even if the Phins’ TV numbers are still reasonable. A Newtown-Ipswich Jets JV might skirt around this but it has its own conceptual issues to iron out.

There’s also no particular reason the NRL has to stop at 20 teams. That’s just a number Politis pulled out of his head. Abdo has also made it clear that there is no further expansion past Perth and PNG in this coming broadcast cycle, so there’s nothing doing until 2032-ish (or 2030, if the cycle is surprisingly short). Brisbane may be a post-apocalyptic wasteland by then.

If not, a north-ish Dolphins, a south-ish Titans, a west-ish Jets and the central, all-conquering, much-bigger-than-them-all-combined Broncos, feels like an easy sell to all the stakeholders who matter (the broadcasters), and a 22 team NRL gets you all the Sydney heritage you want, all the SEQ derbies you can handle and all the pins in the map you need.

Intermission

Kayo has made it difficult to screen record so you’re probably just going to get more photos when QCup doesn’t provide the juice. The new Kangaroo Point Bridge is good.

Click here for some footy content.

Hotseat

🔥🔥🔥🔥 Flanagan

🔥🔥🔥 Payten

🔥 Ryles

🔥 Ciraldo

🔥 Woolf

Congratulations to this week’s one-flame debutants, Jason Ryles of the Eels and Kristian Woolf of the Dolphins. We’ve already sacked one coach - finally! - and there’s a line of 3.5 sackings. I can see ourselves getting to three easily enough but the fourth is tricky.

Upcoming slate

Bit of a strange week of scheduling. All of the Queensland Cup, bar Sunday’s feature game, are kicking off at 3pm or 5pm on Saturday, which at least leads in to some decent non-Queensland NRL match ups on Saturday evening.

The two games worth watching are The Big Game on Friday night (not Dragons-Sea Eagles, which is toxic and hazardous to human health, I mean Cowboys-Broncos obviously) and the Sunday QCup feature game between the Tigers and Hunters.

A reminder that daylight savings has ended in NSW, so kick off times are back to normal.

The Dolphins have the bye. A sigh of relief emanates from north SEQ and Central Queensland.

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Nickelware

Read this

• Aaron Bower - Super League’s rousing Rivals Round offers timely boost for takeover talks. Funny how there’s almost no coverage of this from the Australian-based media.

• Eye Test - One stat every NRL club could fix as the Panthers dominance continues

• Rugby League Writers - Brimson’s No Try, Casey McLean & Twidle On Debut

• The Sportress - Waiting on a resurrection

• Stereogum - We All Float On: A Weekend Aboard The Modest Mouse Cruise

Notes

• Programming note: a reminder I’m overseas from this Friday. Service is expected to be intermittent to non-existent until I return on the Labour Day weekend. I am not sure how or if I will have time to watch any NRL. Apologies in advance. I do plan to issue a Bovine Bulletin later this week.

• Margin watch: it’s about the same as last week.

• One of the commonly understood consequences of the expansion of rugby league in general has been the decline in depth at clubs. One of the less understood factors is that the gap between the starting side and the reserve options is greater now, so the opportunity for mass cullings for poor performance is reduced because even an underperforming starter is still likely better than what constitutes replacement level now.

• Browne Park, Rockhampton reopens on May 2. Interested to see how it looks on the TV.

• Just for funsies: Australia’s most decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith arrested over alleged war crimes. Don't forget this.

Welcome to the Pony Picayune, a regular, independent newsletter about the Brisbane Broncos.

The Pony Picayune is often not just wrong, it’s also rarely early. The theme of each of last season’s editions reflected the most recent result, a monument to short term bias and a shortsighted inability to see the forest for the trees. Surely when the Broncos went down 34-6 to the Sea Eagles at the end of May, that was it.

While the subsequent results disproved each of the previous edition’s theses, the theses did reflect the prevailing sentiment of the time. I feel less silly about being wrong only because being disappointed is the rational response to a 28 point loss to an average Manly team coached by a guy who is now fired. Everyone who saw it felt the same.

People like things in threes: the father, the son and the holy ghost, or the maid, the mother and the crone, or the rule of thirds and the rule of three. In the pre-season, I posited that the Broncos could be good, bad or mediocre. Halfway through the third game of this season, that one against the Storm with the Broncos down 14-0 at half time, following a bizarre performance against the Eels, 40-32, and an absolute battering at the hands of the Panthers, 26-0, I thought the best case scenario might be that we’d see all three versions of the Broncos at stages through the year. A trinity of uncertainty, if you will, and this was the ugly leg.

That wasn’t right. Once the Broncos stopped dropping the ball quite so much, they began conceding fewer and scoring more points. Once the Broncos dropped Shibasaki and got Piakura back, the edges tightened up and the staunch defence the real aficionados of the Broncos have come to appreciate over the last few seasons returned. Once injuries forced a tweak to the playmakers, things started to click into place and the obviously blinding attack that everyone has noticed over the last few seasons returned.

The Broncos are basically good. They’re going to have bad games but even a 26 point bashing from the Panthers in round 1 looks fine considering only one other team has gotten any closer (the Sharks lost by 20) and even if you changed nothing else about that game than reducing the handling errors to a more typical rate, the Broncos would have only gone down by a respectable 12 to our erstwhile overlords.

There’s a case, maybe not a strong one, that Brisbane are the second best team in the league. Whether they can close that gap to Penrith, as they did in 2023, or eclipse them, as they did in 2025, that’s what the next five months of the season is to figure out. Figuring out not just the if but also the how is the job of the coaching staff. Taking down the Panthers in 2026 is not going to be a straightforward task and while there has been a considerable tumult in that part of the club, they’ve shown themselves up to the task before.

Until then, there’s an injury crisis to deal with. Here’s what the NRL’s official injury report has:

• Reece Walsh - broken face, return round 11

• Ben Hunt - knee, return round 14

• Adam Reynolds - groin, return round 8

• Grant Anderson - knee, return round 16

• Del Hoeter - broken fibula, return round 15

That’s a lot of experience, replacement level skills and Reece Walsh on the side lines with our autistic king, Billy Walters. The Broncos have made do without Walsh before, just as they made do with Haas against the Dolphins, but it’s not the life to which we’ve grown accustomed.

That the first drop fullback is Jesse Arthars is not particularly encouraging but better than having to rely on Selwyn Cobbo or Tristan Sailor (excluding 2023). It’s possible Arthars’ time in the wilderness has successfully communicated that he can be part of this team but only if he wants to be. If not, there’s others who want that job.

The halves are a bigger challenge. Ezra Mam has put together maybe 50 good minutes in 400 so far and will now have to drag around Tom Duffy, Josh Rogers or another much more exotic combination, thrilling only in its possibilities of chaos or new levels of incompetence. Without Walsh, that’s a lot of playmaking that’s going to have run through a guy that, in the absence of being booed for nearly manslaughtering a child, still needs to find form.

Anyone who can tell you what is going to happen with certainty, especially without a Tuesday team list, is lying. All we can do is look at the recent past and guess at a near future. The next few weeks are going to be challenging but with the disruption to the heart and soul of the roster, that’s hardly surprising and it will be hardly representative of what this team can be.

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Welcome to the Phin Review, a regular, independent newsletter about The Dolphins that is not the Australian Financial Review.

What.

The.

Hell.

Just.

Happened?

But also not just what, but how?

Down 28-nil at half time, the score was 52-zip in the 70th minute before any attempt was made at restoring a shred of self-respect with a quick run of 18 points. The entire team transformed into a series of turnstiles. The electrifying attack that the Dolphins subjects other teams to was turned against them, with Sea Eagles slicing through the line with horrifying ease and finding it easier still to just go around the right side defence.

The team hasn’t found the songsheet it was singing from for most of the second half of last season. Whereas the 2025 Dolphins scored over 30 points per game, the 2026 Dolphins are at 23, while conceding four points more per game than last year’s team. It is not a combination that’s going to win games. Given last year’s team was hardly a steely stalwart of defence, doing a much worse job this year is dire, indeed.

The pack, which on paper looks fearsome, has yet to really assert itself. Other than a six again shutdown of the Sharks, the Dolphins weren’t able to compete with a Haas-less Broncos, much less Souths’ overhyped or Manly’s washed forwards. Flegler is still working his way back into shape, Gilbert is mercurial and Kaufusi is done. One bright spot has been Finefeuiaki.

The bigger concern is the function of the attack. While it took the Phins half a season to get going last year, and most of the issues against Manly were simple dropped balls that are easy to fix, a finals-bound team and a serious player in this league doesn’t have half a season to find its groove. Good teams start better than this and they certainly play straighter. Cue a considerable amount of discourse coming about Katoa before he gets everyone on his page (maybe). There will be less consideration of the below replacement level play of Kodi Nikorima, who put up a season average 109 Z score in 2025, his best since 2017, and has one game above zero in 2026.

While these were the three issues we talked about in the season preview as potential concerns, the more baffling factor is that Manly just fired their coach into the sun. Even though that was on the cards as soon as Seibold white anted his way in and signed a contract, Manly remain well in the conversation for the spoon. The Dolphins opened the door to a team in complete disarray, coached by a Jeff Saturday debutant who was on TV a week earlier, and being the more professional team, the Sea Eagles accepted the invitation and trashed the place.

With an MPL of 1830, this puts the Sea Eagles’ victory comfortably in the 98th percentile of all NRL beatdowns since 2016. It’s the seventh best blowout by a Manly side, a list of matches which inexplicably includes a different Dolphins thumping (round 15, 2023, MPL = 1940). They’ve only played four matches.

In 2023, that flogging was one of the tipping points for that inaugural team. Expected to get the spoon, and having made a decent account of themselves in the first half of the season, everything that happened after that was either irrelevant to future prospects if bad, or house money if good. Having banked seven of their eventual nine wins, in a season they were expecting to win three, it was a gentle slide to the finish from there.

It is now 2026 and what we’ve discovered about this club is that the slightest modicum of expectation causes a complete collapse. Think they should have a clear run to the finals? They’ll ship 64 to the Roosters and 58 to the Sea Eagles. Want them to show up against their erstwhile main rivals? They’ll win the one and only time that rival is in an even bigger mental hole than they. It is hardly an encouraging sign for the culture of the organisation that this keeps happening.

There is time to fix this. You may note that an embarrassing loss to the Sea Eagles was the turning point in the Broncos’ run to the premiership in 2025. Nonetheless, we can turn on the burners for Kristian Woolf’s hotseat, low at first but the temperature is going to increase if the results don’t come.

There are no existential threats in the NRL. The structure of the league is such that no matter how pathetic a following a club has, the league will never revoke a licence and the money from the broadcast deal is too good to ever land in significant financial trouble. So no matter how anonymous the Dolphins are, they aren’t going anywhere.

But there’s still something to be said for simple pride. That seems in short supply.

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Conflict on Caxton vibe check

Back when I first started this newsletter, I thought regular coverage from the ground would be a worthwhile offering. I could couch the match day experience in a local idiom that might otherwise be lost to history, because the sport’s coverage tends to emanate from Sydney and cities and people and culture are constantly in flux.

It turns out that if you go to half a dozen games a year, they all tend to blur together and, actually, there isn’t all that much interesting about how often strippers pop up on Caxton Street, whether you wanted them to or not. Even Brisbane, which is undergoing one of its fits of renewal ahead of the Olympics, doesn’t change quite that quickly.

Instead, the match day report tended to serve as a review of the relationships of the clubs. Last Friday was the seventh meeting of the Broncos and Dolphins and I am pretty sure I’ve been to all of them but I haven’t written about it specifically since the fourth, the one and only Dolphins victory, at the end of 2024.

If you’re reading this, it is very likely that you watched the game, so you don’t need me to tell you how flat the Dolphins were, that their attack is still a work in progress or that the Broncos were fine without Payne Haas. You might be surprised to learn that Jordan Riki had a really good game and be equally unsurprised at how poorly Selwyn Cobbo went, targetted like a Dresden factory. Brisbane won, Redcliffe lost, and the Broncos go to 6-1 over the Dolphins.

What you might not have noticed on TV was the lopsided fan distribution. In the first game in 2023, it felt like the crowd was mostly Broncos or Dolphins with a noticeable slice of neutrals who came along to see the spectacle. The next year, everyone had picked a side. In 2026, there was nary a Phinatic to be seen.

Some of that is that Dolphins red blends in with the seating colours at Suncorp, some of that is the novelty of the Dolphins has worn off and a lot of people who were very excited in 2023 have moved on to other things, and some of that was the Broncos hosting, but Bronx Nation out-numbered Phinsland by 10-to-1. The return fixture later in the year will undoubtedly be less skewed but the Venn diagram of Broncos members and Dolphins members have significant overlaps.

The Dolphins’ fanbase isn’t just made up of lapsed or former Broncos fans. A material proportion are active Broncos fans. These Broncos fans can range anywhere from hostile or indifferent, getting a Phins membership because, perversely, that’s how you get to see your team, to sympathetic and even supportive, wanting to see locals succeed over the dreaded Sydneysiders, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of the Broncos. People, including Broncos fans, contain mulitudes and a survey of 100 would yield 16 different answers for their most hated NRL club. If you ask the right way, some might even respond with the Titans.

This presented a less raucous, perhaps more muted, vibe, not dissimilar to how recent Cowboys-Broncos games have felt when one team or the other is struggling to put a season together. Despite that, the announced crowd was the higher than either game in 2025, if only just, and the 714,000 people who tuned in at home was the second highest of the four games that have been broadcast on free-to-air.

For most people, their sporting rivalries are inherited. We are able to trace back to a time when the Cowboys and Broncos weren’t rivals, because both clubs are relatively new, even though plenty of bona fide adults weren’t alive when either club first played, and the Cowboys were so terrible for so long. The rivalry ignites in 2004 and combusts during the prime Thurston years around 2015.

That is an exception among the box office derby games in the sport. Easts and Souths may have been rivals back in 1908 but trying to understand that is going to involve anachronstic projections of how we do things now onto the past, painting an unreliable picture of how those clubs related to each other then. Even so, no one alive today would remember the spark, other than their proximity to each other and both clubs’ general odiousness. Each generation since has layered its own perspective on the substrate of the previous generation, forming a sedimentary briquette that keeps the flame alive.

In 2023, Kotoni Staggs hitting the Dolphins with “this is our home” and all of the Broncos’ overbearing insistence that there is only one team in this city - c.f. “we’re Brisbane, they’re Redcliffe” - felt over the top, almost cringeworthy. I thought that was all beneath the Broncos but they’ve stuck at it and in 2026, I spent most of the game waiting for Bart to say the line.

Whether people like it or not, whether it makes any sense, whether its cringe, ‘Our Home’ is the keystone of the rivalry. Another, it bears repeating, is that the Broncos almost always win. The Meanjin Matchup isn’t going to be like any of the others. We’re watching this develop in real time and it is going to do so under very different conditions to its predecessors. We would not have been able to embed an Instagram post into a Substack newsletter in 1908 or 2004.

Presuming our civilisation and its cultural institutions endure much beyond the end of my lifetime, which is by no means assured, the River City Rivalry will continue to develop, grow and change. Evetually, enough time will have passed that 1908 and 2023 will look similar to the people of the distant future, flattening what feels so vibrant with possibilities now into homogenised history.

Until then, it’s not going to be the same. It’s going to be its own thing.

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Around the grounds

Roosters 26 defeated Sea Eagles 10. Is this the laundromat because everyone in it is WASHED. That’s it. Sorry. Except Bobby Toia. Probably not a great sign that the Roosters struggled to go with the spoon presumptives for so long, even if it was raining. Daly Cherry-Evans got booed. The best thing Anthony Seibold did for the Broncos was scaring off Sam Walker.

Broncos 26 defeated Dolphins 12. On one hand, the Dolphins were gifted 50% of their points but on the other, the Broncos only really kicked away in the last ten minutes. It wasn’t as tense or dramatic as their first meeting in 2023 but the same script was improvised on. Ezra Mam still stinks - what’s up with that? Jordan Riki and Cory Paix have been excellent, giving me no reason to curse their birth. Brendan Piakura’s return has been extremely welcome. People keep mentioning Morgan Knowles and I don’t know who that is.

Panthers 48 defeated Eels 20. Penrith good.

Cowboys 28 defeated Storm 24. Let’s hear from the fans:

A better Melbourne team wouldn’t lose a 24–14 lead with less than 15 minutes remaining. This isn’t that Melbourne team. We all need to get with the program on that. Too few players look to do the hard work. Too many fail to do the little things well, let alone adequately.

As a bonus for the Cowboys, this victory devalues the Broncos’ one by at least 40%.

Blackhawks 34 defeated Tweed 6. The Blackhawks moved the ball around, not really with any intent or forethought, and that was enough to completely disrupt the Seagulls early on. Townsville weren’t asked to do much, having 62% of the ball against a 70% completion rate by Tweed. Lindon McGrady had his career ended several times, as the Seagulls forward pack collapsed like the formation of a neutron star, burning interchanges very early on. Shaq Mitchell is probably not getting a call up anytime soon. Jack Campagnolo’s hair is starting to thin (solidarity, brother) but he still has it.

Titans 22 defeated Dragons 14. Even the 1999 Magpies won three games. Only the Titans would manage to give up a penalty for offside while in possession and they did it twice. What is the point of Lachlan Ilias? Why did I spend my Sunday evening watching this penalty-a-thon (on 2x speed)?

Super League highlight sprint, round 6. My overwhelming impression from this week is that it's not that difficult to get a major Super League team to stop trying, although some were more guilty of this than others. In contrast, Olympique went down 20 and took it to golden point. Lol, Toby Sexton was so angry down 22-0 at half time. Tyson Smoothy’s presence in Super League is as inexplicable as Tristan Sailor's presence is explicable. Buy Jason Qareqare. Wigan fans impotently booing as their team goes down to Huddersfield was very funny. What's with the weird 3D signage at Leigh Sports Village? It brings me no joy to say this but, sell Luke Polselli.

Stadium chat

I hoped they checked with the legal owner, Kotoni Staggs, first:

The Broncos have unveiled plans to buy into Suncorp Stadium and deliver Brisbane a world-class venue in a first for Queensland sport.

Exciting! Or is it?

“We want to invest in the stadium to secure its long-term future,” Broncos CEO Dave Donaghy said.

“It’s really important for our members, fans and players to have a high-quality venue.

“We understand some of the budgetary challenges that come with investing into an Olympic Games, but we don’t want to see Suncorp left behind.

“We have had preliminary discussions with Legends Global and Harvey Lister (CEO/Chairman) about those opportunities.

“We are looking forward to discussing that further with the government when they’re in a position to do so.”

So, actually, no plans, goals, dates or dollars. It gets worse. Mr Lister of Legends Global:

“Some additional seats would be great, but 8-10,000 seats is a big challenge cost-wise and probably doesn’t stack up commercially.

“We’re not seeing a massive demand for an increase in capacity, but the patron experience and the players’ experience are the two big things where we could invest substantial funding and make a real difference.

“There’s some new technology that we’re aware of. The Legends Global group is the largest operator of stadiums in the world and we see what works and what doesn’t.

I definitely want to be on the hook for upgrades to the “patron experience” as a taxpayer, ticketholder and Broncos shareholder. Installing a system that more effectively blasts Jim Beam ads into my cerebral cortex, improving the bottom line of the stadium operator and Diageo by 2.9%, sounds like a great use of my money.

Unless the thought of the Broncos taking a part share in an otherwise public asset and adding 7,500 seats with visual obstructions at a thousand percent markup gets you hot for some reason, let’s just park this idea, shall we? That is probably what the state government is hoping.

While the nation’s capital has a death trap for a stadium that will never be fixed, we’re drowning in new infrastructure. Starting up the road:

Brisbane Stadium, which seems to be what we’re calling it, will seat 63,000 around a pitch the equivalent (note that no one uses the word “same”) size to the MCG. It’s as close to Exhibition as Suncorp is to Roma Street, so that probably saves us a train station. More importantly, will there be cupholders?

Ms O’Driscoll explained the consequences of cup holders to the visitor experience.

“If you’re adding 10cm to every seat to provide a clearance, and you times that by 63,000 seats, it increases the venue significantly,” Ms O’Driscoll said.

“Those finite decisions are really important to understand. Part of the user experience and stakeholder engagement is having these discussions early, because the fundamental flow-on effect of getting that wrong is incredible.”

Walking between rows of seats is always difficult in a full stadium, she said, “even when there’s a good amount of clearance”.

“But when you’re hitting a cup holder, every step you’re taking, it’s not great,” Ms O’Driscoll said.

“Particularly if you’re spilling people’s drinks, they’re not too happy with you.”

Cupholders are the kinds of details that ordinary people tend to think are simple to incorporate but actually have huge impacts when magnified at that scale.

Finally, in a big week of announcements:

A Las Vegas-style 17,000-seat indoor venue will be built in the inner city, with new artist impressions revealing what the Brisbane Arena could look like.

It comes as two heavyweight consortia are set to battle it out for who gets to build the mega project.

Short-listed from a global field of eight bids, the Brisbane Entertainment Alliance — backed by Capella Capital, Lendlease, AEG and Legends Global — will compete against the Gather Brisbane Consortium, comprising Plenary Group, Live Nation and OVG.

Las Vegas-style means fancy, right? Presumably the main prize is the redevelopment rights of the Gabba site and this is the thing, we the people, “get” in exchange even though it is not required for the Olympics.

On the other hand, the fact that Legends Global - there’s that name again - and AEG and Live Nation might be directly investing, suggests the opportunity to fleece people on concert tickets is simply too lucrative to pass up, despite an out of control construction market because of the Olympic Games coming to town and an imminent inflationary pulse that is going to destroy a lot of balance sheets in the industry.

Jarrod Bleijie, who is apparently not a big sports guy, used this opportunity to be heard a lot, including the wonderful line:

“We’re doing the geotechnical studies for drill, baby drill, to get this project underway.”

People do love Donald Trump and his wisdom. Excellent gambit, sir. You should definitely be the political face of this enormous exercise in sports spending.

Intermission

Postcard perfect. From the Gold Coast gallery on the excellent Queensland Places.

If you need a footy highlight, check out the end of Jets-Magpies.

Hotseat

Club statement!

The Manly Warringah Sea Eagles have today confirmed that Head Coach Anthony Seibold will depart the Club effective immediately.

The Sea Eagles thank Anthony for his service and contribution to the Club and wish him and his family all the best for the future.

The Club is disappointed with its start to the season but remains focused on making the 2026 season a success.

Hahahahahahaha. Ahahahaha. Ha. Haaaaaaahh.

Kieran Foran has received the poisoned chalice on an interim basis. The only downside is that Manly have ruined their season - raising the question of why now and not last year - but not so comprehensively that the club’s first ever wooden spoon won’t come under Seibold’s direct supervision in a milestone anniversary season.

Seibold is an exceptional self-promoter. He white anted his way into Red Hill and did the same at Brookvale. Even after his ousting, there was at least one pro-Seibold column in a masthead beacuse if Nathan Brown got three cracks at it, then why not Seibold? The league is that silly, so the funniest landing spots for Seibold’s final tour are:

1. Cowboys, on likely availability of the position

2. Return to Souths where he was 2018 coach of the year after Wayne finishes up

3. Reunited with protege Sam Walker at the Roosters

I will accept that a return to Red Hill to repalce Madge would actually be the funniest but it would also mean the end of the newsletter after I self combust.

Meanwhile in PNG:

History has been made in Papua New Guinea with Willie Peters appointed as the inaugural Head Coach of the PNG Chiefs.

Peters, one of the most sought-after coaches in the game, has recently completed a record-breaking season in the UK, where he led Hull Kingston Rovers to the English treble for the first time in their history, including the Super League Grand Final, Challenge Cup and League Leaders’ Shield.

This breaks with the recent trend of hiring over the hill, past legends to front the organisation while a new, up-and-comer does all the real work and then takes over, and mericfully cuts to the chase. Presumably it would be hard to convince an already rich, retiree-aged man to spend his declining years in Papua New Guinea to fight off the Commies. That is, almost definitionally, a young man’s game. Whether Peters is up to that or not, we’ll see.

What drew my eye were these quotes, allegedly from Chiefs GMF1 Michael Chammas (emphasis mine):

PNG Chiefs General Manager of Football, Michael Chammas said: “This is one of the most important decisions we will make as a franchise. Willie wasn’t just available - he was in demand.

“The fact that he chose the PNG Chiefs, chose this challenge, and chose this country says everything about the kind of man and coach he is. He understands what this means - not just for rugby league, but for an entire nation.

“Tactics win games, but people win premierships. That’s a philosophy which is the foundation of Willie’s coaching career. His ability to connect with players - to genuinely earn their trust and loyalty - is something that we admired.

The ‘it’s not x, it’s y’ construction and the use of em dashes2 are telltale signs of LLM use. Did Chammas, a former journalist and presumably someone who is capably literate, use ChatGPT to summon up his quotes about his new coaching hire?

People are not reliable identifiers of AI but it’s possibly even more pathological if someone whose trade was writing words as recently as a few months ago organically generated that text.

Upcoming slate

No QCup or junior statewide comps this weekend because of Easter, which is now a traditional break instead of a mad scramble to inject footy into a weekend where people typically have more spare time to go to games but not necessarily put them on.

The British have decided to move their clocks forward for the summer as of last weekend and the southerners will be rejoining us on God’s own time (AEST) on this coming Sunday morning.

Hull KR vs Hull FC, Super League, Friday 9.30pm, Craven Park

Even at the greatest depths of my revulsion at the small-mindedness of the Super League and parochialism of its rivalries, disproportionate to both their place within the sport and in comparison to other sports, I still found a soft spot for the Hull derby. Both are coming off wins last week, after uneven (to put it mildly) starts to the season. FC suffered through a late comeback from Catalans but prevailed while Rovers kept the foot on the throat of St Helens, so if that means KR have uncorked themselves post-WCC/Vegas, we should have something here.

The 12.30pm Good Friday kick-off makes for a primetime game in Australia after Panthers-Storm. The smart move - and perhaps one PVL will insist on when his takeover inevitably goes through - would be for the Brits to schedule one game a weekend to roll on from Super Saturday in the NRL and get Fox to make a big deal about it to build a following in Australia. Would it work? Maybe, maybe not, but it also wouldn’t cost them much.

Broncos vs Titans, NRLM, Saturday 6.30pm, Cbus Super

All of the Queensland NRL games are rated two stars this week, reflecting weak teams, weak opponents or both, and this match is no exception. Some people like to imagine that the Broncos get an easy draw because they draw the Titans twice a year on their docket. The problem with that fantasy is that the Titans treat this like the grand final because lord knows they won’t be playing a real final and so these games tend to be more spiteful for the Titans than normal. Still, they’re going to get crushed. Formula 2 driver-ass-name-haver, Antonio Verhoeven, is on the six man bench for the Broncos.

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Programming notes

A reminder that I am going overseas soon and so service will be reduced (possibly non-existent) through most of April. I would like to churn out the first round of club newsletters before I depart on the 10th, but we’ll see how we go.

Stats pop

The average margin in round 4 was exactly 14.0 points per game, which is bang on what we like to see. After a rough start to the season, the average margin has come in to a more moderate 17.0 points through four rounds. The 1995, 2021 and 2002 seasons have all moved ahead through the same mark in their seasons (18.4, 18.3 and 17.2, respectively).

Nickelware

Read this

• Aaron Bower - Featherstone’s long and quiet Sundays in a rugby league town that lost its soul (cf recent discussion of Whitehaven)

• Campo - After a lopsided and uncertain start to the season, the NRL risks losing itself in a maze of set restarts

• Eye Test - The NRL’s setrestartmaxxing era and the value of consecutive play the balls and Penrith versus the field

• The Sportress - Red Lines and rule books

• Dominic Cansdale - The Gold Coast has transformed over 50 years. Its growth debate hasn’t

Notes

• Am I the only one that thinks the league’s 5th tackle options are uniformly terrible? Even the good teams, except when an otherwordly pass is lobbed to the wing, have bad 5th tackle options. I understand the rationale for the decline of kicking on the last but, like the short dropout, it’s swung too far the other way. Cut it out and kick the ball as god intended.

• Somehow, the Titans have to offload Phil Sami to clear cap space. This QCup-style roster is one that is ostensibly pressing against the ceiling, not the floor. I do not understand how that happened.

• RIP Granderson (10-12 weeks recovery)

• Player suffers seizures on field after tackle from ex-NRL prop Darius Farmer. Ugly stuff. Despite being unconscious for 20 minutes, “Johnstone said he spoke to Ramsden on Sunday morning and the prop confirmed he had been released from hospital. Ramsden underwent MRI scans that night which cleared the him of a major brain injury.” Unbelievably lucky.

• Storm sign Jamayne Isaako. Remember the Jamayne Isaako game? Fun times. Saw the same face as he got bamboozled on Friday night There’s still an outside chance Isaako signs for the Cowboys after this and completes the Queensland set.

• Gold Coast mayor yet to decide if he’ll vote on Trump tower after gifts. “‘I just don’t understand why the invitation should or could have been afforded to the mayor in the first place,’ he said. ‘And I just don’t understand why he would accept it, why he thought this was appropriately some part of his work representing the Gold Coast.’”

• Presumably following rugby league’s lead of banning trans women from women’s footy in 2022 (which affected no one), the IOC is instituting mandatory SRY testing for women. This was the basis of gender testing through the 90s. Predictably, it did not go well: “Four years later, when eight women failed SRY tests during the Atlanta Olympics, a member of the IOC’s medical commission complained, “If we screen for sex by using this test, women will be screened out and men will pass.” More recently: “Andrew Sinclair, the deputy director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, said testing for the SRY gene was not a reliable test for determining biological sex. Professor Sinclair discovered the SRY gene in 1990 and has continued to work on gonad development for the past 30-plus years.” There’s no reason to think it will succeed this time, not least because the kind of society that allows its politics to be dictated by the author of Harry fucking Potter is one inching towards the dustbin of history in any case. Anyway, have a look at this if you would like a slightly better understanding of the complicated world of biological sex.

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“2–0 lead is the most dangerous lead” is a cliche so overused it has its own Wikipedia article:

"2–0 lead is the worst lead" (sometimes phrased as "2–0 is the most dangerous lead") is a cliché used in sporting contests, to describe the situation in which one team is leading by a score of 2–0, causing them to become complacent. The phrase is most common in association football, where it is sometimes applied only to the scoreline at half-time. It is sometimes also encountered in other sports where 2–0 is a moderately large lead, such as ice hockey.

The equivalent in rugby league is the “14-nil dickheading,”1 which posits that a team that leads by the exact score 14-0 is at risk of an embarrassing comeback from the opposition. Whether the impending dickheading is considered more likely because it is specifically a 14-0 scoreline, depends on the interlocutor.

Last Friday, the Melbourne Storm gave up an absolute classic of the genre, going into the sheds up 14-0 over the Brisbane Broncos, only to watch as the defending premiers pile on the points and sap the Victorians of their will to live in the second half. That morning, on the other side of the world, York City Knights raced out to a 14-0 lead after 24 minutes before Wigan ran them down, sealing the result, 23-22, with a field goal in the 69th minute before conceding a late try to make it interesting.

We don’t have to overthink this. The funny part of a 14-0 dickheading is watching a team - preferably not your own - squander a handy lead.

Based on data from the last eleven years of the NRL, a team leading by 14 points at any point in the game wins the game 92% of the time. That means 8% of the time, and ignoring the clock, a 14 point lead can be overhauled. For the record, the biggest comeback in the dataset was 26 points, which has actually happened three times but only once since 2016 (Dolphins, 28, defeated Titans, 26, in 2023).

It is important to understand the nuance of this chart. What it is saying is that in all the games where a team was down by exactly two points for at least three minutes of game time (to skip over games where the margin was briefly a certain number between a try being scored and the conversion taken), the trailing team ended up winning the game 35% of the time.

Given this is over 2,000 games of sample size from 2016 to 2026 round 2, including a bit over 1,000 games where a two point deficit has existed for more than three minutes, we directly infer the frequency at which the event has occurred historically is effectively equal to the actual probability of the event occurring in future.

This is not quite precisely the same thing as “the odds of a team winning down by two are 35%.” The actual win probability from that position is roughly 40 to 45%, and depends on the time remaining in the game. In this analysis, a team that takes the lead with a try with five to go, misses the conversion but doesn’t relinquish the lead is treated the same as another team trailing by a conversion in the first half2, even though the win probabilities for each of those scenarios are quite different.

This chart establishes a baseline of what a 14 point lead represents in our expectations. You may not have known it was exactly an 8% chance of a comeback but if I surveyed enough of my audience, the average response would have landed close to 1-in-10. So what happens with a 14-0 scoreline?

This table needs some explanation. The top row is the leading team’s score. The first column is the trailing team’s score. Remember that this score only has to occur for a few minutes in a game to count as an example and that we infer the probability of an event ocurring based its on historical frequency. From this, you can see what the rates of successful comebacks have been from any combination of even numbered scores up to 20.

To find 14-0, we go across the top to 14 and down one row to 0, to find the chance of a successful 14-0 dickheading is 13%. This is noticeably higher than the baseline 8% we got for any 14 point lead. The latter rate is lower, which reflects a greater number of games where the winning team increases their margin to 14 points near the end of the game, a position that is effectively impossible to overcome, and other games where the margin is 14 for a while, on the way to a bigger beatdown.

As we descend down the 14 column, the margin narrows and the probability of the combeback succeeding improves. This makes sense. Unless, that is, a team finds itself in a situation where it is down 14-2. There is a range of scenarios where a team might take a penalty goal and then concede 14 points, or concede 14 points and then take the shot at goal or some combination of. They all represent a degree of cowardice, lack of self-belief or incompetence. In fact, if the team leading has a double digit score, the lone penalty goal reduces the likelihood of the comeback compared to the situation where the trailing team had scored no points at all.

This is not information on which you could base in-game tactical decisions - the team taking the penalty doesn’t know if it is going to score more points later, and thus move into a different box and improve its probabilities, or if the leading team will make it to double digits - other than acknowledging that two point is, indeed, poo points.3

While the rows and columns form scores, the diagonals show the probabilities of overcoming particular margins. For example, the odds of overcoming a two point deficit range from 49% (4-2) to 32% (20-18). As we move to the bottom right, it is worth remembering that situations in which nearly 40 points have been scored are necessarily much later in the game, certainly in the second half of the match, than a game in which six points have been scored. The clock becomes a more significant factor as to whether the comeback will succeed, as the total score increases.

This chart is the same information as the table but displayed differently. Each curve represents the top row of the table, or the leading team’s score. The x-axis is the same as the first column. Where the x-value intersects the line gives the probability on the y-axis.

Despite the complexity, this helps visualise where probabilities stand out from the trend. I’ve marked 8-4, 16-6 and 14-0 as special scores. A team trailing 14-0 is as likely as a team trailing 14-4 to stage a comeback, acknowledging that 14-4 is likely on the route from 14-0 to victory. If the team leading has 16 points on the board, the best bet for the comeback is to be on six or 12. And being down 8-4 is seemingly better than 8-6, partly because the trailing team is incentivised to score a try instead of playing for a goal and partly because 8-6 is a late game coded scoreline, while 8-4 is a necessary progression to any number of much higher scoring outcomes.

There’s no ideal score to be down. From a win probability perspective, it is always preferable to lead the game or, if trailing, minimise the margin as much as possible. There are more successful pathways to victory than others - going from 14-0 to 14-4 is generally more succesful than going from 14-0 to 14-2 - and these involving scoring tries, rather than kicking goals. All of this is unsurprising in the least because funnily enough:

There is little evidence that 2–0 is the worst lead in practice. In association football, a team leading 2–0 at half-time only goes on to lose the game in about 2% of cases. A 2017 analysis by Sky Sports showed that between August 1992 and July 2017, there had been 2,766 occasions in the English Premier League where a team established two-goal lead. Of these matches, 2,481 resulted in victories for the leading team, 212 ended in draws, and 73 in defeats. In ice hockey, statistics show that if a team builds a two-goal advantage, they go on to win the game in the majority of instances, and that a one-goal lead is far more dangerous. As a result, the cliché is often used in full knowledge that 2–0 is not in fact the worst possible lead.

A 14-0 dickheading is fun and memorable but not necessarily anything special statistically.

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The non-expansion expansion era

It is incumbent upon those of us who are not beholden to deadlines, editors or any kind of quality control or supervisory oversight, to continue to peddle our particular pecadillos. Eventually, through the power of sheer brainwashing and too much time on ours hands, we will prevail. I’ve been on this front for six years already, what’s another decade? I’m not in here with you, you’re in here with me, etc, etc.

So, yes, more set restart chat. Over the weekend, the vibe, such as it is that I’m exposed to, seemed to move away from the ongoing crisis of the NRL’s own making. Average margins reduced to a “mere” 15.8 points in round 3, down from 20.0 and 18.5 in rounds 1 and 2 respectively, and that took some of the heat out while the media apparatus, palpably relieved, gets distracted by someone jangling their keys elsewhere (e.g. meeting room names).

For the record, through three rounds, 2026 still leads 1995, a season in which four new teams were added, by an average margin of 18.1 to 17.4.

To borrow from our friends at The Sportress:

In an attempt to back Peter V’Landys’ re-expansion of the set-restart law, he engaged what we in the business call a ‘false dichotomy’. This is a logical fallacy in which Stick suggested that we could either have more six-agains, more tries, and more fun, or less of all of these things. In Stick’s words

You’ve got to make a decision yourself as a fan. Would you like to be a fan of an opposition team where you’ve got a team that just wants to keep on wrestling and wear the referee out to the stage where the referee just doesn’t give any more penalties? Or would you rather it just be play-on with the six-again? You make the decision yourself as a fan. I know what I want.

The problem with the correctly identified false dichtomy is that Stuart’s fundamental premise isn’t even sound.

Points scoring has been rising over the last few seasons but scoring is not occurring at the rate that we saw even last year, without this stupid change to the set restart. Points are being scored at a rate that is a little higher than the norm but not that much higher.

You’re suffering through this until the discipline improves and not even getting a points scoring extravaganza. 1988 season, in which three new teams were added, scored 50% more points in the first three rounds but managed to keep the average margin two points narrower than 2026 has so far.

The problem is not the volume of points but the lopsided distribution between the two teams. While an average margin per game can conceal some oddities, the range of margins shows the same impacts on the game.

The categories used here are entirely arbitrary. The proportion of “blowouts” is relatively static, but the number of “big wins” (four to six scores) is grossly inflated to any other comparable time in the NRL era. This has come at the expense mostly of the “medium win” (two to four scores), with a lesser impact on the “small win” (two scores or less).

The point of comparison for margins or point scoring or unpredictability for this season is not any other time in the NRL era - at least so far, but it seems likely 2021 will catch up later in the year - but to 1988, 1995 and 1997, seasons in which the introduction of multiple expansion teams, or entire new leagues, significantly altered the status quo.

Not only are you not getting the promised points-splosion from this rule change, which would undermine the directive to maximise time of ball in play in any case, you’re not even getting the fun of watching new teams run around the field or the feeling that there might just be something to this rugby league thing.

Instead, like 2021, 2026 feels like a sullen march to an inevitable conclusion, occasionally punctuated by a close game of questionable quality.

Be a crank

Unlike the NRL, The Maroon Observer is having a very good start to the year. I’m not here to talk subscriber counts again but it does feel like the newsletter has found a bit of reach via word of mouth that is generating some momentum that keeps new people trickling in. I am extremely pleased with that because each time number go up, so does dopamine. Thank you all for your hard work on producing that word of mouth.

For those of you not yet subscribed:

Around the grounds

Broncos 18 defeated Storm 14. That was a premiership winning performance if I ever saw one. Which I did. Last year. Over the Storm. Brisbane have won three in a row over Melbourne, the first time that has happened since 2004. The Broncos decided they could fuck around for one game, two games, even two and a half games but drew the line at fucking around for three games. Not today. We should have known Jordan Riki in headgear was going to get them across the line and when he did in fact cross the line, we all knew this was on the cards. Look at me, I’m the hoodoo now.

Dolphins 38 defeated Sharks 10. While the Dolphins notionally pushed up the score in garbage time at the end of the game, I felt the margin actually reflects the gap between the two teams for most of the game. It just took Redcliffe 70 minutes to wear Cronulla down and feast on the gooey innards. The Sharks are not a good six again team. Imagine carrying a pack that wasn’t tough enough to smash through 2023 to 2025 but can’t hack the pace of 2021 or 2026. Not great.

Cutters 24 defeated Capras 10. Maybe its the thrill of the regional area rivalry but is there a bit of something about this year’s Cutters? Mackay withstood a very frustrated Central Queensland in the not-so-friendly Friends of Coal Bowl and showed what I think is becoming a trademark turn of pace to win the game. I don’t want to fall for a 2024-style hot start but let’s put a pin in them as a potential Regional Team of the Newsletter of 2026. The Capras, on the other hand, don’t look great. It could be a long year in Rockhampton, as it usually is.

Dolphins 36 defeated Wynnum 16. Redcliffe already have that air of smooth competence that we usually only see in one or two teams each season. While it may be a luxury to play Trai Fuller, Tevita Naufahu and Karl Oloapu in Cup, the Dolphins still went out and did the hard work to dominate possession and crush Wynnum Manly by 20 points. While the margin did get closer at times, it wasn’t really ever that close. The Seagulls’ own star studded roster killed themselves with errors. Gehamat Shibasaki looked depressed just being there, barely involving himself in the game and taking only some small pleasure in a Trai Fuller error.

Cowboys 30 defeated Titans 16. A shootout with no consequences. This was an abysmal game and I am ashamed to share a state with both of these teams. The Cowboys’ general air of ineptitude was only saved by Jojo Fifita finding himself turned around not once, but twice, defending his own goal. The rest of the Titans’ performance was at this exact level - it is hard to believe Mo Fotuaika was once an Origin calibre player - so bravo for North Queensland for not maiming themselves quite as significantly as Gold Coast did. Reed Mahoney needs counselling.

Statewide split screening, round 3. Blackhawks showed a bit more grit and resolve in the Tropical Tango than we’ve seen in the early season but ultimately the class of the Pride came to the fore, much to the annoyance of Townsville. Norths scored two late tries but missed both conversions, which fortunately for the Devils only resulted in a draw, instead of a loss, with the Magpies. Jack Ahearn is back to his usual effortmaxxing. Burleigh and Tweed played out a bizarre Gold Coast derby, with each team scoring exactly 28 points, all of Burleigh’s in the first half, then all of Tweed’s in the second, with the latter’s coming in a run close to the end of the game, also ending in a draw. That late run is less than you would like to see in the defending premiers’ defence. I have no idea why Adam Christensen got pinged for dissent - he rubbed the marker on the head - or why there was a whistle blown before that but the potential game winning penalty goal was missed anyway.

Super League highlight sprint, round 5. York got themselves 14-0 dickheaded by Wigan but showed impressive resolve to only finish a cheeky field goal short. Sign Junior Nsemba now. Toulouse Olympique were horribly outclassed by St Helens, although managed a few late tries to make it respectable. Lewis Murphy sent Ashall-Bott to the shadow realm, Soward-style. Early victim of the Roosters’ zero tolerance drugs policy, Jayden Nikorima scored two tries for Bradford, who made dispatching Huddersfield look a lot harder than it needed to be. How quickly is the air going to come out of the Willie Peters bubble if Rovers, you know, keep losing? While Hull KR did only give up at the end, with a Sol Faataape assist for Les Dracs’ victory, but a loss is yet another loss. 72-6: Cas are in trouble.

Kiwi state cup

If it is not already clear to you, the media apparatus is a voracious monster that demands constant feeding. Novel takes - the novelty is far more important than the quality - are required, every single day, to fill the weekdays of people who are utterly bored by their jobs (hello!) until they can watch the actual games on the weekends and also, separately, otherwise enjoy their lives.

To that end, this newsletter is like a parasite. I prefer to think of us as one of those birds that cleans the crocodile’s teeth, more symbiotic than parasitic, or a kind of bivalve, filtering the ocean, but if I’m honest, male anglerfish or remora or tape worm would also be appropriate metaphors. I take the takes, repackage them with jokes or (much more rarely) praise, and then post it to your inbox for you to laugh/deeply consider.

Thus we have NZ State Cup:

Former NSW coach Brad Fittler believes a new NRL team based out of New Zealand would be monumental, but the nation would benefit more from a new competition to sit under the Warriors.

“I think what we need to do is get a competition over there,” Fittler said.

“Establish a competition, so we have more players – playing at a higher standard.”

In principle, I agree with Fittler. He reasons that:

Fittler says the talent stemming from New Zealand is at an all-time high.

“Add onto that all of the players from over here that will want to go over and play,” Fittler said at a Harley Davidson launch on Wednesday.

“It’s obvious, just their genetics, they’re just built for rugby league.

Sorry, Harley Davidson launch? Feels like the lede was buried there.

Fittler goes on to become increasingly phrenological and seems to have been restrained from breaking out the calipers to take skull measurements, however, I don’t think that undermines his essential point.

The problem is, that in the pursuit of having something interesting to say to feed the media void, we have no real idea of how realistic this proposition is, or how well it would fit in to the existing New Zealand rugby league landscape. Is this a good idea worth speaking into existence in the first place?

Providing more semi-professional rugby jobs close to home seems ideal for attracting players from New Zealand’s rugby union system, a process that is going to have to become increasingly common as rugby league’s rapidly expanding competitions need vaguely competent bodies to fill jerseys. This proposition should be an easier sell with the pending discovery of El Dorado: La Ciudad d’Or in the new broadcast deal, should the NRL choose to invest, and the week-to-week, year-long competition having its advantages over the completely stuffed Super Rugby format.

That in itself becomes a problem for a nascent NZ state cup-equivalent. NSW Cup is always going to be the stronger competition because that’s where the overwhelming majority of NRL clubs invest their resources and that is not going to change without a significant cultural revolution - some kind of Little Red Book and numerous struggle sessions would probably be required - in the boardrooms of NSW clubs. Clubs like the Warriors, and now the Storm, who might otherwise have had some flexibility about where to put their second tier talent, will prefer to participate in the NSWRL competition because Proverbs 27:17 and all that. That leaves the question of what the realistic pathway is out of NZ state cup to the NRL?

Presumbaly a second NZ team would aid a solution, by having a visible goal for up-and-comers and creating an opportunity to restructure the sport in Aotearoa, but Warriors’ questionable participation aside, this would also exacerbate the labour issues by creating even more jobs to be filled. More bodies drawing a paycheck but not working at a high enough level to be useful, commercially speaking at least.

Perhaps the best case scenario is that the NRL becomes so bloated that there are no more diamonds in the rough in the next tier down because they’re already in the NRL. In that situation, the three state cups may converge to a similar level of talent. But then, that may not prepare players for the rigors of NRL which would have to be supplemented with gap years in Europe, and you’ve just shifted the burden of player production to district A-grade or created further impetus for national reserve grade.

I doubt Fittler had any of that in mind when he opened his mouth but those are the things we like to consider here at The Maroon Observer, while we cleanse the seas of phytoplankton:

“Hmm, if we add the NRL teams to QCup, that makes 18. You could throw in Helensvale and Wide Bay to round up to an even 20 and then split into a two-tier ten comp with pro-rel. Would that work? There wouldn’t be significant commercial difference between the tiers and it would be very funny when the Twotans get demoted but might sharpen up the top end… hmmm. Also would a residents all-stars game be better for grand final day than the reserve grade super bowl? Some of the prelim finals losers might be more motivated than the premiers…”

Intermission

Normally, we would try to feature Queensland Cup highlights in this section but there are so many QCup graduates running around Super League these days, it’s practically the same thing. Former Wynnum Seagull and be-mulletted redhead, Caius Fatili, puts up the bomb, which does not have any depth on it, to be collected by former Falcon and Broncos legend, Tyson Smoothy, who puts in a real kick that is collected and grounded by some English kid, en route to Wakefield’s 18-14 victory over Leigh.

Caius Fatili kicking: the essence of #BigManSZN. Is it time to bring it back?

Sunshine Statewide

NRLQ is back:

Following a successful inaugural season in 2025, the NRLQ Series returns with an expanded format, providing even greater development opportunities for Queensland’s emerging stars.

Launched through a partnership between the NRL and the Queensland Rugby League, the competition brings together Under 21s squads from the Dolphins, Broncos, Titans and Cowboys in a home-and-away, round-robin tournament.

Designed to bridge the gap following the QRL’s junior representative season including the Mal Meninga Cup (Under 19s) the NRLQ ensures young players continue their progression in a high-performance environment aligned with NRL systems.

The season will now be 12 rounds long with a final to be played at the end. That means some of these teams will end up playing each other five times. Given the flexibility of rosters used last season, the teams at the start of the campaign and those at the end are likely to be quite different, so we will see if the repetitiveness matters but I suspect it will make for a confusing experience from the sidelines.

I had expected last year’s NRLQ competition to be a bridge between statewide competitions and a returned national youth adventure in 2026. Given that sanity seems to have prevailed on that front, I will pay greater attention to this year’s edition and rotate it into the Monday night split screen review.

NRLQ kicks off on April 2.

At the risk of making this an exclusively PVL vs The Law newsletter

Last week’s not so brief history of V’landys’ legal issues was meant to only cover lawsuits that have happened in his time as ARLC chairman. It turns out one is still very much an ongoing case (h/t ):

The Australian Turf Club has claimed Racing NSW owes it nearly $10 million in withheld payments as the high-stakes court battle between the two took a fresh twist on Friday.

The Sydney racing club spent months fighting a move by Racing NSW to sideline its board, enjoying victory last week when a judge ruled the regulator's appointment of an administrator was invalid…

According to court documents, Racing NSW agreed in 2023 to a monthly rather than a quarterly payment schedule to assist with its cash flow, and to top up TAB distributions to the club to $80.4 million each year. The top-ups totalled $12.2 million in the 2025 financial year.

But in an email sent to then ATC chief executive Matt Galanos on July 31 last year, Racing NSW chief executive Peter V'landys said the monthly frequency of distributions and the top-ups were both discretionary and "a gesture of goodwill".

The monthly payments continued to be made late last year but they ceased after the ATC took Racing NSW to the NSW Supreme Court in December, challenging the regulator's intervention in its affairs.

Pretty sure PVL’s various legal teams have tried this exact gambit before and failed but why not give it another shot? Seems likely there will be agreements that, if not written down, are demonstrable by a pattern of behaviour, that the TAB money Racing NSW collects has to be distributed to racing clubs in New South Wales. Let’s see if it pays off, Cotton.

But V’landys has an even more extensive history in the courts in his capacity of czar of NSW horse racing, as brought to my attention by Rooner Ryan. It is beyond my amateur legal skills to summarise effectively but the cases stretch across the unfairness of the termination of an employee, disputed costs associated with a workers compensation claim for a severely injured jockey, arguing that Racing NSW purchasing two properties for the care of ex-racehorses is so benevolent that they shouldn’t have to pay stamp duty and making grabs for broadcast rights of racing in NSW that Racing NSW does not have the right to sell.

These all went about as you’d expect. Perhaps the most simple summary of the V’Landian approach to the law is from Oberg vs Racing NSW (2021):

At the conclusion of the hearing in this matter, which was fought with regrettable ferocity, the only substantive issue in dispute was the applicant’s entitlement to weekly compensation in respect of a short closed period between 17 December 2020 and 26 December 2020.

Racing NSW lost but the case, “fought with regrettable ferocity,” was over the princely sum of about $500. Think about all of the time wasted by lawyers, by the Personal Injury Commission, the employees of Racing NSW and you’d get a much greater cost than $500. Irrespective of the merits of the case, reasonable executives with multi-million dollar turnovers and public reputations know when to cut their losses.

Racing NSW were also criticised in that determination for not providing documentation. This was not the only example in which there is negative commentary about the organisation that V’landys has run for 20 years. NSW Supreme Court Justice Bergin noted in 2005 in Racing New South Wales v Sydney Turf Club & Ors [2005] (my emphasis added):

The legal principles to be considered for the justification of the appointment of an administrator were not part of the discussion evidenced in the notes at which this strategy was proposed. Neither could they be. This was not a principled approached but rather strong arm tactics to forcecontracts upon clubs operating pursuant to statutory and contractual obligations. A fair minded bystander would be left with no doubt that this was a further step along the way for the plaintiff to implement the resolution it had passed on 25 January 2005 irrespective of the views of the clubs…

What is troubling is that in exercising its powers the plaintiff seemed to forget that it had to be fair to interested parties whose rights may be adversely affected by its conduct and decisions. The correspondence between the Chairman and the Chief Executive in particular demonstrate business strategies with the use of military epithets to describe the planned outcome suggesting that the war could be won. The Chairman expressed possessory interest in the “network”, claiming that he had two gorillas trying to damage “his network”.

Sounds familiar. As is this from Beith v Racing NSW [2007] NSWIRComm 82:

According to the applicant, from March to May 2004, Mr V’Landys introduced various changes in relation to reporting lines and roles generally. These included:

(a) General Managers were advised not to attend Board meetings.

(b) Authorisation procedures changed so that Mr V’Landys approved every payment.

(c) Mr V’Landys was to attend individual budget meetings.

(d) All managers reporting to the applicant were to report to Mr V’Landys on an ad hoc basis.

(e) Budgets were controlled by Mr V’Landys…

(g) Officers of the Respondent were to undertake tasks which were historically the applicant’s tasks to undertake such as obtaining quotes for renovation of the foyer and enlarging Mr V’Landys’ office.

(h) Mr V’Landys was to approve all expense and travel requests. This had been previously done by the applicant for Managers.

(i) A new Annual Leave approval process was introduced whereby all leave was to be approved by Mr V’Landys. Previously this role was undertaken by Managers.

Back in 2019, I already had the shits with coverage of the sport and V’landys’ rise to power. I remember begging someone, anyone, to publish a profile of this sweaty, stingy, clueless guy that wasn’t “this man is a Greek god”. The profiles, the dirt, the criticism all existed, but it was all couched in the world of horse racing. If you didn’t know about it, or didn’t want to know about it, then it was as if this pattern of behaviour was not previously established. Shame on me for not doing a better job of Googling, I guess.

The playbook employed by V’landys at Racing NSW is not that dissimilar to what he’s deployed for the NRL. A commercial focus on what we might call the elite end of the sport has generated plenty of money, which in turn secures his position with most stakeholders. The rest, including the media, are trivially easy to buy out with a couple of free lunches that serves as carrot. If not, the threat of legal action, despite a frankly abysmal track record, will be the stick.

The non-elite part of the sport is neglected, which has a detrimental impact that creates a story more complex than “it’s the race with the biggest prize money” or “the NRL is the biggest sport in the Pacific”, so the media is unable or unwilling to connect a to b, let alone to c, to let you know that attendance at NSW races and horse stock is declining1 or that Queensland’s legacy clubs are under threat from a vertically integrated model. Rather than a god-like vision of administrative competence, V’landys has found the exact gap in the sports-media complex to crawl through to keep himself cocooned at the centre of public life.

Upcoming slate

Broncos vs Dolphins, NRLM, Friday 7pm, Suncorp

The defending premiers pulling themselves out of an early season funk with a great win over the Storm, and the visitors comprehensively dissecting the Sharks, gives this game a level of stakes we might not have assumed it would have a week or two ago. It’s no 2023, when both teams were 3-0, but it’ll do. The main question of the game is whether the Broncos can score more points than the Dolphins have fans in attendance. Haas is out, Molo and Flegler return and Gilbert might be getting back to his old self, so feels like a good opportunity for Redcliffe’s pack to stamp their authority on the Broncos’ awful, awful bench.

Wynnum vs Cutters, QCup, Sunday 3pm, Kougari

The Seagulls may not prove to be much this year. Between too many Broncos affiliated players that don’t look like actually breaking through to the NRL and an unwholesome back row of Bayley Sironen, Brendan Frei and Jaiydn Hunt, the roster lacks a certain pizzazz that Ryley Jacks is unlikely to bring. Nonetheless, Wynnum will be sufficient yardstick to see what this Cutters team can do. Let’s see if Barber, Ngutlik and Burns can produce something while trying to go around the Seagulls’ right side. It’ll be better than watching Blackhawks-Tweed.

Junior competitions

Once again, I have neglected the junior statewide representative competitions. There are only so many hours in the day but the semi-finals for U17 and U19 women’s, and the U17 men’s competitions (Cyril Connell) are this weekend. The Blackhawks are in three semi-finals, matched up against the Magpies in both women’s competitions, and Wynnum in the Cyril Connell. The other side of the bracket has Wynnum vs Easts in WU19, Bears vs Clydesdales in WU17 and Devils vs Falcons in Cyril Connell.

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Maroon Observer QCup Tipping Sickoship

Rory still leads the competition but consistency is key. Four out of seven each week is apparently pretty good because tipping is a harsh mistress. Every single person tipped the Devils, which I find funny for some reason.

To that end, I'm just going to offer everyone a suggestion: don't tip the Clydesdales. When I write “I'm getting all these jabs in now so I don't have to watch the Clydesdales anymore,” like I did last week, that means they're shit.

Here's another tip: don't tip against the Hunters at home. It's FORT Moresby for a reason. The Hunters have one of the best home ground advantages in rugby league.

Stats pop

In honour of the Broncos’ victory over the Storm, I am working on the next Stats Drop, which is going to be about 14-0 dickheading. While I have a lot of data about scoring events, it turns out a lot of it wasn’t much good. From just over 2,000 games played between 2016 and 2026, about 250 to 300 didn’t have the right scoring events to add up to the scores.

Some of this was my fault but a lot of the blame resides with NRL dot com, who seem to have belatedly addressed some issues with how their data was presented on the website. I spent my weekend cleaning this up, so the NRL events data in The Dataset™ is now much more accurate and complete. Rooners can access this via The Almanac.

Player ratings and advanced stats are going to need a half dozen rounds before we have a decent enough sample size to set a replacement level and start calculating Taylors properly. I do have a live regression going for this season, which I have not had previously, so we’ll see how that goes.

Nickelware

Read this

• Teko - The NRL’s Record Year: What They’re Telling You, and What the Numbers Actually Say. Interesting analysis of the annual report.

• Rugby League Eye Test - The NRL’s setrestartmaxxing era and the value of consecutive play the balls

• What You See Is What You Get - How to watch the set restarts in NRL Round 3

• Rugby League Writers - Bulldogs Deception, Panthers The Benchmark & Tristan Sailor Highlights

• Storm Machine - Game 744 – S29E03 Review

• One Percenters - Has the AFL broken footy? Yes, yes, yes, AFL, yes, but nonetheless, there are common themes.

Notes

• Ben Te’o quits as Broncos assistant. I’m sure people will be very normal about this thing that happens every couple of years in pretty much this exact fashion.

• This week in PNG: “Owner of the Lae Snax Tigers rugby league franchise Ian Chow has threatened to withdraw the six-time premiers from the Digicel ExxonMobil Cup if the PNG Government does not explain the alleged transfer of land titles for the softball ground at Bisini, Port Moresby, to the Australian Rugby League (ARL).“

• PNG Prime Minister witness to Hunters victory over Clydesdales

• England: Five clubs show opposition to Wood

• Shaylee Bent leaves the Titans for the Tigers

• Dolphins members have to enter in to a ballot to get seats for round 5 against spoon-presumptives Manly. A ballot, like it’s the tickets for the 100m final at the Olympics. Other random thought of the weekend was whether it would be possible to add another grandstand to Dolphins Oval, bring capacity up to 5k and move more Dolphins home games, especially against NSW clubs and the Titans, to Redcliffe. Probably on the northern end?

• Foley Shield: May 2 - 4

• Far North Queensland residents re-open businesses after ex-Tropical Cyclone Narelle. Given all the pants pissing we did in SEQ over ex-TC Alfred last year, including in this very newsletter, it is good to see the FNQ take a much more severe battering and bounce back even faster.

• Which NRL team performs best in the wet? It’s very funny to me that this perfectly optimised SEO post still gets lots of hits despite being 7 years old and concluding “it’s probably just random”. The Phil Birnbaum post is definitely worth a read though.

• Superficial amateur political analysis (light): South Australia elects some ONP in Labor landslide, allowing Bernardi to liken immigrants to cattle. I like this framework from 2016 - The three-party system - because it accords with the current destruction of the UK Tories and LNP. All the ghouls of the 2010s - Bernardi, Joyce, Christensen, etc - have all turned to ONP, following the voters turning their back on the Libs. Fun fact: after resigning from Parliament, Christensen then ran on a Mackay local government ticket with FOG Steve Jackson, before resigning last year. The Left is stuck at 12%.