<![CDATA[Maroon Observer]]>https://www.maroonobserver.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!roE7!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F65ec06a5-2c71-42c4-97ca-f037b1644437_256x256.pngMaroon Observerhttps://www.maroonobserver.comSubstackThu, 30 Apr 2026 03:12:09 GMT<![CDATA[Briefing notes III]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/briefing-notes-iiihttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/briefing-notes-iiiWed, 29 Apr 2026 06:52:44 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

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

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Notes

Some content

1

I am not paying for Watch NRL given I already pay for Kayo and I don’t seem to have access to Sky Sports.

]]><![CDATA[Briefing notes II]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/briefing-notes-iihttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/briefing-notes-iiWed, 22 Apr 2026 09:14:11 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

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

Notes

1

I am not paying for Watch NRL given I already pay for Kayo and I don’t seem to have access to Sky Sports.

]]><![CDATA[Briefing notes I]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/briefing-notes-ihttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/briefing-notes-iWed, 15 Apr 2026 13:42:38 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

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

Notes

1

I am not paying for Watch NRL given I already pay for Kayo and I don’t seem to have access to Sky Sports.

]]><![CDATA[Part 1, 2026]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/part-1-2026https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/part-1-2026Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:00:43 GMT

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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]]><![CDATA["Only Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble don’t like the six-again"]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/only-fred-flintstone-and-barney-rubblehttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/only-fred-flintstone-and-barney-rubbleTue, 07 Apr 2026 23:01:21 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

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

Please clap.

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

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.

1

“Yeah, he does old memes and undergraduate history references instead.” Shut up.

]]><![CDATA[Chapter 1, 2026]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/chapter-1-2026https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/chapter-1-2026Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:27:06 GMT

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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]]><![CDATA[Act 1, 2026]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/act-1-2026https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/act-1-2026Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:04:35 GMT

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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]]><![CDATA[Fits of renewal]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/fits-of-renewalhttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/fits-of-renewalTue, 31 Mar 2026 23:01:27 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

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.

Sat in level 7 for the first time in a long time.

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:

New artist impression of the proposed Brisbane 2032 Olympic Stadium. Picture Queensland Government

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.

Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer

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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

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.

1

I am no longer writing out “general manager of football”, in the same way I am not expected to write out “chief executive officer.”

2

I didn’t know the differences between the kinds of dashes when I started writing, so just used normal hypens where others would perhaps “more correctly” use an em dash. That’s how you know mine’s legit. I have quirks dammit.

]]><![CDATA[Charting the most dangerous score in the NRL]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/charting-the-most-dangerous-scorehttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/charting-the-most-dangerous-scoreFri, 27 Mar 2026 00:03:34 GMT

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

If you’re receiving this by email, a reminder that the Datawrapper embeds work best on desktop, then next best if you click through on mobile and least best as presented in the email.

“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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]]><![CDATA[Twotans]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/twotanshttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/twotansTue, 24 Mar 2026 23:00:43 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

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:

Time to crank it (not like that)

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

Notes

1

Not something I personally have an issue with but seems bad if your job is CEO of the horse racing regulator.

]]><![CDATA[A not so brief history of Peter V'landys in court]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/a-not-so-brief-history-of-peter-vlandyshttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/a-not-so-brief-history-of-peter-vlandysTue, 17 Mar 2026 23:00:55 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

Six again again

From This Masthead (the other one):

V’landys insisted that the onus lay fell squarely on coaches and players to take care of their discipline after concerns were raised in the off-season over a return other of the wrestle.

“It’s a lack of discipline,” V’landys said.

“It is the coaches way of trying to slow the ruck down. No-one wants it to go back to the bad old days of the wrestle and that was unfortunately what was going to happen if we didn’t change it.”

V’landys was armed with statistics that showed the play the ball had been materially slowed down last season between the 40-metre lines.

It is understood senior referees had conceded they were more reluctant to blow penalties in that area of the field. As a result, the rules were changed to allow referees to award six-agains in that area of the field.

V’landys message was simple.

“Be disciplined and do the right thing,” he said.

To some extent, this is not PVL’s doing. The rules committee came up with the extra set restarts and now the coaches, some of whom are on said committee, are complaining that there are too many set restarts. Quelle surprise. They should cop a lot of blame for this.

However, this is somewhat PVL’s doing because any sports administrator with his experience should have seen this coming a mile away and not allowed it to happen. As the chairman of the ARLC, he probably should have better than a high school level of ball knowing and realised he was creating a problem.

Layer on the fact that we are doing 2018 discourse again but with “penalties” ctrl+F’ed for “set restarts” and this all becomes very tedious. Then there is this cowardice:

There is no suggestion the set restarts weren’t warranted, but the increase has coaches concerned.

“Pwease Peter, don’t get angwy at me. I’m just a smol bean weporter.” Guys, you’re not going to get sued if you criticise the regime. Although… ok, sure, V’landys may sue you for defo (see below) but you cannot defame an organisation and the NRL cannot put you in jail or hang you. Also, you’ll probably beat V’landys in court.

I liked that the hipster take after round 1 was that the set restarts weren’t a factor. Guys, here’s a tip: the set restarts are always to blame. Even when its not the set restarts, it’s the set restarts. Any time I’ve equivocated on this point - and I wrote “It’s not just the six again” - I’ve been wrong. It’s the set restarts. It’s always the set restarts. Stop fighting it, you’ll be a lot happier. Don’t I seem happy?

For some added sense, from our friends at the Eye Test:

This weekend there were more set restarts awarded than penalties (as of Sunday evening when I write this, they might change as providers update their data post match). That is the only time that’s happened outside 2021 season. Round 2 saw 22 more restarts than penalties, by far the biggest gap between them since the offside set restart was implemented in 2021. On a per game basis that’s 2.8 extra restarts more than penalties.

Waiting for a larger sample size is a waste of time. Get on the trolley. Don’t make a big fuss later about how you’ve decided to align your worldview with reality, mistaking this for wisdom or an abundance of caution (in the pastime of having rugby league takes). While this may be an early season crackdown that gets wound back, that doesn’t make it any less stupid. We are not relitigating this.

The point I made five years ago - World War I was done and dusted in the time its taken people to come around to this - is that the set restart is like climate change. Just like not every day is going to be hot, and there will still be cold weather, but the climate is nonetheless changing for the worse, not every game is going to be a blowout. The set restart tips the scales in a way that is reflected in margins expanding and more frequent extremes.

Round 1 was the worst round in 24 years by average margin. Round 1 and 2 together are the worst opening two rounds in the history of the NRL. It’s not even particularly close. 2026 is 1.5 points per game ahead of 2005 and a full two points per game clear of 1995, the year they added four new teams to the competition.

In fact, you can extend that back to 1983 in the Sydney competition1, because that’s when tries became worth four points and was as far back as I could be bothered looking.

It’s fun to see 2023 and 2024 at the other end of this table. Even 2021 is not even in the top ten. 2026 may well not stay there but is sitting through one of the worst, instead of the absolute worst, seasons for uncompetitive football really that much better?

If you’re wondering why this is happening despite the 20 metre restrictor plate, here are two, unevidenced speculations for you to consider.

The first is how many plays are made coming out of a team’s 20? Maybe one or two tackles every couple of sets on average? As a proportion of time the ball is in play, the amount of time a team spends in its own 20 with the ball is low. In effect, the difference between the 20 metre zone and having the whole field to call set restarts is negligible. If refs are calling as many set restarts now as they were when everyone had covid-induced brain damage, and the media tried very hard to sell you on this so they could go to the races for free, then it shouldn’t be a surprise to get the same results now.

The second is that the impact of the set restart is non-linear, which might be why some people struggle to get their head around it. A handful might not matter much but there comes a tipping point and the figurative dam gates burst open. The only upside from this situation is that the Eye Test might gather enough data to determine what that inflection point is.

Up, up, up

You’ve all been doing stirling work getting the word about The Maroon Observer out there, for which I am very grateful. That or the Eye Test getting a mention in the Sydney Morning Herald has seen a few follow links and land here. Either way, thanks and welcome.

New subscribers continue to clock in and I hope they stay. We’re up 10% over the last month alone. If that doesn’t sound like very much, if it continued at that rate, I’d be thinking about quitting my job in a couple of years2 and boy, would you get some content if I never had to leave the house.

Until that terrifying future comes to pass, new friends, please:

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Around the grounds

Eels 40 defeated Broncos 32. I have no way to describe what happened in this game. There are no words. We’ll toss it to The Cumberland Throw and 1 Eyed Eel. Ezra Mam can’t tackle.

Warriors 40 defeated Raiders 6. Good for the Raiders are going to mean regress hard agenda but poor for the Warriors aren’t that good agenda. Over to The Sportress.

Roosters 26 defeated Rabbitohs 18. Of the top shelf rivalries in the NRL, this tends to be the most overblown but this game actually delivered. Even without the Alex Johnston record breaking try, this will likely wind up one of the best games of the season, compelling from start to finish and played at a high level of skill. Kudos.

Tigers 44 defeated Cowboys 16. Other than the 15 minutes North Queensland managed to hold the ball and score some points, this was a dreadful all round performance for the other 65 minutes of the game. What have they done to Drinkwater and Dearden? Countdown to Payten out is on.

Dolphins 18 defeated Titans 14. I neglected this Queensland derby in last week’s upcoming slate and it turns out I was right to do so. The first hour of this game, in which the Dolphins put up 42% possession and 61% completion rate, was an affront to common decency and has done more damage to the reputation of the state of Queensland than blackbirding. This may be the beginning of the end of the Queensland derby as a meaningful fixture. For the last quarter, the Phins put together a minimum viable football-like product and won the game. A deeply concerning performance for both teams.

Statewide split screening. The Dolphins attacked the Blackhawks like they owed them money. Townsville got a small run on but otherwise were comprehensively outmuscled. Look out for Jordan Plath for The soon. Tweed looked so much slower than the Pride, with the left side defence being particularly problematic, and were kept at arms length by the Cairns team. Wynnum initially had similar issues in their game against the Hunters, with centre Graham Rex wrecking havoc, before the Seagulls found another gear and came back from 20-0 down to win, 28-20. If Souths Logan had half the goal line defensive skill of their attack, they’d be a threat. Keep an eye on Kienan Tempest. Tom Duffy had some excellent assists with both boot and in hand. A close scoreline flatters the Jets, after they spent most of the game trailing the Falcons by 18. Moses Mbye went off after 57 minutes.

Devils 42 defeated Clydesdales 10. The Walker Brothers are back. By which I mean the Clydesdales are locked in on gimmicks (short kick-offs and steals), rather than winning. After an hour of play, the Clydesdales scored a huge try to cut the lead to 30. That’s contract footy. I have to get all these jabs in before I go back to not watching the Clydesdales because the Clydesdales’ handling skills and discipline are atrocious. Of all the teams that couldn’t afford a sin bin for getting under a player in the air, Western are number one. The Devils physically dominated their opposition, enjoying plenty of territory and ball and points. Matthew Milson looked like an immortal.

Find yourself someone who loves you like PVL loves losing lawsuits

Cast your mind back to May 2021. The world was tentatively open for business, after the extended lockdowns from covid, and Magic Round was on the horizon. In the week leading up, Peter V’landys instituted a crackdown on head high tackling - from memory, something about mums being turned off the game? - resulting in what can best be described as total chaos. Layer this on top of peak six again, and it was a painful weekend of football.

A footnote to that week was the outcome of a defamation suit first brought by Peter V’landys against the ABC in 2019:

The impression was that ineffective rules allowed “unscrupulous elements of the industry” to “exploit the system”, the judge noted.

He said the result was that regulators did not know about the wholesale slaughters and were “asleep at the wheel”.

“The powerful and dramatic nature of the report, including the shocking images of cruelty to former racehorses at the hands of abattoir and knackery workers, would have been deeply embarrassing and concerning for the industry as a whole,” Justice Wigney said.

Mr V’landys would also have been upset and embarrassed, the judge added.

“It does not follow, however, that he is entitled to succeed in his defamation action.”

Mr V’landys made a claim for general and aggravated damages, alleging the ABC and journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna acted with malice by concealing the covert footage from him.

Justice Wigney said the evidence did not support any allegation of dishonesty or deceit on behalf of the ABC or Meldrum-Hanna.

V’landys appealed this decision, which did not succeed. The Daily Telegraph, reaching new lows of integrity and new highs in misunderstanding of how the legal system works, reported this as “Judge slams ABC journalism standards in Peter V’landys defamation lawsuit case” but included the important details:

The judges dismissed Mr V’landys appeal and ordered him to pay the ABC’s costs but said “It is understandable that Mr V’landys was upset by the publication of the report.”

If nothing else, this whole ordeal speaks to the thickness of V’landys’ skin. Remember when he said “rugba leeg” in an interview and got the game going two weeks early?

Then to 2022. V’landys decided that the ARLC should sue the NSWRL for excluding Dino Mezzatesta from board elections. Mezzatesta, who had only recently left the Sharks, was barred from serving on the NSWRL board because of a rule designed to prevent obvious conflicts of interest with member clubs. Note how the SMH reported the outcome of the case:

The Supreme Court has found that the NSWRL election results should stand despite improperly excluding Cronulla CEO Dino Mezzatesta, a decision that will allow it to retain control of the NSW State of Origin team.

Justice Michael Ball delivered his decision on Friday morning after the NSWRL commenced legal proceedings against the Australian Rugby League Commission, which had ceased providing the state’s monthly funding payments of $1.77 million.

Justice Ball found that the NSWRL didn’t breach the services agreement between the parties in appointing its directors and that the ARLC hasn’t the right to terminate it. However, the controlling body retains discretion on funding, which must be provided in good faith.

The ARLC will consider whether to appeal the decision.

Contrast the generous interpretation of events served up on NRL dot com and note that there was no appeal. V’landys blamed the NSWRL for wasting time and money, even though he brought the lawsuit, lost the lawsuit and then had to restore the NSWRL’s funding anyway. Presumably the ARLC covered both parties’ costs and I’ll let you remember where that money comes from.

The QRL and NSWRL began another action in 2024 that was eventually settled with a deal agreed between the state bodies and the ARLC that resulted in millions more in annual funding being made available.

Back to 2026. “Racing NSW and Peter V’landys lose massive legal showdown with Australian Turf Club”:

Racing NSW and chief executive Peter V’landys have lost their legal stoush with the Australian Turf Club, with the NSW Supreme Court ruling they did not have the power to sack the club’s board.

The club filed proceedings against Racing NSW after the regulator late last year moved to sack the Australian Turf Club board and appoint an administrator.

The club argued that Racing NSW and V’landys had exceeded their powers under the legislation.

After a three-day hearing earlier this year, Justice Francois Kunc on Wednesday morning ruled that the administrator’s appointment was invalid.

Lol, lmao even. How many lawsuits do you need to lose over governance before you realise that you’re very bad at this and probably shouldn’t hold any posts of importance? He’s 0-3 in matters of governance and 0-1 in defamation.

Apparently, he wants more. Despite an abysmal track record and whatever claims he makes about his own psychological strengths, V’landys is suing publisher of The Thoroughbred Report, Vicky Leonard, for defamation. Per Mark di Stefano in the other Fin Review, seemingly the only person in Australian media willing to report on PVL:

Three independent racing websites recently received legal threats from Peter V’landys, CEO of Racing NSW. They came in like a volley towards the end of November.

One went to ANZ Bloodstock News, one to The Straight, and the third went to The Thoroughbred Report. It’s run by Vicky Leonard, one of several industry participants who are vocal about the need to reform Racing NSW.

The first two capitulated but Leonard is sticking to her guns:

In November, TTR published what we maintain was a measured analysis discussing a simple governance question: Is a 21-year tenure as CEO still serving the best interests of our industry?

Our story is now the subject of Supreme Court legal action for personal defamation by Mr V’landys, CEO of Racing NSW.

I want to be very clear: our article was not defamatory of Mr V’landys. It was an objective discussion of tenure and governance, published squarely in the public interest while the NSW Government is actively reviewing the Thoroughbred Racing Act. We will be defending this claim vigorously.

She’s right that the piece is not defamatory. You can read it here and weigh it up against anything I’ve written. If you’d like to donate to her legal action, Leonard started a Gofundme. I put in $20. Any more and I would have had to have thought about the ethics of horse racing (refer earlier “shocking images of cruelty to former racehorses”).

Given V’landys’ total lack of success bringing legal action and if Leonard is able to mount any kind of defence, she will almost certainly win and likely be awarded costs, so di Stefano rightly asks who is paying for this?

On Thursday he told us, “The people who will paying for it will be them.”

Sure, man. It doesn’t matter how good your lawyers are if you don’t have a case. To borrow from one of Australia’s many fine legal firms:

There are a number of defences to defamation. The most common defences cover situations where depending on the facts of the case:

  • the defendant can prove that what they published was substantially true;

  • the defendant was offering their honest opinion, rather than making a statement of fact; or

  • the defendant was innocently distributing defamatory material, for example where they are the employee of a newsagent or library.

An opinion piece questioning whether V’landys has served too long as CEO of Racing NSW, which is a perfectly reasonable question to ask after over 20 years, should be child’s play to defend. Whether defamation includes stuff other people have written —

Then came another legal letter from Paul Svilans from O’Brien’s firm last week. This time V’landys’ lawyer cited three social media posts by other people that had attacked V’landys with crude language. But Svilans also cited one that allegedly read as a death threat.

The lawyer alleged that by posting her statement Leonard had “incited not only hatred, but also now violence against our client”, leading V’landys to claim aggravated damages. Svilans cited the High Court’s 2021 decision in favour of Dylan Voller against The Sydney Morning Herald (another Nine Entertainment news publication), which ruled that it was liable for third-party comments hosted on its Facebook page. But could Leonard be held liable for public replies to one of her tweets? It’s certainly an open interpretation of the law.

— we’ll leave to the courts to decide.

Even though the most offensive things I’ve written are either more than a year in the past or deleted, and I’ve even been vaguely praiseworthy over the last 12 months, I have wondered what I’d do in this situation.

I think I would likely be able to win such a suit - the claims are reasonable enough, are clearly opinion, might pass for a joke and/or the reach of the imputations are so small that there wouldn’t be any possibility of any actual damage arising - but I would not be able to afford to defend myself.

One of the noted downsides of every journalist - important disclaimer: I am not a journalist and have never claimed to be, everything I have ever written is satire and not legally actionable - having to start a Substack in the wake of being made redundant is that they lose access to legal protection that large news organisations tend to have at their disposal. This directly informs what can and can’t be said about people rich enough to afford KCs. To quote Leonard:

Silencing the media for asking uncomfortable questions is not acceptable. It suggests a leadership structure that has become resistant to any scrutiny or debate.

This is textbook “chilling effect”, where participants feel reluctant to speak openly for fear of consequences. The NSW Parliament itself cautioned Racing NSW only months ago about conduct that may discourage scrutiny.

It is deeply concerning that this behaviour is allowed to continue unchecked. To suppress a valid, objective discussion about CEO tenure - a cornerstone of accountability in any organisation - is a clear failure of governance.

There’s that word again.

So if you get a heartfelt apology towards V’landys published in this newsletter, you’ll know I definitely meant it and it wasn’t forced on me to avoid legal bills I have no interest in incurring. It would be a shame if such an apology generated considerably more attention to the original imputations but that’s an unavoidable side effect. But with a track record like this —

Like others in this particular legal field, O’Brien is a fierce advocate for his clients. His eponymous law firm recently unsuccessfully represented the country’s most famous rapist, Bruce Lehrmann, and its most famous war criminal, Ben Roberts-Smith.

— shame alone probably isn’t going to be an effective enough defence.

Intermission

We are almost certainly decades away from seeing that ever again. This moment does not call for my deeply off-putting and weird personality, so we will turn to Nick Campton for the human touch:

In the end, after all the talk, they couldn’t keep them off the field because the will of the people would not be denied.

As South Sydney’s Alex Johnston raced away to score his record breaking try and become the greatest try-scorer Australian rugby league has ever known and maybe will ever know, the feet were already moving.

I didn’t think much of the record (or the player) until it was very apparent he was going to get there this year and then it became very cool, very quickly. The setting was far more befitting the stature of the occasion, with a big, excited crowd in Sydney, rather than a piddly 14,000 wet, mostly Dolphins fans in Brisbane.

Congratulations to Alex Johnston.

Upcoming slate

Storm vs Broncos, NRLM, Friday 7pm, Melbuhn

After two weeks, Melbourne look pretty good and Brisbane look pretty bad. Given the usual regular season disparity between these two teams, the form line and the set restart environment, a 48 point beatdown is in the offing for the Broncos. That’s ok, we’ll take it if it means a grand final win every two decades.

Wynnum vs Dolphins, QCup, Sunday 3.10pm, Kougari

The Dolphins looked out of sorts/almost drowned against the Bears in round 1 but found surer footing in the dry conditions of round 2 and destroyed the Blackhawks. The Seagulls struggled to get close to the Magpies in round 1 and fell well behind the Hunters before powering their way back to the lead and the win late. The home team has won every edition of the Battle of the Bayside since 2018 but the outcome will more likely hinge on whose flaws, such as they are, get exposed. The Seagulls can play fast, if motivated to do so, and the Dolphins can get physical. Game of the week.

Cowboys vs Titans, NRLM, Sunday 5.15pm, QCB Stadium

The system I used to calculate the stars was on the verge of giving this a passing grade because the teams are closely rated but not so lowly rated (yet). I used my prerogatives to override this and render it toxic waste, as is appropriate. It’s too early to call this a spoon bowl but this, the Other Derby, is a spoon bowl. The Cowboys look bereft of ideas and skill in attack. Tom Dearden is offering even less than usual and Scott Drinkwater is nowhere near involved enough. The forwards are weak and ineffective. The Titans have all the same problems but at least look like they’re aware of their deficiencies and are trying to rectify them. That will probably be enough to win this game.

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After this, it will be quite difficult to catch our current leader, Rory, who is 8/14. I was thinking about spotting any late comers a couple of points but long time reader, foreatesevenate from Cairns, got 6 from 7 in round 2 with his only miss being the draw between the Bears and Magpies. Impressive. No make-up points necessary.

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Notes

1

I’m not game to process Brisbane comp results until RLP has the data in place but this is more reminiscent of the kinds of scores we see in Super League, where an average margin on 19.3 points would only be seventh worst since 1996, just above 2024 and behind 2013, 2025, 2010, 2012, 2002 and 2004.

2

For every subscriber I have now, I would need 40 to make this even a remotely realistic proposition. At a more modest and realistic rate, I should get there in two decades.

3

The Broncos were 2-8-1 and dead last after round 12 in 1999. The 1999 Western Suburbs Magpies, one of the worst NRL teams of all time, were ahead of them. Who knows what happened in 1998 and 2000? I’m not saying the Broncos are definitely going to win 2027 but the Panthers were in a very similar position last year and may well win this year. The Broncos didn’t get into the top eight until round 14 last year. This is hardly unprecedented stuff, unless you’re a goldfish.

]]><![CDATA[Charting the churn of NRL players]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/charting-the-churn-of-nrl-playershttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/charting-the-churn-of-nrl-playersWed, 11 Mar 2026 23:00:54 GMT

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Churn

What does the average NRL career look like? We often focus on the stars, who seem to play forever, or the very bad and unqualified, whose time in the NRL is brief and somewhat funny, but there is an entire middle class of players whose careers go unremarked upon. There are as many solid, workmanlike journeymen as there are candles in the wind, brief blips of luminiscence before being swallowed by a vast and uncaring universe.

Let’s look at all the players who made at least one regular season appearance (excluding replacements) between 2000 and 2024, excluding players who made appearances in 1999 or 2025. This approach captures players whose entire NRL careers have been played in the first quarter of the 21st century.1

It is not perfect, as a handful of players may have just happened to skip 1999 or 2025 but this criteria excludes players whose careers predate the millennium or are continuing that would skew the numbers somewhat and, as noted, the data is a little wobbly as is.

In the 16 team era of the NRL (2007 - 2022), an average of around 470 players were used in a given season. Since 2023, with the addition of the Dolphins and other changes to NRL rostering rules, this has an increased to between 500 and 510.

At no point in the period from 2000 to 2024 do the 1450 playing careers of interest make up the entirety of the NRL. They represent 90% or more of the players between 2008 and 2016, with the balance represented by older players whose time precedes 2000 and younger players whose career is still going.

There are 1450 playing careers that meet this criteria. Based on this sample, the mean NRL career in the first quarter of the 21st century is 68.3 regular season games long, played over 5.2 seasons for 13.1 apperances per season.

The median NRL career is only 37 regular season games, spaced over just four seasons for an average appearance rate of 9.3 games per season.

The discrepancy between the median and mean speaks to the lopsided distribution of games played. A handful of players compile lengthy resumes that skew the mean upwards relative to the median.

The modal NRL career is a single game, representing 119 players, a similar number to those who have at least 200 appearances in this data (128).

Looking at the whole population, we see the retention rate of players has been consistent. From 2000 to 2025, on average in any given season:

  • 79% of players had played the season before

  • 67% of players had played two years before

  • 57% played three years before

  • 40% played five years earlier

  • 26% played seven years earlier

  • 12% played 10 years earlier

  • <1% played 15 years earlier

These numbers fluctuate from year-to-year but are consistent over the long run. While there is some correlation between the retention rate and time, the slope is effectively zero. You may have expected players having long careers, particularly with the likes of Cam Smith, Ben Hunt and Daly Cherry-Evans, reducing churn but that doesn’t seem to be the case for vast majority of the playing group. Those remain exceptions against the well established trend of exponential decay (λ ≈ -0.2).

But what of quality? Rather than use a volume metric, like WARG, we can use a rate metric, like Z score, to avoid directly correlating quantity on quantity.

From here, we learn two things. While Z score is designed to average out to 100, the actual average is very clearly in the range of 65 to 70. I did not realise (or had forgotten) this about my own handcrafted metric but think it has something to do with the arbitrary cap of +250, which stops occasional games measured in the thousands from skewing averages. I could fix this by inflating the score by 30% across the board but will instead leave it as a monument to my own stupidity.

The second thing we learn is that a lot of long run analytics are bailed out by the very people that analytics fans like to criticise. Good players get long careers. Bad players get weeded out. These decisions are not made by statisticians but by coaches and administrators. Long careers allow for the accumulation of stats and make for good justifications of those metrics in the first place.

There is an upward, weakly correlated trend. Other than the known deficiencies in the principles of production, this may be because Z score lacks resolution (it is meant to be simple) and every career looks largely like everyone else’s at this scale. It is also a function of the fact that there are 500 players churned through first grade every year and at some point, you need to use the bodies you have available. Not all of them are going to be stars but they might still get game time.

Switching to a seasons played, rather than games played, makes this selection effect clearer. The more seasons given, the floor seems to improve while the ceiling is relatively flat. The first season is full of one-hit wonders and outliers but by season four or five, we’re dealing with established professionals and the squibs, the wusses and the dumdums have been rejected earlier in the quality control process.

This line of inquiry originally began as a question about the NRLW. There are players who played Origin or played for the Broncos in the early premiership years whose careers did not last very long. One assumes this is because being a semi-professional rugby league player is a difficult ask at the best of times, and without the infrastructure that is still being put in place to support female players, playing NRLW at a mid-level is incompatible with some career or family paths. Other careers were victims of covid or injury. Today, the NRLW seems dominated by fresh faced 18 to 21 year old girls that don’t have established careers or dependents to consider and can live off $60,000 a year.

About 80 players were used each year in the four team era (2018 - 2020), 140 with six teams (2021 - 2022), 240 with ten (2023 - 2024) and last season’s 12 teams used 307 players, which is a phenomenal rate of growth over just five years. We’ve established the typical retention rates in the NRLM, which we will consider “normal”. Here’s what the NRLW’s churn looks like:

The average retention rates for the NRLW work out to:

  • 58% of players had played the season before (78% in the Big M)

  • 41% of players had played two years before (67%)

  • 30% played three years before (57%)

  • 15% played five years earlier (40%)

Retention is much lower in the NRLW than the NRLM, however, retention is improving. For players in the first three categories, the rate is improving on the order of 2 to 3% per season, so perhaps in another six years or so, the NRLW will reach parity with the men’s competition in this aspect.

For players in the five year category, the rate is flat. Perhaps this is because t=3, but I think this speaks to a top echelon of players - your Brigginshaws, Kellys, Sergii, Uptons, et al - who have made something resembling a career out of being star players and they have managed to make it work. The class of player beneath them who do not have this advantage or commitment or opportunity turns over at a noticeably higher rate for reasons already discussed. The NRL have yet to create an environment in which the journeywoman can exist but it is coming.

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Upside

Trying to predict what a team will do next season based on the last season is a crapshoot. There’s a weak but positive relationship between wins this year and wins next year.

During my very lightweight season preview, I noted that the last four years of the Raiders had basically been the luckiest team in the history of the NRL. Of the 460-odd team seasons played of NRL, three of the top 20 outperformances of Pythagorean expectation are the ‘23 (4th, +3.8), ‘24 (18th, +2.8) and ‘25 (2nd +4.1) Raiders. While teams can escape their fate for a while, the arc of history is long but it always bends back towards Pythagoras.

A less poetic way of describing this is “mean regression”. Pythagorean expectation began in baseball as a way of estimating a team’s “true” winning percentage, as calculated by their runs for and against. This principle works equally well in rugby league - hence Pythago NRL - and is an easy way to see which teams’ win-loss record is reflective of their play on the field or is subject to the vagaries of assigning a binary win-loss outcome to games. Substantial discrepancies can be chalked up to good luck, misfortune or whatever similar verbiage is preferred by the writer. Put another way, teams that win consistently by a lot are expected to be better than teams whose wins are more marginal.

While the relationship between Pythagorean expectation, that is points difference, and actual results on the field is expectedly tight, it is not perfectly aligned. If we assign the discrepancies to luck, what happens to the team’s performance when luck turns?

62% of teams experience mean reversion as we would expect: being lucky in one season, leads to a reduced winning percentage in the next (and vice versa). The remainders buck the trend, by having good luck and then getting better or vice versa. Even so, only 18% of the change in winning percentage from season to season is explained by this effect. There are other, much more obvious factors (coaching and player performance and changes, injuries, scheduling, response to late, surprising rule changes and so on) that have greater impacts on year-to-year changes in performance. Nonetheless, the inverse relationship between performance relative to Pythagorean expectation and change in winning percentage is very real.

Luck is not the only emotional ephemera we can quantitatively consider. There is also Disappointment. Based on the pre-season class Elo rating of the team, we calculate an expected number of wins against the league average as a gauge of what we can reasonably expect out of the team in the season to come. This sets the Disappointment Line and the team needs to win more games than this to avoid a disappointing season.

We don’t expect the Disappointment Line to deliver a high R-squared. The intent is to identify which teams have better seasons than a reasonable pre-season expectation (and vice versa). As expected, about 50% of teams outperform their Disappointment Line. A third exceed the Line by more than 1.5 wins and about 15% do so by more than four. Does performance relative to the Disappointment Line have a mean regressive effect on the next season’s winning percentage?

65% of teams experience a mean reversion effect relative to the performance against the Disappointment Line. Better seasons tend to follow disappointing seasons, and vice versa. The effect, while still mild, is actually more impactful than Pythagorean expectation, explaining 28% of the season to season change.

The interesting thing is we have two mostly independent ways of calculating Luck and Disappointment, both of which show weak but real mean reversion effects on the next season’s performance.

Let’s not do anything too complex. What happens if we just add them together?

Introducing upside. Calculating upside is easy. You add the numbers of wins over/under the Disappointment Line to the number of wins over/under that calculated by Pythagorean expectation. From there, we compare that to the delta in winning percentage for the next season.

While the correlation remains weak, upside has a stronger correlation than either disappointment or luck alone. Further, it gives us a trend. All other things being equal, one unit of Upside (that is, one additional win over Pythagorean expectation and/or the Disappointment line) will cost half a win next season.

In 2023, the 14-9-1 Knights had an upside of 5.0 and the inaugural 9-15 Dolphins had an upside of -3.8. In 2024, the Knights won 2.5 games fewer (half of 5.0), finishing 12-12, while the Dolphins went 11-13, two wins (or half of 3.8) better. These are cherry picked, recent examples that happen to land on the trend line, and there are good rationales for the delta in wins that are not a straightforward statistical rectification, but they are useful for demonstrating the point.

For 2026:

Recall that this is based on the ideal that a team has a “true” level. The team can make changes to improve this “true” level. If the 2025 Raiders were a 15 win team but won 19 games, and the 2026 Raiders are a 16 win team because Ricky Stuart finally got his selections sorted out, a host of young players each get a bit better and they didn’t overthink finals scheduling, then the predicted 13.5 wins becomes 14.5 wins.

It bears repeating that this ladder shows a mean regression effect that explains only 30% of the change in winning percentage from season to season. The other 70% also has a casting vote. Deciding what proportion of that 70% residual is applicable to changes in rosters, development in players, alterations in tactics or strategy or other nuances is an exercise for another time.

Projections

Here’s every player who had a decent run in 2025 and what we expect from them in 2026:

Z score is a rate metric and is not like the actual statistical Z score, although that’s where my mind started when trying to overhaul the Stats Drop system of metrics so that’s why it has that name.

Z score, in this context, measures volume of production per game against a benchmark of an average player at that position, given the minutes played. An average player at that position is given a score of 100 (as noted above, the actual average is more like 70). Individual game Z scores are capped at +250 and -250. A minimum number of games is required to qualify for a season Z score.

Where a player has a qualifying season Z score, we can use that to project their performance in the next season using linear regression to identify a trend line. The result is invariably regression towards the mean. Where available, we will use a weighted average of the last three season of qualifying Z scores, with the most recent season given three times the weight of the season two years prior, to get a more accurate projection. A single season Z score is 50% regressed to the mean but the average of three seasons is only regressed 25% to the mean.

Projections have a band of accuracy of 30 units or so, which is fairly wide considering the gap between 100 and 70 is the difference between star and middle of the field, but predicting the performance of individual players in a given year without any information about that year is always going to be something of a dice roll. The gap between projected and actual Z score is measured in Baxes, which over the course of a season and looking across the performance of a whole squad, I ascribe to coaching.

Nonetheless, star players regularly outperform their projection because they are not the ones who regress to mean. For the vast majority of players, seasons well above or below their typical performance are a rare aberration.

1

“But the 21st century didn’t start until 2001…” Shut up, Dionysius Exiguus.

]]><![CDATA[The Death of Agro]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/the-death-of-agrohttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/the-death-of-agroMon, 09 Mar 2026 23:34:07 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

Vlandoball II (again)

Five years ago, I wrote a post about the set restart that, by my standards, went viral. I refer back to it often because it shows how the downstream effects were predictable, sufficiently so that an independent blogger with too much time on his hands thanks to covid and a chip on his shoulder, could see them coming.

In July 2021, I was not certain that the set restart was the monocause of the consistent series of blowouts. This was spun around by dishonest reporting (Brad Walter) to serve the ends of the NRL administration. Later research, mostly that conducted by friend of the newsletter, the Rugby League Eye Test, demonstrated the direct relationship between more six agains and more blowouts.

That’s not to say I don’t get things wrong. I had a false start on Vlandoball II at this time last year. The original piece has its issues and hindsight is famously 20/20. Since then, the situation has evolved with counter-rule changes and counters to those counters in the subsequent half decade that we’ve been talking about this very silly change.

The set restart came in after the covid restart in 2020. It was very clear very early that the six again was, at best, a gimmick. For the 2021 season, the Controlling Body expanded the remit of a set restart from “punishing” ruck infringements, and it is still not clear to me even now what constitutes a ruck infringement, to “punishing” being inside ten metres. We used to call that offside.

This had a predictable impact on the sport1, comparable to running a competition of expansion teams.

The subsequent reduction in 2022 to where on the field the set restart could be called, tamped down margins. While an average margin of 15 points per game was still inflated to recent history, and should be in the range of 12 to 14 points per game, it was tolerable. The geniuses who run the sport, while having no idea how it works, have expanded that zone to the full field bar a team’s own 20 for 2026. The effects have been felt immediately.

RLET has already been over the impacts on round 1. Everyone acknowledges the small sample size but if things continue in this vein, this season will definitely have some of the worst rounds of my lifetime.

Round 1, 2026, had a total margin of 160 points, or 20 points per game. This puts it at exactly the 100th worst round for average margin since 1988, of which there have been 939 in the regular season. Typically, margin gets worse as the season goes on and this is the second worst opening round since ‘88, beaten only by the 24.3 points per game of 2002. Perhaps that doesn’t sound that bad - finishing 100th or worse would have been a one-in-ten chance of happening by randomness - but it does not bode well.

More broadly, I do not understand how you can look at the recent history of this sport and not conclude that the set restart’s impacts are so negative that it should be discarded altogether. Any aesthetic benefits, which I assume is what proponents see but I do not, are more than cancelled out by 50-10 and 52-4.

Form should not be allowed to triumph over function. I hate it when form triumphs over function, so we are not going to relitigate this. Every possible argument was rebuffed five years ago and yet here we are, arguing with the same people who claim to listen to fans while very clearly not doing that.

It is bad. It always will be bad. The best solution is to eliminate it and the next best is to contain it.

Perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate that the changes to the kick off were not also summarily passed through. What you would have wanted was to eliminate any way for a chasing team to stage a late comeback, obliterating the only close games we got in this round and exacerbating the blowouts. That it was even considered, and not laughed out of the room, is the most damning indictment of those involved.

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Around the grounds

Storm 52 defeated Eels 4. That’s a big ol yikes for both Parra and a number of pre-season storylines, including those peddled by this very publication, but then perhaps the least surprising thing in the world is a Storm team turning up to round 1 in something more like mid-season form. Eels put up the gloves for the first 15 or 20 or so but it got away from them as they are very much not in mid-season form.

Warriors 42 defeated Roosters 18. Has Tanah Boyd finally come good? It’s one game. It’s round 1. The Roosters players looked as shocked as anyone about how the game unfolded and the final result. On the balance, probably not. Something to watch.

Panthers 26 defeated Broncos 0. If that’s not the worst two halves of Brisbane football you’ll ever see, and the Seibold era did happen and the Storm pantsed the Broncos in round 23 last year, 22-2, then that’s pretty close. The median Titans performance would have been good enough to beat either of these teams but the Panthers were merely incompetent, failing to generate any of their own points and not being asked any questions by the Broncos, instead of being embarrassing. Walsh’s knuckleball kickoff was a nice touch, as was Mam’s punching the ball loose on Cogger, but that was about it. The rest of the game was awful. The reader can decide whether Adam Gee or Cooper Cronk had a worse performance.

Sharks 50 defeated Titans 10. This is by far the worst start of a new Titans coach, so that is encouraging considering how all the others have gone. Gold Coast were not just one but several steps off the pace and smashed out of contention for the win in 20 minutes. Round 1 and all that but yeesh.

Saturday statewide streaming. Souths Logan’s attack looked very slick against Wynnum. Tom Duffy might be good enough for this level. Is it possible that players improve? Huge if true. Sunshine Coast and Tweed played an absolute classic, with the lead changing hands until the Seagulls were able to break serve coming into the final quarter. Tweed held on, despite two sin bins for professional fouls in the last five minutes, including one before the final play of the game, which the Falcons promptly squandered the 13-on-11 opportunity. Norths looked a little surprised to be behind Mackay in the first half but managed to rectify that going into the break. The Devils got bashed out of the game by a more committed and skillful Cutters team, especially the athletics of Raydan Burns and Jimmy Ngutlik, a 25 year old from PNG coming into his second season of Cup.

Bears 22 defeated Dolphins 12. A waterlogged pitch and a steady stream of drizzly rain ensured that we didn’t really get a good idea of either team’s capabilities. It’s the kind of game you can slide in to the in-goal from five metres out and combine for nearly 40 errors. Moving forward, the Bears lineup looks stacked (e.g. Blake Mozer, Del Hoeter, various Turners and Bradleys) and other than two kick-offs out on the full, Burleigh were forceful, led by a defensive masterclass from Guy Hamilton of all players. The Phins made too many errors and didn’t do enough with their surplus of ball. Oloapu had a few nice touches, shuttling the ball out to Michael McGrath.

Rabbitohs 40 defeated Dolphins 30. What you don’t want to do is spend your Sunday afternoon sitting in drizzle, watching the Dolphins fall behind Souths by 18 points twice in the same game. Less than half the game was compelling and the Rabbitohs failed to really put the foot down and stamp on the Dolphins, denying us a round of record blowouts. The Phins pack showed a capacity for using tackling to limit the beefy Rabbitohs lads from marching down the field but conversely, also allowed them down the field with set restarts, penalties and poorly timed errors. Once in the red zone, Redcliffe were not able to defend. The Dolphins attack looked ok-to-good but denied themselves opportunities to level the game. I suspect this will be a recurring theme. Peter Gough sent up a try that I saw Latrell Mitchell had clearly knocked on from 100 metres away. What’s doing with that?

Super League highlight sprint, round 4. Something needs to be done about the alternative kits in this competition. Wakefield showed some enterprising play in the absence of Mason Lino to level the game at halftime and take the lead 20 minutes later (after one of the worst botches of a try you’ll see). Hull look bereft of ideas, other than what Lewis Martin offers. Leigh seem almost entirely reliant on Tesi Niu to break games open - he stepped Charlie Staines out of his boots - while Toby Sexton is looking more the part for Catalan, playing key roles in two spectacular tries as Les Dracs took the win over the Leopards. York conceded 16 points almost immediately before scoring 18 of their own. The second half proceeded in similar fashion but Warrington just edged the Knights out. Wigan kicked Toulouse’s derriere, finding a lot of joy down the Olympique left edge. Romanos, Garrigues and Wallace unable to get into position to tackle. Bradford a real early season success story but fell just short against a fast finishing St Helens. Leeds beat Castleford - Maika Sivo has the best highlight reel of anyone in rugby league right now - and Hull KR got off the mark, thrashing Huddersfield.

Last thoughts on Vegas

Unsurprisingly, the Vegas matches did not rate well on US TV. This comes after being moved to Fox Sports 2, which I gather is like being shown on one of those random shopping networks that have popped up under the FTA HD channels.

The matches were given ratings of 12k, 6k and 2k, down on 370k on Fox Sports 1 last year. These are basically zero, a statistical rounding error resulting from one person falling asleep with the TV on during the Dragons-Bulldogs game. More people watched these games in Adelaide than the 350 million people in the USA.2 It also seems that the Super League game outrated both NRL games put together, which has to sting given this is meant to be a NRL branding exercise but throws into stark relief how pointless that particular endeavour has been.

The National Maul
'War minus the shooting': Welcome to American rugby, where union is league and league is union
“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” So wrote George Orwell about totalitarian rule and its effect on language itself, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This week, those words have hovered in my mind. Why? Not because of anything on my regular beat, U.S. politics. (Well…
Read more
2 months ago · 2 likes · 4 comments · The National Maul

It is entirely possible that the NRL fully believed that they could crack the US market where so many previous administrators and sports had failed. Most people, and probably everyone reading this, understood this to be unrealistic. The US bookmakers are not obliged to share their revenue with sports, local Las Vegans avoid The Strip like the plague unless they are working or the Golden Knights are playing and it seemed unlikely a few clips from Gronk was going to convert a mass audience.

Nonetheless, I think Vegas is a success. The NRL can drop any inventory it likes into the spot and get a 10 to 20% premium on the ratings. They also receive local government funding otherwise unavailable. The reporters and some fans like the junket. It brings together the two hemispheres of the game in one place. The no pads, no helmets schtick seems to be as much as advertising to Americans, as it is communicating to Australians that this sport is good enough for export. Along with actually doing things, demonstrating that the NRL is a quality product via its actions are the two strengths of the PVL administration.

Whether the NRL intended for this to happen is another question. I tend to believe that bad process eventually outs, even if there are good results in the meantime. Unexpectedly finding a bunch of benefits while failing in your stated aim in a way that was quite obviously going to happen, is almost definitionally bad process with good results.

What kind of shelf life this has, I don’t know. The mooted global round seems poised to be a successor event, provided things like spiking petrol prices don’t kill consumer spending and send airlines bankrupt because a gaggle of morons in Washington decided to bomb Iran without consulting a map and discovering the Strait of Hormuz.

Peter V’Landys does seem to be completely insulated from the consequences of his decision-making. He is about to deliver $3 billion TV deal, maybe even $4 billion, and if the NRL walks away from Vegas and international sojourns in a couple of years, even admitting their failures (such as they are and that aspect seems unlikely), there will be minimal, if any, blowback.

Intermission

Upcoming slate

No Super League this week, as what’s left of English rugby league contests the Challenge Cup.

Broncos vs Eels, NRLM, Thursday 7pm, Suncorp Stadium

Between the Eels’ fairweather fans coming out of the woodwork and the Broncos continuing popular momentum, this will be a pretty decent crowd if the weather holds off. They will be treated to two sides licking their wounds and trying to make amends. If the Broncos manage not to drop the ball 4,000 times, they should win this game, but they may drop it 2,000 times and make it a contest.

Panthers vs Sharks, NRLM, Saturday 6.30pm, Bathurst

Bathurst is not where this game should be being held, not from the perspective of the quality of matchup nor from the perspective of a prime time Saturday night game. Are you kidding me? Expecting both Penrith and Cronulla to introduce rubber to road and see which of them has any traction. Very early in the season for this kind of critical match.

Magpies vs Bears, QCup, Sunday 3pm, Davies Park

Two first week winners collide, with the defending premiers visiting a side that had all the advanced metrics going for them in 2025, except for the win-loss column. The result will hinge on what the Magpies can put together. Another good week from Tom Duffy, and another abysmal performance on Thursday night from the far more experienced Broncos playmakers, and Duffy could be shockingly in the 19.

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Notes

Superficial amateur political analysis

I think it is axiomatic to say that professional sport has a conservative streak. Part of that arises from the long bow of legitimacy drawn from the founding date of a given league to now, with an unbroken line of continuous successive champions. In sport, values only change slowly, even if those show up in landmark events, like legalising professionalism, that break with the past. This avoids disrupting the line of succession and the legitimacy of the current hierarchy that has glommed onto it. That has appeal to a certain kind of person who holds a certain kind of worldview.

Part of that is the cultural milieu around sports attracts a disproportionate amount of a certain kind of conservative: the American gentry, whose Australian equivalent is perhaps the boomer investment property landlord and associated crowd of real estate agents.3 They use their demographic and financial influence to react negatively and with great inertia to the ever evolving social paradigm in an increasingly complex society. That is, the kind of people who insist the women’s category of sport must be protected from the evil trans, despite showing absolutely zero interest in engaging with women’s sport on its merits.

There is a long history of reactionaries attracted to sport. Look no further than Henri Desgrange or the products of the Rugby school from the late 19th century and you can draw a wobbly line from there, through the mid-century flirtation with fascism, up to the likes of Scott Morrison and David Crisafulli.4

One way of looking at the above post is that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy is the ideal person to deliver closing remarks at what is, in part, a trade mission from Australia to the United States under the guise of rugby league. Other speakers included the global VP for sports finance from Goldman Sachs, Andrew Liveris of the 2032 Olympic delivery, executives from the Raiders and Athletics, and Peter Hutton, who is a board member for Super League and the Saudi Pro League.5

Another way of looking at the above post is by googling Sarah B Rogers:

Rogers has arguably become the public face of the Trump administration’s growing hostility to European liberal democracies. Since assuming office in October, she has met with far-right European politicians, criticized prosecutions under longstanding hate speech laws, and boasted online of sanctions against critics of hate speech and disinformation on US big tech platforms.

Great! But that’s not why her name had stuck in my head. It was this admisison:

So I had several Gawker... I was a prolific Gawker commenter, and the reason is that I got married in 2009, and I was worried that if I got married, that my wedding announcement and my husband and my family and myself were all going to be dissected by these malicious internet commenters. And I thought about this the way that perhaps a future public diplomacy under secretary would, which is I thought if I can just have four Gawker accounts and sock puppet the thread and say good things about myself, then I don’t have to be afraid to get married because people, even if they bash me in public, I’ll be able to speak back. So I developed, you had to audition to be a Gawker commenter back then, and I developed this algorithm to be an impressive poster.

Rogers is a typical apparatchik of the Trump II administration, a holder of a highly incoherent worldview that centres on race with a posting brain that broke the wrong way from being Too Online.

In isolation, this wouldn’t be a big deal. It would be far more likely to create a big scandal by rejecting Rogers than would be created by going with the flow and I am not proposing to create one now. What would be the point?

However, piece this together with PVL’s plea for Trump’s attendance last year, Andrew Voss’ pathetic Instagram invitation for same this year6 and long running descent into talkback crankery, and something about Dana White attending7, lay it on the substrate conservative coding of sports, and contrast that with even a cursory understanding of what is currently happening in the US (vis a vis domestic occupation, establishing warehouse concentration camps, paramilitary kidnappings, preemptive strikes against sovereigns, engaging in school shooter behaviour as foreign policy and so forth) and a picture resolves into focus.

Putting aside the innate toadying and bootlicking of the NRL elite, which explains their desire to collaborate with whatever regime happens to be in power to achieve commercial goals that remain unclear, there is a decidedly anti-progressive streak to the NRL of recent years.

Remember the histrionics about the anthem? Remember when PVL tried to get an otherwise unqualified police commissioner on the ARLC, despite the police’s track record with e.g. Tom Starling, Latrell Mitchell and Jack Wighton? The handpicked board of the Perth Bears has two (2) Liberal politicians. According to the widely respected Roy Masters, problems of consensus can only be resolved by strongmen. These are little visible specks that strongly indicate an underlying fatberg of shitty politics.

One of the fun parts of getting into an otherwise tedious argument with a rugby union fan was dropping “union collaborated with Nazi-occupied Vichy France to eliminate League,” as told in Mike Rylance’s Forbidden Game, and dropping the mic along with it. However, as time passes, the (relatively) progressive, (relatively) inclusive politics of famously working class game are waning. Money, growth and middle age will do that and there’s a good argument that historical inclusivity was not as broad as we might like to think.

I’ve previously cited Tony Collins’ piece about Workington Man, published right before Workington Man went hard for the Tories in the 2019 UK general election, as a sort of bellwhether for the end of this political ideal. The ongoing process of LNP politicians and various Katterati publicly signalling allegiance to specific NRL clubs (Sharks, Cowboys, etc) speaks to a parallel trend locally. That 2026 seems to be revealing that a lot of the last decade of culture war seems to have been influenced by Epstein and his pedophile cabal only lends the whole thing another degree of revulsion.

Where does this end up? Dunno but it feels remiss to not at least point it out.

Some content

Things are getting desperate when clubs start to make pleas like this. Hard to imagine that’s going to meaningfully turn around what sounds like terminal decline.

There are plenty of larger forces working against Whitehaven, primarily the drying up of TV money to the lower divisions and the distance of Cumbria from the rest of the rugby league world (in part, causing their coach to resign), and perhaps the new league structure is not that accommodating (take note re: NRL reserves in QCup). While we normally point out that not even the ineptly-run Super League went under during covid, I do think the pandemic has weakened plenty of structures around the game that may just take a bit more time to collapse.

The best case scenario is the next TV deal is steady, which means the Super League clubs aren’t going to be any more interested in sharing cash with the lower tier clubs than they are now. Without a miracle, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, if at all.

1

Worth noting that we do in fact see margin inflation in NSW Cup and Super League post-2020, although QCup is a little more muddled due to local factors.

2

Remember how the NRL, as the first* sport to return from covid, was going to provide prime live sports programming for Americans?

*As long as you don’t count Bundesliga, Korean soccer, a bunch of competitions that never stopped, etc, etc.

3

The thinning of the boomers does not seem to be reducing this dynamic.

4

Albanese, too, but he is not a reactionary. That would be a category error. Useless, perhaps, and likely a bad politician that will somehow be prime minister for a decade.

5

Hmmm.

6

“Why would u want a pedophile at the game” one commenter asked. Great question. Mr Voss, your response?

7

Look, I didn’t care enough to read about that one.

]]><![CDATA[A diverse ecosystem of weirdos]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/a-diverse-ecosystem-of-weirdoshttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/a-diverse-ecosystem-of-weirdosTue, 03 Mar 2026 23:01:05 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

In 2020, the QRL introduced an official tipping product. I started a comp for PythagoNRL followers, we got one round in and then you know the rest. It never came back. That was disappointing and I have often thought about creating my own but never got around to it. Fortunately, Faceyourfears has taken that out of my hands and created a website that allows for custom tipping competitions.

So if you’re interested in joining a Queensland Cup tipping competition for 2026, join the Maroon Observer QCup Tipping Sickoship.

First prize is $50 and the title of Champion Sicko, assuming anyone signs up and at least half a dozen people tip consistently through the season. There’s also $20 for last place (minimum 20 rounds tipped). I’ll put a reminder in the weekly newsletter.

Good luck.

The glorious future is within our reach, comrades

V’Lando-Leninist Thought scores another victory over the fat cats:

Vegas interest surges to record heights as global expansion gathers pace

Each percentage point above plan goals is a blow against war-mongers [not anti-Semitic].

The Allegiant Stadium triple-header set a number of broadcast records, including:

  • Knights v Cowboys fixture was the second-most watched exclusive Fox Sports/Kayo match of all time, behind only the 2024 Vegas opener

  • It was the highest-ever audience on Fox Sports/Kayo for both Newcastle and North Queensland

  • The Bulldogs v Dragons game was the most-watched match of all time (including finals) between the two sides

  • It was the fourth most-watched Round 1 fixture of all time

  • It was the most-watched regular season fixture featuring the Bulldogs and the second-most watched Dragons regular season fixture of all time

  • The Super League fixture between Leeds and Hull KR was the most-watched Super League fixture on Fox Sports/Kayo of all time

I think a lot of these “records” have more to say about the state of the clubs involved than the appeal of the Vegas in 2026, a comment you can interpret as suits your agenda. The attendance figure will almost certainly be undermined by the real number released later and the FTA game was down 10% on last year.

Despite the claims of our man of steel, the vibes were not as high as previous years, with the broadcasters not making the same effort and the smaller NRL clubs not bringing the same crowd. Given that the NRL only has a couple of properly big clubs, if every team is expected to rotate through Vegas, this was as inevitable as the waning novelty. But V’Landys won’t be so easily defeated by counter-revolutionaries:

The NRL will decide in the next three months whether to charge towards a global round, with gradual year-by-year international expansion the likely model.

ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys has confirmed the NRL has a three-year plan for the concept, culminating in double-headers in at least four cities.

The game’s boss also declared to AAP that Las Vegas would stay on the calendar beyond the current deal, which ends in 2028, labelling it the league’s anchor event.

The plan seems to be four double headers, comprising two NRL games and a Super League game, in some combination of London, Vegas, Miami, Hong Kong, Japan and several small countries that technically qualify as war zones as of the weekend just gone. Travel impacts, scheduling around time zones and whether the NRL will have a Glorious Global Round to start the season and then a week off as everyone returns to Australia remain question marks.

It seems pretty clear that V’Landys has a fixation on being a “global” sport, presumably because he has realised that you can extract a lot of government money that way. The Nevada tourism board chips in a mil or so for the Vegas event and the NRL would be a relatively budget option next to a lot of US and European sport with the advantage of being able to use existing infrastructure. I don’t doubt some version of this will happen if PVL wants it and you’ll be told it will be successful, even as V’Landys admitted that cracking the US gambling market was more difficult than expected (What? No way).

For the fans, it only serves to create very expensive games to attend but Vegas has proved there are some very willing fans if you make the event on the other end worthwhile. For the rest of us, the TV spectacle is fine but in an era of endless surpluses, I can’t say I find the NRL increasing its bottom line all that compelling.

Nonetheless, our illustrious captains of Leagueintern seem intent on forging a new future:

The NRL’s commander in chief, Peter V’landys, will sit down for talks with English officials this weekend with a view to ironing out a deal that will result in potential investment from the Australian game into Super League, bringing the two competitions together like never before. While the bright lights of Las Vegas and the glamour surrounding the fixtures at Allegiant Stadium catch the eye, this is perhaps the real story of note if you scratch beneath the surface.

V’Landys will get his way eventually. It’s just not that clear what that way is.

AMA

What one of the finest sports writers in the nation gets up to in his own time is usually beyond the purview of The Maroon Observer. However, I did go through Campo’s responses to his recent Reddit AMA, even though I probably have guessed his responses like a human LLM trained on the output of Boom Rookies episodes (subscribe here), and hey look we got a shout-out.

Nick didn’t need to do either the AMA or drop a minor mention of a very minor publication in that AMA (or the Boom Rookies Broncos preview), but it is appreciated.

Because there's something you need to understand about the way the internet has changed since 2013, which is when I started writing online for fun. These things are obvious to me because I have spent a lot of time trying to get people’s attention (within the limits of my capability and dignity) and I spend a lot of time reading various media operations’ woes but here it is:

It is harder than ever to connect with potential readers via social media.

It is probably harder now than it was before social media existed. Double or triple the degree of difficulty if you don’t have the time or will to produce front facing video.

The big internet platforms made it easy to find people in the 2010s. Once people and small businesses had moved their entire way of life over to the platforms, the platforms became pay for play. Everyone was captured by the algorithm and very few stray outside it.

For independent writers, through sheer good posting, you used to be able to find and build an audience. If you had a big enough personal audience prior to 2020, you could leverage that to start a Defector or be NRL Physio. After that, the hill got a lot steeper. These are not jealousies - I subscribe to Defector, although they did not get back to me about my pitch to write a freelance piece about the PNG NRL team, and Brien once flipped me off during Magic Round, but in a friendly way - but a statement of the situation.

It is now roughly twice (and feels ten times) as difficult to find your audience because very little of the independent fan content assembly line generates the kind of money that justifies investing in what is effectively advertising. There is no Maroon Observer Facebook page because it is not worth my time copying and pasting the link across and then asking you to waste your time trying to signal boost. If I was going to pay to advertise, I’d rather sponsor a footy club. If you want to signal boost, forward this email.

Hopefully, this partly explains why a lot of written content turned to newsletters and subscriptions (or moved to other media) and why in the 2020s, personal recommendations, even small ones like Campo’s, become really important. I’ve added about 6% to the subscriber base over the last week. To borrow from our friends at the Eye Test:

I’ve specifically chosen newsletters because email is one of the few remaining channels that hasn’t been ruined (as much as Google and Microsoft have tried) by algorithmic feeds promoting outrage and emotionally charged content. You’re in control of your inbox and hopefully these suggestions are useful additions to your rugby league information diet.

So today, I encourage you to subscribe to something. It doesn't have to be this newsletter, although I won't stop you and will provide a box for you to put in your email —

Please clap.

— but if you want a diverse ecosystem of weirdos punching out charts and GIFs and posts about interesting things about the NRL you would never have considered in a billion years, it starts with you connecting with them. It sounds backwards but then at least we know someone is listening and then we can justify putting in the time.

Here's a list from RLET to get you started. That I'm second on it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm linking to it. About half of these I had no idea were going concerns. See if there’s something that will change the way you look at things.

Around the grounds

Knights 28 defeated Cowboys 18. It's only round 1. It's only round 1. It's only round 1 and it's Vegas. There's no reason to panic. Calm down. Not even because the defensive line looks as porous as ever against a team people are not expecting to threaten this year and not because the offence looked as bereft of ideas as last year. Just… it's fine. Really. No need to panic. Look at how confident Crisafulli is.

Bulldogs 15 defeated Dragons 14. A game that presented a classic dilemma: do I spend my Sunday afternoon with my children, who are growing up faster than you can imagine, or do I watch this game between two teams I do not care about and that is expected to be both boring and round 1 rusty? In answer, I, for one, am looking to another 23 games of this scintillating Bulldogs attack that included taking multiple penalty goals and several favourable refereeing calls. I do not intend to watch any more of the Dragons.

Super League round 3. Wigan blitzed Leigh in an ominous warning sign for the rest of the competition. David Nofoaluma scored the opening try in York’s single point victory over Hull FC, although the black and whites benefitted from an extremely dubious last minute try. Huddersfield against Castleford is the most miserable fixture in professional rugby league but Tom Weaver added a touch of Gold Coast sunshine en route to the Tigers’ first win of the season. Trinity did well to make a contest of it, but Marc Sneyd showed too much class and got Wire across the line. The highlights didn’t make it clear if Catalans-Saints was a defensive masterclass or a bludger in the first half but the Dragons woefully underperformed their roster talent in the second half. Toby Sexton is looking like a lemon and Tristan Sailor is back to looking like a hero. Maika Sivo was the star of Leeds’ rout of Hull KR in Vegas. Perhaps dumping all of their emotional energy into the World Club Challenge, only to then jump on a plane to Vegas has taken its toll on Rovers. Presuming KR get off the canvas at some point, the Giants look like the best bet to be replaced by the Broncos next year (presuming there is promotion and relegation).

QCup Qicks off

Yeah, “qick” looks a lot like “dick”. Speaking of:

“It is ridiculous to have a 17 or 18-team Queensland Cup.

“The only people who benefit from it are the NRL clubs like the Broncos putting their teams in and it’s not right.

“If you have North Queensland Cowboys playing, how in the world are Cairns and Mackay and Townsville ever going to be able to compete in a Queensland Cup comp against a back-up NRL team?

“It’s just such bullshit for the NRL clubs to want their own reserve grade team in the Queensland Cup, playing against teams that haven’t got the capacity to be able to compete against them.”

Shane Richardson, onetime CEO of the Wests Tigers and onetime driving force behind the Brisbane Firehawks while at Easts Tigers, had his say on the proposed inclusion of Q4 reserve teams in the QCup.

“The Titans couldn’t even do a good enough job to retain Burleigh Bears and now they want to run their own second grade team,” he said.

“In my papers (when working at the NRL), my idea was to expand the game in NSW to Tamworth and Dubbo and places like that, because I think the Queensland model is the best way of doing things.

“Places like Mackay and Townsville are genuine cities that love their rugby league and by adding NRL teams, they will tear away from the heart of what the game is about.

“It will starve Burleigh. It will starve Tweed. It will starve Souths Logan to death. Ipswich won’t even exist.

“This is not doing anything for districts.

“It’s all for the NRL clubs. It’s not for the growth of rugby league.

“If the QRL goes along with it, well that’s their decision, but it’s just wrong on so many levels.”

Richardson has a whiff of that loser Tigers stink on him but I can’t say I disagree. NSW Cup should be more like Queensland Cup, rather than the other way around, and the Titans should try not to step on their own genitalia for a change. All good points. I expect this will have a similar impact to this newsletter.

The other media darlings reminded everyone they were back:

Ben Walker has been licking his lips at the prospect of exploiting the many rule changes brought in by the NRL.

“The game keeps providing coaches like us opportunities to innovate because they keep changing the rules every other day in rugby league. It gives you an opportunity to exploit those rules,” Ben Walker told AAP.

“Some of the changes are going to help our cause. There is one particular rule, brought in recently, that the game will probably be forced to change because of the way we will exploit it.

“You will see it in round one. I will send you a clip of it when we do it and it will make a mockery of the rule that is already there.”

Sure, man.

With the imminent arrival of rugby league’s greatest competition, here’s where each of the teams stands coming into 2026. From north to south:

Darren Lockyer personally raided the PNG Hunters’ roster, looking for players to fill out his newly acquired London Broncos. The Broncos are 4-0 in the Championship with a +215 points difference while the Hunters now have to fill a massive hole. Paul Aiton has restored this team to competitiveness but this might be too great a challenge for the Hunters to be relevant this year.

The Northern Pride had an exceptionally strange 2025. A team with Jeremiah Nanai, Jake Clifford, Zac Laybutt and Robert Derby lost to the Tweed Seagulls in round 2 and the Pride just never got going under new coach Russ Aitken. Aitken has made way for Sam Williams to take the reins in Cairns and get Northern moving again.

Recently reunited with the NRL team across town, the Townsville Blackhawks have to make sure that the Cowboys don’t drag them down to their level. The Blackhawks were 14-6 under Terry Campese in 2025 and in theory, a couple of fringe NRL players would patch some weaknesses and put them into contention. Someone sign Dudley Dotoi already.

Both the Mackay Cutters and Central Queensland Capras have plenty of work to do. The Capras reverted to form last year after a mini-golden age that included a preliminary finals appearance in 2023. Likely these two will be scrapping for the bottom of the table.

I always think the Sunshine Coast Falcons are on the verge of something. Since covid, the Birds have won 9, 13.5, 11.5, 12 and 12 games each year. Sunny Coast are definitionally good but not great. Losing the Storm will not help, even if Melbourne haven’t been much help over that period in any case, and adding a tenuous connection to the Broncos seems unlikely to change the calculus.

The Redcliffe Dolphins will be helmed by Dave Elliott, the premiership winning coach of 2024 at Norths who was decided to be surplus to requirements when Rohan Smith returned from Leeds. Proven quality with a point to prove at a big club smarting from an eight year title drought? Look out.

Despite the three titles in four years, the Norths Devils never felt that convincing. Perhaps it was that they are not the Bears or the Dolphins, our true overlords to whom we must bow and scrape, or perhaps it was the repeated narrow and last minute grand final wins. Burleigh crushed Norths in last year’s grand final, which felt a punctuation mark on the end of the Devils’ run. Oryn Keeley being too good for QCup, Jordan Lipp departing for York, Manase Kaho for Catalans and Sean O’Sullivan being mercifully rotated out of the Dolphins roster are some of the changes Rohan Smith will have to find solutions for.

Who knows what Souths Logan Magpies are doing at any given moment in time? The Magpies led QCup by Wins Above Reserve Grade, Anthony Milford finished as Guy #4 and Souths Logan underperformed their Pythagorean expectation by 2.5 wins. Your guess is as good as mine as to what they will be like this year. I hope the toilets are working at Davies Park. I will not be attending to find out.

Easts Tigers were the most active in the transfer market and have brought in stalwart veteran Jim Lenihan to take over from Matt Church. I am expecting a pretty big improvement at Coorparoo.

Wynnum Manly Seagulls:

Quite the dilemma. We’ll be watching to see if Jamal Shibasaki can get himself into good enough shape to crack the Broncos or if he is like the earlier version of his brother.

The Western Clydesdales have managed to bring in plenty of attention with the Walker Brothers. One hoped that would translate to better recruitment and better results but the team list for this week is not that different to what has been served up previously. Sweet jerseys (see end of newsletter).

The challenge for the Ipswich Jets is to maintain last year’s dramatic improvement from the bottom of the league to the finals. Tye Ingebritsen oversaw minimal churn in the roster, so the Jets just needs to stay better than the other improvers to maintain their place.

The Burleigh Bears are the reigning premiers but suffered a number of departures in the offseason to Super League and other statewide clubs. The mark of the big clubs is their ability to churn the roster and stay competitive. I’m not expecting the Bears to show much strain.

Tweed Seagulls? Oh, are you guys still here? Look, I’m going to have to see something before I commit too much memory to the southern seagulls.

A reminder to join Maroon Observer QCup Tipping Sickoship.

Intermission

It is not nice to make fun of people's appearance. On the other hand, it is called making fun for a reason. It is fun. For me.

So we see here three normal looking people, Anasta looking conventionally handsome by sheer and stark contrast, laughing at I’m not sure what because I had the sound off but I’ll bet it was a real ZINGER, and —

— Bruno Ganz in Der Untergang (2004), moments before the film's climax.

Man remember those memes? Couldn't go anywhere on the internet in 2009 without tripping over one. So it was only nearly 20 years ago. Most of them weren't funny. Movie was pretty good though.

Hopefully, QCup provides some better highlights than Vegas did.

Brisbane football is a gold mine

The Broncos reported to the ASX that revenue is up 20% and profits are up 35% on the previous year. Shockingly, winning premierships is good for business. Someone should have told Paul White that.

The Broncos will clear $7.7 million in profit, mostly off the back of increased sponsorship, increased funding from the NRL and tax payer funding for waving through the PNG Chiefs licence. I bought a full price jersey, possibly for the first time ever, which has to have contributed as well.

Unlike the Controlling Body, the Broncos making a profit makes sense, because it is a private entity with no overarching constitutional social responsibility which exists to enrich its shareholders, which is predominantly News but also me. My (extremely small) investment since 2018 is up 265%.

Surprisingly, the Broncos are not the most profitable or richest football club in Brisbane. The Lions, who didn’t even win the women’s premiership, reported $108m in revenue, compared to the Broncos’ $98m, and $9.8m in profit.

A 10% margin is not a bad bit of business.

Watch guide

Normally, I would preview a few games but I’ve spent too much of this newsletter talking about PVL and myself, as usual, so I’ll cut to the chase. Watch any Queensland Cup you can this weekend, it’ll all be good, and the obvious picks in the NRL are the 2023 grand final rematch on Friday night and the Re-Lomaxening: This Time Its On The Field on Thursday night. Remember the southerners can’t adjust their body clocks to the reality of the sun, despite billions of years of evolution, and so must have the nanny state and NRL do it for them.

I’ve also re-created Elo systems for Super League. While it needs a bit of tweaking, and some pre-Super League history added in for class rating purposes, it’s good enough to add the European game to the watch guide. With all the good teams scheduled against bad ones, or at least recently promoted clubs, what a weekend we get on debut. Last weekend, which was much more competitive on paper, was decided by an average of 26 points, so we can only tremble in horror at the prospects round 4.

We won’t treat you like a moron

One of the reasons this newsletter got going is that I realised that I had to write the stories I wanted to read about the sport. Another reason it got going is that I am tired of NRL content that makes you feel dumb and so wanted something that wasn’t written in the same voice as every gambling ad you’ve ever heard.

Enter NRL-IQ:

In collaboration with Telstra, the NRL has developed advanced capabilities using large language models to enhance the fan experience.

Phase one of the initiative is now complete, with future phases set to introduce an Al-powered, chat-based interface that helps fans better understand game statistics and insights.

By translating complex data into everyday language, NRL-IQ aims to deepen engagement and make the game more accessible and enjoyable for all fans.

In contrast to the NRL®, in collaboration with Telstra®, The Maroon Observer does not offer this service. I assume a basic level of reading comprehension and command of numeracy of my subscribers. I also assume that you would prefer to hear from a person, no matter how self-righteous or pretentious, than a computer, who should not be allowed to speak my holy tongue.

We do not have time to litigate the outputs of “Fox AI”.

If that sounds appealing, 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.

Read this

Notes

Random logo of the week

Some good content

]]><![CDATA[PREVIEW: 2026]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026-e44https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026-e44Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:01:11 GMT

When a team struggles, the first step is to tweak the roster. The second is to turn over the roster. The third is to re-evaluate the coach, then the CEO and then the board. During Todd Payten’s tenure, the Cowboys have turned over the roster with at least two big clean outs and results have not meaningfully improved. Instead of sacking him last year, North Queensland opted to replace the assistant coaches. This interim step leaves Payten, and a metaphorically significant length of rope, solely responsible for this year’s result.

I will acknowledge that it is an even numbered year and perhaps the Cowboys draw special inspiration from our Olympic representatives to pull themselves to the top of the non-quite-contending pile but while it is narratively convenient, it does seem like a long bow to draw. The Cowboys hierarchy have waited for proof 2022 was no fluke, even though the accumulation of evidence - the ‘21, ‘23 and ‘25 seasons weighed against the ‘22 and ‘24 seasons - make it seem like it almost certainly was.

The pattern of Payten’s tenure has been bad-good-bad-ok-bad. That might look like he sometimes has good teams and sometimes had bad ones, but I think it is reflective that you don’t really know what you’re getting month-to-month. Some years those dice rolls add up to a bunch of wins and some years, it doesn’t. Call it the craps theory of the North Queensland Cowboys.

The upside, and perhaps the only reason that Payten still has a job, is that the Cowboys seem to have gotten past the absolute bottom of the barrel post-Thurston era. The best result in the late Paul Green era from 2018 to 2021 was 13th. The worst result of Payten’s cycle of 2022 to 2025 was 12th. That is progress but hardly satisfying and does not indicate steady growth towards the ultimate goal. Beating the Tigers and the Titans while the Broncos win the title and butcher the World Club Challenge is not where this club wants to, or should, be.

Jeremiah Nanai exploded for Samoa before destroying his shoulder and missing the first ten weeks of this season. He was not the only one to have an interesting representative offseason. Even Reuben Cotter played noticeably better and harder for the whole of Queensland than he did for just the northern part. If you contrast these individual players’ lack lustre club performance against their lustrous representative performances, and wonder why the discrepancy exists, then we might start looking at the variables.

There are more club games. The jerseys are different colours. Home grounds and the vibes of different team mates might put players in a better frame of mind. But a lot of that, directly and indirectly, comes back through the coaching regime and the man who is paid the money to take responsibiltiy for the performance of that regime is Todd Payten.

I hope this helps you clarify any feelings of frustration or powerlessness

Future therapy sessions delivered to your inbox here:

Naturally, Payten is responsible for the results but does not actually play the games. That comes down to the roster. I am developing a theory of what constitutes a “Cowboys signing” and I think there are three types.

There are your Scott Drinkwaters, Reece Robsons and Tom Deardens. Good players who were surplus to requirements at their respective clubs who have found at home in Townsville. Even Johnathan Thurston, the Brisbane kid at the Bulldogs, fits this description. Reed Mahoney, from the Sunny Coast hinterland1, is another and while I personally think he’s a little shit, North Queensland could hardly have done better to replace Robson from the options available.

There are your Reuben Cotters (when he can be bothered), Heilum Lukis and Jake Cliffords, who are locals and probably never wanted to go anywhere else, even if in Clifford’s (and Dearden’s) case, they did. That’s Matt Bowen and Kyle Feldt. These guys are like shooting fish in a barrel.

The most recent generation of young men brought through the Cowboys system have had been a mixed bag. Purdue is likely a success and likely a defensive liability. Laybutt, perhaps not so much after a disappointing return from an ACL. Chester might have something. Derby is going to have to leave and make it big elsewhere in the grand tradition of many ex-Cowboys. Duffy sucked and his presence at Brisbane remains inexplicable. Not one of them could make a single yard over replacement and none of them are forwards. No one has signed Dudley Dotoi yet and it drives me nuts.

Finally, there are the mysteries. Why did the Cowboys sign John Bateman? There were injury problems in that position, agreed, but was a guy barely hanging on in Super League the best the Cowboys could do? While Bateman did maybe ok sort of, Chad Townsend made more sense at the time and I openly laughed at that one.

Which brings us to a very low stakes signing but one with significant “guuhhh?” factor: Matthew Lodge.

Lodge played in 12 games for the Sea Eagles in 2025 after agreeing to a one-year deal late in the pre-season.

Lodge adds significant depth and experience to a Cowboys forward pack, which will be without young stars Jeremiah Nanai and Griffin Neame to start the 2026 season.

“We are fortunate to be able to secure someone of Matt’s experience this late in the pre-season,” Cowboys General Manager of Football Micheal Luck said.

There is a reason - many, in fact - he was available. This is his sixth club. Lodge might pan out and give the Cowboys a solid six weeks but that is the best case scenario. You’re telling me Lodge provides better cover than keeping Marly Bitungane or giving Josh Stuckey a proper go? Come now.

This kind of signing is almost a signature Cowboys move. It ostensibly solves a problem - bolstering a saggy middle - but is left field enough - a guy who played 12 matches last year - while lacking obvious quality - Lodge’s best years are well behind him - that it makes you wonder about the guys in charge and if we won’t be doing some re-evaluation of their place in this organisation down the track.

Soni Luke makes more sense:

“With the departure of Karl Lawton, we had an open spot in our roster for an experienced dummy-half to complement Reed Mahoney and Xavier Kerrisk,” Cowboys General Manager of Football Micheal Luck said.

That’s more like it. I can be complimentary about complementarity.

Speaking of Lodge-like monsters:

North Queensland have denied any interest in signing former NRLW half Maddie Studdon for 2026 after the club was mentioned in a court hearing on Wednesday for a domestic violence-related stalking charge.

To be clear, Studdon is the one accused of stalking of her former partner. This lone charge justifies everything negative I’ve written about her since 2018. For the Cowboys, that you have to deny it in the newspaper (albeit, for reasons probably related to a later story) is not a good sign!

Structure

Even for me, organisational charts are not the most interesting thing in the world but the Cowboys have come in with a beauty:

David Myles has been appointed as Chairman of the Football Club board, while Micheal Luck has been promoted to CEO - Football.

Cowboys premiership-winning captains Johnathan Thurston and Matthew Scott along with 229-game NRL veteran Brent Tate join Myles on the Football Club Board.

The Football Club leadership announcements follow the implementation of a new structure across all Cowboys operating entities – Football Club, Cowboys Leagues Club, Cowboys Community Foundation and NRL Cowboys House – consolidating into a group entity titled NQ Cowboys Limited.

The Cowboys group, which includes the football team, the leagues club and some community foundations, have created a nested, byzantine structure of boards, presumably in an attempt to clearly demarcate zones of responsibility and improve leadership, cohesion and accountability across the organisation.

For the football club, because we are not concerned with NRL Cowboys House, does this achieve that goal? The theory of the board is to get a bunch of people with similar domain knowledge but differing experiences to lend that experience to the high level strategic decision-making of an organisation. While Myles, Thurston, Scott and Tate have had varying post-playing careers that might have let them accumulate that experience, and their playing careers lend them a great deal of credibility, the four of them forms a very small board (most football clubs have boards that are five to nine people) and is not particularly diverse (most clubs have boards with non-athletes and women). For contrast, I’ve talked about who is on the Chiefs and the Bears boards recently. Are you telling me they asked Little Robbie Katter and he said no?2

Putting aside the frailties of people and the temptations of power that can send this theory askew in reality (cf: Wests Tigers), diversity is important. A group of accountants will make different decisions to a group of lawyers or engineers or marketing and comms people because they have different backgrounds. If you take a little bit from each, the board should be able to form a more well-rounded perspective on strategy for the organisation. A lack of diversity is prone to groupthink. That the CEO is cut from the same cloth makes the situation worse.

This is not to suggest that more people from other backgrounds won’t be invited to the football club board or this is doomed to failure but it is a deviation from the norm. I usually expect negative effects of this kinds of decisions to take years to make themselves felt but the Cowboys do tend to be an accelerant.

Affiliations

We have already talked about this but for the sake of completeness:

The North Queensland Toyota Cowboys have finalised its Affiliate Club Agreements through the 2028 season.

The Northern Pride and Mackay Cutters remain as Cowboys feeder clubs, while the Townsville Blackhawks return to the fold for the first time since 2023.

As part of the agreements, the Cowboys will send players to all three feeder clubs from its NRL squad to play in the Queensland Cup.

I cannot express how big a waste of everyone’s time the Kyle Laybutt scandal ended up being. Just because we ended up back where we started does not meant this was a storm in a tea cup. Relationships and careers across the North have been damaged by this ineptitude.

Perhaps we should just be grateful that the status quo has returned for the time being and we’ll deal with the Young Guns mark 2 in a couple years’ time. If nothing else, it will give us some more content for future Bovine Bulletins.

The Cowboys and affiliates are buddy-buddy again…

…so does that mean we can be friends and I can ask you to do me the favour of sharing this piece?

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Dibb’s on Knights

Kirra Dibb returns to Newcastle:

The nib Newcastle Knights are pleased to announce Kirra Dibb has signed a 3-year NRLW contract to return to the Club until at least the end of 2028.

Dibb, 28, brings a halves skillset, leadership and experience to the Knights squad, having represented the Jillaroos, NSW Blues and Indigenous All Stars, along with almost 50 appearances since her making her NRLW debut in 2019.

The last season had some odd selection choices and Dibb seemed well out of her usual form, so that would suggest some underlying tension. The release and signing by the Knights then makes some sense, if it is unfortunate.

Also unfortunate, Tahlulah Tillett retired at the ripe old age of 27. This leaves the Cowboys without both of its 2025 starting halves coming into the 2026 season.

This is a team that had a good run and made finals that now finds itself in the middle of a rebuild. Krystal Blackwell left for Canberra and China Polata went to Cronulla. While there have been signings and extensions, who is going to play in the halves?

Whitfeld, Manzelmann and the forward pack are good assets to have, and Ricky Bobby Henry has been extended, but without a helmswoman (preferably two), it could get grim in 2026.

And don’t forget they’re all moving to Cairns in 2027!

Mr Reibel said he accepted the Cairns public’s cynical perception of how the Cowboys’ timing of expanding its presence in the Far North coincided with investments and the introduction of Papua New Guinea into the NRL.

Gee, I wonder why anyone would think that?

The Cowboys remain in the market for a Group CEO.

Ah!

Notes

1

This is the nicest way to refer to Nambour, birthplace of Billy Slater.

2

Better than George Christensen I suppose but you’d assume Crisafulli will be a prime target post-politics.

]]><![CDATA[Uncomfortable writers doing vertical video]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/uncomfortable-writers-doing-verticalhttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/uncomfortable-writers-doing-verticalMon, 23 Feb 2026 23:01:05 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

Not a deep dive

This is my tenth season writing about the NRL and every season, I’ve done the season preview a little bit differently. Some years I do a lot of writing. Some years I do a lot of numbers. Some years I do both (e.g. part 1 and part 2) but more recently, I usually have done very little writing and let the vibes run.

The overall question for 2026 is: are there any Good Teams? Every year since 2018, there has been at least one, if not two or three, Good Teams that have dictated the terms of the premiership. Good Teams have weaknesses but they are usually minor enough to be managed by coaching tactics on the way to a 19-5 regular season and a deep finals run.

2025 was defined by a wide open premiership, similar to 2018. The games were as unpredictable as any in NRL history. Every team seemed to have at least one glaring weakness that could be exploited by the rest of the competition. The premiers won their finals games by a combined margin of seven points, after being down dozens at various stages of those games.

Surely we won’t be treated to that again.1 If we expect a reversion to a more typical season, who are the clubs that are likely to step up to Good Team status? I am reasonably confident that I know who it is not going to be, but other than the Panthers and the Storm, any other team putting it together to really contend this decade usually has an element of surprise. I think this group is the Sharks, Bulldogs, Broncos and Roosters with very, very outside chances for the Rabbitohs and Dolphins. You could make a case for the Raiders but the other eight is outside looking in and its only February.

Here’s a predicted ladder that I refuse to be held to and the logic, loosely defined, as to how I arrived at each team’s position:

17. Sea Eagles (wish casting and high confidence): Seibold is the prime hot seat candidate and he has a roster that looks like a big fart sounds. We could save a lot of time, and Trbojevic’s knee and ankle ligaments, by firing Seibold and giving them the spoon now, as Manly auto-forfeits through the season.

16. Titans (high confidence): The worst team that won’t fire its coach. The roster is too QCup, even for my taste.

15. Cowboys (high confidence): Wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see these guys slip below the Titans even. More on Thursday in the first Bovine Bulletin of 2026.

14. Knights (helmet analysis): Justin Holbrook, who coached four (4) losses where the Titans were leading by at least 20 points, took the Knights into a coal mine during the offseason. The image of Holbrook’s bunch of effete footballers that have never had an office job, let alone done manual labour, coming back with Zoolander black lung seems hard to get past. So I am not expecting heaps this season. Or ever, really.

13. Tigers (helmet analysis): After another off-season of board room ridiculousness, where does the impetus to move Wests up the ladder come from? Koroisau has gone quiet. Luai is at his maximum capacity. Marshall doesn’t have any experience to fall back on. Breakout Bula? The rest of the roster isn’t much better than Manly. Every team has a few good players but the rest of the Tigers are, best case, development prospects

12. Warriors (high confidence): I don’t think the Warriors are very good and I don’t think the Webster Warriors have ever really been that good. People want the Warriors to succeed but losing two (2) good players derailed their entire season in 2025, one of whom is still injured. Good teams have depth because those kinds of injuries happen. Bad teams show these kinds of frailties. Other than that getting pantsed at Suncorp in 2023, what have they shown? A massive outperformance of Pythagorean expectation in 2025? The Wahs are on a similar trajectory to Payten’s Cowboys.

11. Dragons (low confidence): By a process of elimination, I ended up with the Dragons in the top eight because I wanted the Storm to miss the finals but I just can’t make it stack up, even for the purposes of having a hot take for the sake of having a hot take. Even this feels preposterously optimistic for a team with nothing in particular to recommend them as St George Illawarra remain the least interesting franchise in the NRL, except when they do something catastrophically stupid.

10. Rabbitohs (medium confidence): I’ve done a couple of season previews with Souths by helmet analysis and expecting them to be good and they have not delivered. I don’t know if Bennett has his fast ball anymore - last year’s coaching performance was not just subpar but the worst of anyone who wasn’t fired - even though he probably has some decidedly noxious stuff for maybe two big games a year. On the other hand, the injury luck has to turn, so maybe they keep their stars on the field and put up some wins. In all likelihood, you probably get both experiences.

9. Raiders (medium confidence): Canberra fans better get used to hearing “reversion” a lot this year. It won’t be used properly, instead doubling as code for “not winning as many games as last year”, but it’ll be said a lot. The Raiders’ 19 win minor premiership was worth 15 wins by Pythagorean expectation. Those four wins over have to be paid for.2 If the Raiders meaningfully improve and play like a 19-win team (this is not my baseline scenario), then we’d expect 15 to 17 wins, and still looking like a contender, despite underperforming their Pythag. If the Raiders play like a 15-win team again (this is much closer to my baseline), we’d expect 11 to 13 wins and maybe scraping into the finals. That’s reversion to the mean. It relies on the idea that there is a true level to this team that we might be able to devine through haruspicy, astrology and advanced statistics but as this is the Raiders, we leave that in the hands of the fates.

8. Storm (vibe): I don’t think the Storm will be very good this year. Certainly not by their own lofty standards and perhaps not even in an absolute sense. Unfortunately, this seems to be a commonly held position but I don’t mind feeling silly about this when they rip off a 24-0 season.

7. Dolphins (talking myself into it): The Dolphins will land in the zone marked “12 to 14 wins” but where that sticks you on the ladder is anyone’s guess. See also: Raiders. A finals berth would be good. Some upside risk of being really good.

6. Eels (medium confidence): Things are about as good as they get in Parramatta. Mitchell Moses, 31, will be coming to the end of his career in the next five years, they have lost sex pest Dylan Brown (fine) and instead have Jonah Pezet for a single season instead. Dumdum Lomax may be swapped for [insert Storm player here], although that’s looking less and less likely, which means the Eels at least have some self-respect. Some tooling around the edges and given the state of the competition last year, Eels fans would be forgiven for wondering, “why not us?”

5. Bulldogs (medium confidence): The Bulldogs have blown it. At least in the sense of they had a very winnable premiership in 2025 - the Raiders won the minor premiership with 19 wins, for god’s sake - and opted to build to win future, less tangible premierships. They had an elite defence through the back third of 2024 and first half of 2025 - coughing up a 16 point lead to the Broncos in round 18 is something of a turning point - so there might be something there if they can avoid giving up 40+ to the Panthers in a final but they need to figure it out quick. Otherwise, Ciraldo is starting to look real tired.

4. Roosters (helmet analysis): Probably good? Due a decent year, which is the kind of thing we say about teams that are well run by reputation but haven’t had the results to back it up. Roster looks more complete than a lot of their rivals. I still don’t really believe in Sam Walker. Lil Spenny Lenny is still a fraud.

3. Broncos (high confidence): They’re going to be more relaxed but not as hungry. Given the underlying talent, that will balance out to a pretty good team but not necessarily a premiership winner. Upside is if there is some magnified Origin effect where they’ve been through heaven, hell and everything in between so nothing can stop them now?

2. Panthers (helmet analysis): Expecting another solid-to-good performance taking them to a preliminary final. Dylan Edwards stinks. Nathan Cleary has better protection than the black rhino.

1. Sharks (medium confidence): Maybe this is the season they put it all together and that feels as likely for Cronulla, who have at least demonstrated that they have all the puzzle pieces, as any other team in the league. The Panthers proved you don’t need a special fullback to win the comp. KL Iro was one of the top rated players by Stats Drop stats last year. More of that and a bit more out of the other protagonists and sure, why not?

A content warning

A few years ago, I used a metaphor that involved PVL’s urine. Maybe it was Phil Gould’s? I cannot for the life of me find what I wrote or remember the context, other than it was likely included in an overly incendiary post about the direction of the NRL.

From time to time, a piece of feedback from the general public makes its way to my eyes. In this case, I clearly remember someone was quite aggrieved at the disgusting metaphor I had deployed, presumably not realising that disgust was the emotion I was trying to provoke in the reader.

Anyway, there are recurring themes of masturbation in this week’s newsletter. It is not my fault that there are at least two (2) reasons to refer to it. Please do not let this disgraceful writing on my part discourage you from subscribing.

Please clap.

Around the grounds

World Club Challenge - Hull KR 30 defeated Broncos 24.

“I’ve been reading a lot more and from that you learn a few things – cutting out bad habits. I don’t mind talking about it because it’s definitely an issue, not just for myself but throughout the world.

“I changed a few things about my diet and stopped watching porn. Honestly, if any man or woman feels like they have a problem with it, just stop for a month or two and come back to me and tell me it hasn’t made a difference. It’s definitely made a difference in my life.

“It wasn’t making me feel better so why was I doing it? I just stopped. I haven’t watched porn in about two years. It’s given me more energy.”

That’s Hull KR winger, Joe Burgess. What are you doing losing to no-fap volcels? This guy probably thinks Andrew Tate has some good points. Having said that, I wholeheartedly encourage England to make not watching porn and not jerking off heaps the strategic cornerstone of their World Cup campaign. You know, once they hire a coach. Perhaps the candidates’ policy on consumption of pornography can form part of the hiring criteria.

As noted in the Pony Picayune, the Broncos beat Hull KR by 400 metres with two minutes less ball but lost because Adam Reynolds coudn’t make three conversions and/or the Broncos let in some poor tries. There are plenty of excuses - cold, jet lag, rust, Cory Paix is anthromorphic constipation - the Broncos still lost to the most important part of the boat.

Super League round 2. Jacob Alick-Wiencke led a poor defensive showing from Leigh on the way to a narrow defeat at St Helens. York City came back to earth with a thud, crushed by Brodie Croft’s Leeds. Maika Sivo got the chants at Headingley as he physically demolished his opposite number. Odsal’s first Super League game in 12 years saw Bradford roll through a disinterested Catalan, racking up a slew of penalty goals along the way. Even getting two wins, and there’s a huge amount of season to go, is a huge result for the resurrected club. Les Dracs’ Sol Faataape pounced on a loose ball for a try and forced an error for a second by future Bear Toby Sexton. Fellow promotees Toulouse outclassed Castleford at home. Wigan were up by 18 after 20 minutes en route to a battering of Hull FC and the commentators were giving the Airlie Birds no chance of a comeback on the second half kick-off. Still want Junior Nsemba to matriculate to the NRL sooner rather than later. Huddersfield’s Sam Halsall had some great moments in an otherwise sloppy affair, as the Giants made a late comeback against Wakefield Trinity. I feel bad every time I see Tyson Smoothy.

The money is not a mirage but money is still fake

We were nearly done talking about the administration, for a while at least, so we could focus on footy. We were so close to being free but then the Controlling Body published their annual report. As is TMO annual tradition, let’s judge the degree of optical illusion around the financials.

In 2024, the Controlling Body seemingly only made money because it slashed costs, passing off work that is no longer being done as sensible economic management. This seemed like a mirage. The following year’s report saw some, but not all, funding restored while maintaining the same profitability, which seemed like not so much of a mirage. While some context makes the financial results less extraordinary, it is harder and harder to deny the financial health of the NRL.

Now, the NRL is directly funding a club in Perth, which I’ve wanted them to do for ages, and there’s still plenty of money, and plenty more coming in the next broadcast deal, so… what am I complaining about again?

The strikingly consistent way line-goes-up suggests the organisation and the accounting are run to the spreadsheet and not to purpose. Philosophically, you can take that as you will.

Line items for development and community and welfare are down, slightly. The investment properties lost half a million in reported value, down from $21.7m to $21.2m (-2.5%) with another $14 million in “investment servicing” costs. Administration costs are slightly up.

Far more importantly to people who matter, there’s a bigger net operating result and a bigger line item for revenue and a bigger line item for club and player distributions.

One of the recurring themes of this newsletter is that V’Landys and Abdo bought off the clubs with ever increasing distributions. While that is true, the rate at which the distributions are growing is slower, on a non-compounding annual basis, than under Smith or Greenberg. The club distribution line item increased 88% in four years under Smith (22% pa) and 28% in four years under Greenberg (7.2% pa), while Abdo has delivered 41% over six (6.8% pa). Some of that is covid, some of that is the timing of TV deals, some of that is the extra mouth to feed in the shape of the Dolphins and some of that is accounting but it is interesting to note.

Is the NRL any better off than we would be under Greenberg? Maybe, maybe not. Abdo and co’s primary advantage in the historical assessment is that we don’t have to speculate how they would have performed. It seems that the rugby league elite decided that they didn’t like Greenberg and worked back from that conclusion, rather than looking at the facts. Again, take that as you will.

Should the Controlling Body be making a “profit”? Probably not a significant one. On the other hand, what are they going to do with all this cash?

Should the NRL clubs be the only rugby league beneficiaries of the rivers of gold minted by Abdo and V’Landys? No. Is there a bunch of stuff that the Controlling Body could do instead of buying hotels that immediately decrease in value? Yes. Should there be more transparency and accountability around the finances? Obviously.

Does anyone care? Viewership has doubled over the last decade and change and this is the guiding principle of the administration:

The 2025 season had the highest-ever live ball-in play percentage and record breaking ball-in-play time, with fans enjoying more action per minute than any previous season.

So no, it seems not. Two simplistic market truisms stick in the mind:

  1. The ultimate signal of the end of a bubble is when all the bears have become bulls

  2. The market can also stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent

Where’s the Polymarket for the NRL’s next TV deal? The line could be as high as $7 billion and I’m still taking the over. It is time to be bullish.

Intermission

Speaking of self-love…

My pearls! Where are my pearls?! I have no understanding of why he would make such a bizarre gesture.

Between this and Cleary’s ice in his veins, I propose a moratorium on Australians making any kind of hand gesture in the lead-up, during or immediately following the World Club Challenge. How about you try catching the ball, you pair of wankers?

Sunshine State-wide

We’re getting closer:

Queensland’s four NRL clubs could field teams in the state’s Hostplus Cup competition if a new investigation finds it will boost the game.

This masthead understand the four clubs - the Broncos, the Titans, the Dolphins and the Cowboys - met earlier this month to discuss the matter.

The change could happen as soon as next season though time is running short for that to happen.

There’s no real new information and some confused reporting:

The Dolphins effectively have a footprint in the Cup as they are an off-shoot of the Redcliffe Dolphins, but if they field a designated Dolphins NRL reserve grade team their Hostplus Cup would change shape and likely become much younger and stacked with future NRL prospects.

It is understood the Cowboys and Dolphins strongly support the concept of NRL reserve grade teams in Hostplus Cup, the Titans have an open mind on the discussion while strongly preserving their links with their feeder clubs, while the Broncos are less passionate about it.

Are the Dolphins really considering ditching Redcliffe altogether? Surely they aren’t proposing to run The Dolphins and the Redcliffe Dolphins in the same comp?

The changing nature of QCup is such that my opposition to this is less than it was 12 months ago but I still think this will suck. There aren’t enough players to have a decent 18-team Queensland Cup on top of a 19-team NRL, 14-team Super League and whatever the NSWRL cooks up. There’s no reason - commercial or cultural - any of the QCup teams should have to take a step down in the hierarchy to make way for NRL reserves teams.

One of the fallacies of fielding NRL reserve grade sides in second tier competitions is they will dominate the competition.

History insists that district teams playing with the singular focus of winning the title can often be stronger than those filled with reserve grade NRL players whose career ambitions lie in the higher grade.

In 2021, Norths won the grand final with a squad of 17 players who had all been signed by the Devils that year, beating a Wynnum-Manly team in the grand final which featured Selwyn Cobbo, Jesse Arthars, TC Robati and Richie Kennar.

Well, based on that single datapoint, I’m sold.

Hotseat

To pick up where we left off last year, let’s consider the current risk levels:

🔥🔥🔥 Seibold

🔥🔥🔥 Payten

🔥🔥 Flanagan

🔥🔥 Marshall

🔥 Fitzgibbon

🔥 Ciraldo

🔥 Webster

Seibold and Payten are ordinary bad seasons away from losing their jobs, while Flanagan and Marshall are very bad seasons away from being sacked. Fitzgibbon, Ciraldo and Webster are coaches of notionally good teams that have to continue to deliver. They are not candidates for sackings this year but a poor season puts them on the block for next year. If the remaining five (Woolf, Maguire, Hannay, Holbrook and Ryles) avoid a historically bad season, they should remain intact but I guarantee that someone will blow it. Then there’s those who are never, ever going to get a fire emoji: Bellamy, Bennett, Stuart, Robinson (most marginal of these five) and Cleary.

Let’s set this year’s line at 3.5 sackings. Years where there are one or two sackings, as in 2025, are followed by years where there are at least four, so I am taking the over, although I cannot reliably say who I think the four will be, other than early bets on Payten and Seibold.

Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer

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Watch guide

Watch the games in Vegas, I guess? I haven’t seen PVL grovelling for Trump’s attendance yet but there’s still time. The Cowboys are playing the Knights, which is just a dreck way to kick off the season. Bulldogs against the Dragons is not much better. Maybe let’s see if Toulouse can go 3-for-3 against Bradford.

The watch guide will return next week.

Stats pop

I am working on some Super League stuff. There are no further updates at this time.

“Shouldn’t you be doing some NRL advanc-”

No. Further. Updates. At this time.

Actually, I may do a quasi-deep dive in a Stats Drop to come next week or the week after. Last year’s deep dive was both ugly (my fault) and didn’t deliver the kind of views to justify the time invested into making it ugly - I acknowledge that those things may be related - so have held off on it this season, hence the vibes-based analysis up front.

Read this

Notes

1

Although I find this level of parity somewhat uninteresting because the individual games are devoid of informational content. The games become coin flips. For the season to have a character, there still needs to be blockbusters or big upsets every month or so, and for there to be blockbusters and upsets, you need well established teams that are winning much more often than they lose.

2

Worth noting that the Raiders have outperformed their Pythag by +11.1 wins over the last four seasons, which is the highest of any four year stretch in the NRL era. The next best are the 99-02 Bulldogs (+8.8). A lesser mind might think this means Ricky’s beaten the system or this run cancels out the -6 stint from 2015 to 2018. Sounder minds know that mean reversion isn’t quite as reliable as gravity but it’s pretty close.

3

This sets the stage for an international women’s draft to fill the January void. Players with multiple loyalties go into a big pool. Worse nations get more/better picks to improve their rosters by selecting eligible players for the year before Aus/NZ/Eng. Rosters reset each season and there’s no draft in World Cup years.

I guess you then reintroduce a tiered system for nations that participate in the draft (Samoa, Tonga, France, Fiji, PNG, Cook Is, Ireland, Wales) and those that don’t (Netherlands, Canada, etc). Nigeria? Greece? Maybe there’s a volume of picks that get issued depending on schedule (e.g. more picks if you are expected to play Australia, fewer if you are in Euro C/MEA).

]]><![CDATA[PREVIEW: 2026]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026-fd0https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026-fd0Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:19:14 GMT

Let’s check the stats.

Huh. Interesting.

“Defending premiers.” Just roll the words around for a bit because you’ll be hearing it a lot. Since the last time that tag applied to the Brisbane Broncos, kids have been born and are now old enough to drink, drive and vote. As we are all very well aware, the right to say that about your team does not come along every year. It is precious and should be relished.

Being defending premiers also sucks a lot of the jepoardy out of the coming season. Perhaps I am just speaking for myself, but whether the Broncos win the 2026 grand final or not is not a major concern. We survived 19 years without a title, so expecting two in two years just seems greedy. I’m still savouring the last one.

Undoubtedly, that attitude will wash away with kickoff and a disappointing season would still be a disappointing season and a premiership is still a premiership. Nonetheless, this nonchalance has been the prevailing sentiment of my offseason. Win or lose in 2026, the Broncos still won the 2025 premiership.1

I also refuse to fall into the brainrot that it only “matters” if there’s a dynasty. The Bulldogs fell foul of that last year, wanting to be Penrith instead of just winning what was in front of them. The Blues cannot celebrate a single series victory because 8-in-a-row hangs over them. One is great, and it’s one more than 16 other clubs won last year.

Before the Roosters’ back-to-back in 2018 and 2019, it seemed impossible to defend the premiership. Penrith showed that it is possible but that does not make it easy nor inevitable. The 2021 and 2023 grand finals nearly slipped through their grasp and had that happened, we’d view their run differently. Win now, win often and the rest takes care of itself. Lacking Habsburg jaw, I could not care less about dynastic machinations.2

That nonchalance was tested by the World Club Challenge, in which a team of plumbers, hacks and NRL wash-outs playing in red jerseys defeated the Broncos, 30-24. The stats show what the eye saw, which was the Broncos rolling easily downfield and completely failing to execute.3 If Adam Reynolds goes five-for-five, instead of two-for-five, it’s at least level.

What the stats and eye missed was the hand of god on the ball for Tyrone May’s first try assist. In the absence of divine intervention, that would have been a knock-on or Billy Slater would have to have been involved. Quite what Hull did to deserve miraculous treatment, I can only speculate, but I can also speculate why Canberra, Penrith and Melbourne didn’t get likewise beneficence. Mere mortals can only do so much.

With jet lag and off-season rust shaken off, the Broncos are still likely to be good. How they respond to the premiership will decide how the next 12 months unfolds. Here are some scenarios:

  1. The team is a lot more settled and confident and wins most weeks

  2. The team is a lot less hungry and can be more of a coin flip

  3. Unable to handle the defending premier tag, losing to Hull KR and/or the slow disintegration of the roster, the team is bad

I’d rather they won than not, but I am also not expecting them to run it back.

What then is there to play for? Here are some things I am looking for:

  • Patrick Carrigan to maintain his production, if not find another, higher gear

  • Billy Walters’ heroic return in round 20 (yes, that late) to rid us of Cory Paix styming the offence

  • Josiah Karapani establishing a place in the team so that people remember he exists

  • Deine Mariner to grow a second brain cell (I have given hope of Jordan Riki doing likewise and it’s not looking great for Brendan Piakura)

  • Jaiydn Hunt to be moved on

  • Adam Reynolds and Ben Hunt have a fun time

  • Is Aublix Tawha anything?

I don’t know when the sense Brisbane have to start building towards a future that involves another premiership will kick in but we’ll worry about that when we get there.

“Defending premiers.”

Thank you for taking the time to share the very rare experience of supporting a premiership winner

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Haas

Payne, soon to be known as Hakeem, Haas is leaving Brisbane for South Sydney in 2027:

“The main factor for me was family. Nothing else to be honest. I felt that being a leader for my family is probably the best move for us to have a change and a fresh new start.

“I’ve got lots of support down there as well with my family and my agent as well, he’s down there, he’s like a second dad to myself and I need those kind of people around me especially now for my siblings and my daughter and for my son as well.

“So, I feel like I’m being a leader, I had to lead and make that decision and it was not just myself but my partner as well.

We at the Pony Picayune wish Mr Haas all the best in his future endeavours.

It is far from desirable and extremely unfortunate to lose one of the game’s best players but, between his open flirting with the market in the past, changing personal priorities and the nature of the salary cap, this probably should have been more front of mind for more fans, including here at the Pony Picayune. I got so distracted by how fake R360 was that I didn’t clock that he might leave for another NRL club. With time, the shock will fade and we’ll have moved on.

The bigger shock is not that Haas is leaving but rather that the media were completely in the dark on the signing. It was very funny watching them scramble to make up post-facto fantasies to explain what happened, much of it contradictory, when it was plain to see that they had no idea. It turns out if the agents, players and clubs all shut up, the journalists are incapable of delivering any news.

This led to some weak attempts at criticism from spurned reporters trying to make it about them, as a means of passing the time until they board the plane for Vegas. It’s not really clear to me what the expectation is, especially given no one seemed to know this was happening, or how the club could have kept him if all he wanted was to leave. Locking him up in the dungeon under Red Hill wouldn’t have worked. Haas would snap anchor chains.

Reynolds and Pezet

In a significantly less surprising turn of events, Adam Reynolds is retiring:

Brisbane Broncos Club Captain Adam Reynolds has confirmed he will retire at the end of the 2026 NRL season.

Reynolds joined the Club in 2022 and was appointed captain in his first year at Red Hill.

Since arriving in Brisbane, the halfback has played 78-games, including 22-games in the 2025 premiership winning campaign where he scored four tries, kicked 81 conversions and had 17 try assists.

The old man, who is younger than me by three years, is ready to move on to the next phase of his life. Reynolds can claim a large amount of responsibility for the club getting back on its feet after the Seibold era, for which we thank him.

We at the Pony Picayune wish Mr Reynolds all the best in his future endeavours (coaching at the Broncos as a salary cap dodge).

The man he will likely be working closely with signed on for three years earlier in the off season:

The Brisbane Broncos have signed exciting young playmaker Jonah Pezet on a three-year deal, beginning in the 2027 season.

The talented 22-year-old has shown enormous promise since making his NRL debut for the Melbourne Storm in 2023, going on to make 18 first grade appearances across two seasons.

After overcoming an ACL knee injury in 2024, Pezet worked his way back to the NRL through consistent performances in the Hostplus Cup, earning praise for his resilience and maturity.

I have held some quiet reservations about Pezet: I didn’t think he looked all that spectacular in Cup in 2023, maybe a touch slow, but that was a while ago now and he did win that grand final. His performance for the Storm during the finals allayed that somewhat. Pezet will spend the next season at Parramatta learning what a terrible club looks like before he feels the relief of returning to a good club.

There’s the rub. Even if the premiership wasn’t a clue, the Broncos were able to go on to a market desperate for playmakers and get the hottest one without breaking a sweat.

We at the Pony Picayune welcome Mr Pezet when he finally gets here. We’re so back.

New logo

This isn’t the lede I would’ve gone with:

The Brisbane Broncos have charged into a bold new era, transforming Brisbane with s [sic, I probably would have corrected this too] surge of maroon and gold pride that stretched from Red Hill to Roma, and even to the very first babies born in the city today.

The Broncos have a premiership and a new logo and accosted some new, presumably extremely confused, parents with Broncos swag. I didn’t have strong feelings about the old logo and I don’t have particularly strong feelings about the new one. It’ll take a little getting used to but that’s fine. I wrote about it in June and I see no need to revise my thesis that it looks like a French apparel range that you’ve never heard of but sells 45% of all tracksuits in Romania.

The Broncos were there at the end and so are you…

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Brigginshaw retires

We’ll talk more about the NRLW team, probably in largely similar terms to the men’s team, later in the year but Ali Brigginshaw has finally called time at the end of 2026:

The enormity of the season ahead is not lost on Brigginshaw.

Her one-year contract extension will mark the final chapter of a decorated career before retirement at the end of 2026.

“My biggest thing was making sure the Broncos were in a great place before I hung up the boots,” she said

Brigginshaw will not play Origin this year but goes out as one of the greatest players of all time.

We at the Pony Picayune wish Ms Brigginshaw all the best in her future endeavours.

What’s that? We’ve already signed Jesse Southwell to replace her? What a club.

Notes

1

If this seems bizarre, perhaps your club could try winning and you see how it fits.

2

Sort of.

3

Penrith Panthers: well, well, well, it’s not so easy to not suck shit isn’t it?

]]><![CDATA[Tell it to the Chinese, Pete]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/tell-it-to-the-chinese-petehttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/tell-it-to-the-chinese-peteTue, 17 Feb 2026 23:42:11 GMTWelcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.

The lack of ball knowing will continue until ratings drop

From our overlords:

The Australian Rugby League Commission (ARLC) today announced the modernisation of State of Origin international eligibility rules to reflect the continued growth and global strength of Rugby League.

Under the updated rules, any player who meets the existing State of Origin eligibility criteria will be able to play State of Origin, regardless of the nation they represent in international fixtures.

The change is that players who represent New Zealand and England are still Origin eligible, provided they meet the existing eligibility framework (born in one of the states, resided in a state since 13 or dad played Origin). I suppose the “modernisation” claimed by the Controlling Body is finally severing the link between Kangaroos selection, which is now an exclusively end of year event, and State of Origin selection, which is played mid-season.

On the face of it, and contrary to the initial understanding of most of the rugby league elite, the change makes little difference. Mulitalo and Farnworth are no more eligible for Queensland than they were last week. There are a handful of players - Kalyn Ponga, AJ Brimson, Victor Radley - who might be impacted by this. Brimson is a marginal Maroons figure, likely only called up during a significant injury crisis. It is not clear to me that Ponga is necessarily a better fit for the Kiwis than Kini. Radley is stuck behind at least two or three Blues and rapidly running out of career runway. Adding Fonua-Blake to the Blues lineup just gives a new face a chance to piss their pants in front of the nation.

Rationally, this change in isolation is relatively unimportant (although it does raise the important question of “why bother?”). Along with the 2027 Origin game to be held in Auckland, State of Origin may be the NRL’s vanguard for a conquest of New Zealand, in line with last week’s discussion of V’Lando-Leninist Thought.

While watching the All-Stars games in Hamilton, I was struck that New Zealand has the same population as Queensland and, to an order of magnitude, approximately the same level of interest in rugby when combined across league and union. If Queensland can support four or five NRL franchises, once the ghosts of rugby union have been cleared from Aotearoa by the spear tip of Origin, the brute commercial force of the NRL and the coup de grace of meaningful international representation (pending WIP), then NZ2 is setting one’s sights too low and perhaps we should be thinking, in the longer term, about NZ3, NZ4 and even NZ5.

I recognise most of this for what it is: fantasy. Imagine a Commission that could strategise! In the meantime, this means quite a lot but only in irrational ways. Crucially, we’ve now set a precedent where the catastrophic lack of ball knowing of Peter V’Landys is the basis of tinkering with eligibility for Origin, the NRL’s golden goose. I am not confident that will go well but since when does that matter?

To briefly commune with my inner boomer, I also say that attitude matters. Rueben Cotter has it, David Fifita might not and irrespective of what I think about the relative merits of those players, Billy Slater has earned the right to do whatever he likes for the next couple of series. If he decides it matters, then it does and so if your reason for not previously playing for Queensland is that you wanted to play for New Zealand or England, I think that speaks to a deeper attitude that is at odds with being a Maroon.

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Often, it is an acerbic, irony drenched, moderately cynical perspective from a middle aged white collar man, which the internet has plenty of I suppose, but it is still different enough from the fellatory house voice at the Courier Mail that subscribing is worth your time. Even with the typos.

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Around the grounds

I managed to keep up with Super League in 2024 but didn’t so well in 2025. I doubt I will watch many full games in 2026 - so temper expectations for analysis accordingly - but will try keep an eye on highlights (which are less than ideal, PVL should be pressuring Kayo to do Minis for every game) to see how the French clubs go, to see which derelict west Yorkshire club is going to get relegated for Lockyer’s Broncos and to see if Bevan French and Jai Field are still considered the bar, as we run into the World Cup. With that in mind:

Super League round 1. Big week of remembering some guys and also upsets, with St Helens and Leeds looking particularly underdone. Newly promoted York surprised defending champions, Hull KR, with a single point win in the opening game of the season. The match equalizing try for the Knights was scored by former Seagull/Falcon, Scott Galleano, who the commentators clearly did not recognise, and the decisive field goal slotted by former Cutter, Ata Hingano. Former Tiger, Sol Faataape, is part of a host of former QCup guys at Catalans and scored on debut. César Rougé put three kicks onto the woodwork and missed a fourth for Olympique (no sighting of former Falcon and Italian stallion, Luke Polselli), making their win over Wakefield - greeted by a deafening silence at Belle Vue - much closer on the scoreboard than perhaps it should have been. Forgot Kyle Feldt was at Saints.

Indigenous 20 defeated Maori 14 (W). It took a little while to get going and the unidirectional wind had a heavy hand in making this a game of two halves. Defence was optional, getting close enough to the line meant that players could barge over through the wing/centre defenders, especially on the left side of the offence. Some nice moments of attacking skill on display; refer Intermission. We won’t see any of these players again until Origin in another 10 weeks.

Indigenous 16 drew Maori 16 (M). The first quarter suggested a points-fest but then the struggle devolved into a wrestling match. Not grit and grind, just back and forth with no one getting inside the 10. As was the case in the other game, getting close to the line meant scoring but getting there was challenging. Not the best or worst version of these games we’ve seen and I thought the skill level was pretty good considering it's T-2 weeks to season start. The drawn result is somewhat of an anti-climax, largely brought about by either side’s inability to set for a field goal. The QCup ass-looking Indigenous team held up well.

JESTERMAXXING Peter V'Landys BRUTALLY FRAMEMOGS Rugby Australia, causing Phil Waugh a NEAR FATAL CORTISOL SPIKE

The Controlling Body’s annual report is just around the corner, which means we are treated to a series of self-congratulatory articles in advance, touting the headline numbers so that no one bothers with the detail later:

Code Sports understands the NRL’s surplus will rise from $62.3 million last year to around $65m this year.

Revenue will increase from $744m to north of $800m, up from preliminary forecasts in October of around $770m.

In another financial coup, the NRL’s net assets have boomed to more than $390m, up from $322.3m, with V’landys outlining the ARLC’s plan to beef-up their property portfolio.

“We have recorded another record profit. This is the fifth year in a row we have recorded a surplus, which is a brilliant result for the game,” he said.

“It’s a record profit, but more importantly … in 2019, players were getting $318 million (in payments), currently they are getting $560 million.

We’ll probably have more to go on next week but any praise will be delivered through gritted teeth. Line does indeed keep going up.

Jestermaxxer-in-chief, Peter V’Landys, also dropped one of his trademark zingers:

The ARLC boss also blasted suggestions Rugby Australia is an increasing threat to the NRL, quipping: “I look forward to Wayne Bennett playing for the Wallabies at the World Cup … and Elvis Presley passing the ball to him.”

It was so funny that Badel repeated the quip later in the same article. In a separate piece about the return of AFL Origin, which I will not linking to because its written by that huge loser, The Mole, coming via Reddit:

“They followed our lead during COVID and played two weeks after us,” [PVL] told Wide World of Sports after the AFL clash.

“This was months earlier than they planned.

“They copied Magic Round, now State of Origin. I’m surprised they are not in Vegas yet.

“No matter what they do rugby league is the greatest game of all.”

Tell it to the Chinese, Pete. Wait until Peter the Great the Short learns who came up with State of Origin. He’s going to ruin his oversized, cheaply made pants.

For what it’s worth, AFL Origin between Victoria and WA averaged 843k on TV, which is the kind of numbers the NRL would kill every single person reading this for the All-Stars to put up. To that point, this weekend’s men’s All-stars match rated 389k. The huge demand from southern state governments to host and have their state take part should ensure its survival and conceptually beats the hell out of AFLX.

Does that mean PVL changed the Origin eligibility rules to keep the spotlight on the NRL? If so, we’re in great hands.

Intermission

Clydesdales secure their existing home

Sorry, missed this:

The club has played all its home games at Toowoomba Sports Ground under a lease deal with the state government.

The new deal would see the Clydesdales move their offices and staff to TSG as well as training for juniors and seniors.

Looks like the Clydesdales made an offer to the Queensland government to effectively buy Clive Berghofer? The reporting is not clear on the nature of the deal, just that the Clydesdales would use their current home ground as a more official base for the club, taking over offices and moving junior and senior training to TSG. Good for them.

As always, this is an opportunity to read the last paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Clive Berghofer Stadium and embrace some local history.

Stats pop

For the sickos, I have added Disappointment tables to each of the competition pages on The Almanac. This charts the gap between pre-season expectations (as determined by class Elo rating) and actual wins.

A reminder that if you would like some cheap publicity for your company, you can easily buy the naming rights to some Nickelware. Prices start at, what, like $20? $10? Make me an offer. If you’re a brewery, then the price is one (1) 24-can case delivered to my home.

Notes

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Beer corner

BrewDog, owner of a large brewery/bar at Murrarie (built with state government assistance) and another large bar in the Valley, is looking decidedly sick. The Scottish brewer, who also has the naming rights to St Helens’ stadium in England (taking over from vape purveyors, Totally Wicked), is effectively in administration. Consecutive years of big losses will do that.

Despite having been to the bars in Brisbane, Brussells and somewhere else I’m forgetting, and BrewDog playing a background role in how I met my wife, I don’t have a great deal of fondness for them. BrewDog’s beers were never that interesting and the company’s marketing has always rubbed people the wrong way. They took on private equity as early as 2009, created a behemoth, and it ended as all of these investment trajectories seem to, with people losing their jobs.

One aspect I had forgotten was the Equity for Punks scheme, which was basically a glorified customer loyalty program with some wildly overpriced equity built-in. I wrote about how it smelled like a scam in 2013, nearly 210,000 investors ago. It seems it did become possible to trade the shares, and perhaps some people made money that way, but most will lose their money entirely if things continue along this path.

Superficial amateur political analysis

When I found out Annastacia Palaszczuk had resigned as Labor leader, and so was no longer Premier of Queensland, three months after the fact, I realised doing a reasonable job of this newsletter would unfortunately require a working knowledge of Queensland and Australian politics. Palasczuk didn’t strike me as a huge sports person but at least understood the fundamental appeal of rugby league in her state, moreso and perhaps more authentically than someone like Scott Morrison. Hypothetically, if Steven Miles had hated rugby league (this does not appear to be the case or is it?) and was in any way electable, would there still be a Magic Round?

Close readers with good memories may remember an essay after the federal election that has held up well enough. I gave you some confused spluttering when the Coalition did their first split in May last year and in July, we also took a look at which rugby league seats in England might flip to Reform contrasted with the RFL coup that was taking place at the time, and seems to have been mostly successful. These events have small degrees of influence on the two main priorities of this newsletter - Queensland, rugby league - but you never know when you’ll need to know this stuff to understand what’s going on.

Case in point. Over the last five to ten years, it has struck me as strange that Australia could have the character and history it has while simultaneously rejecting the extreme right wing politics that seemed to be infecting every other democracy. One part of that might be that Australia was patient zero and just didn’t notice. For example, our mandatory detention policy and attempts to outsource it seem to be increasingly popular ideas in Europe. However, the other, much larger, part is that we were just late to the party.

The most recent Coalition split has almost fatally undermined the Nationals’ credibility. Their voters’ politics don’t seem to be changing but they have decided that they can no longer expect the National Party to represent their views and are defecting in polling to One Nation. This follows the pattern we spoke about in July where the base of the useless Tories seems to be migrating to Reform. Unlike the UK, which has a first past the post voting system that loudly amplifies small changes in sentiment, this does not mean that One Nation are at any risk of forming government as Reform may well do in the next British general election, but One Nation may win lower house seats at the expense of the Nationals. Antony Green lists 12 of the 25 most at-risk seats as being in Queensland, as we seem to be the only state left in Australia that thought the LNP were worth voting for.

My inference is that the LNP’s coalition of crackpots, farmers, historical-farmers-turned-suburbanites, urbanites that think the LNP is a totem for sensible governance and people who hate the poor is falling apart. This has been a long time coming. The latter groups are going to Labor or independents. The former are going to ONP. The farmers aren’t enough of a constituency by themselves in 2026 to support a political party without significant gerrymandering in their favour but probably won’t have much issue going to ONP either.

Whether One Nation has the juice remains to be seen. The party was an irrelevance without Pauline Hanson and, I hesitate to use the word, a “charismatic” leader seems to be a common and necessary feature of these right wing insurgencies. The problem is that Hanson’s existence is offensive to a majority of Australia and I also refuse to believe that Barnaby Joyce has any broad appeal. They’re not much with her and even less without.

The dumping of lame duck Sussan Ley this week signals the Libs and Nats attempting to make a move to win back voters flirting with ONP before it becomes too late. Surely opposition to net zero, a concept a large part of the voting public has a firm grasp on, is where the voters are. The sarcasm is warranted because we haven’t seen this strategy work overseas, as once voters are turned off the incumbent conservative options, they like to see where the more radical options take them (disaster), but maybe this time, it’ll work for them.

Does any of this matter or is it all bad political theatre? I think mostly the latter. This is not a conservative newsletter, so I don’t care if that side of politics destroys itself in internicene warfare and re-emerges even more virulently racist and incompetent than before. You just don’t vote for them. However, the potential for more three-way contests in marginal seats will throw up less expected political outcomes, which has the same tone and tenor as political instability, even if it is democracy functioning as expected.

Some content

No comment. Fine, ok, sorry I posted that. Apropos of the earlier sub-headline:

]]><![CDATA[PREVIEW: 2026]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:23:31 GMT

Welcome to the Phin Review

This is a regular, but not necessarily frequent, newsletter about the Dolphins of Redcliffe. The Phin Review will be the same format as the Pony Picayune and Bovine Bulletin as one of the few (only?) dedicated, written things about the Dolphins that isn’t occasional slop turned out by the major newspapers. Subscribers will receive a copy of The Phin every six weeks, rotating between the other club newsletters. I hope you enjoy it or, at least, find it informative.

As a reminder, you can adjust your subscription settings to opt in or out of receving the club newsletters and/or Stats Drop. Please do not unsubscribe altogether but I can’t really stop you if that’s what you want to do.

If you made a mistake, here’s the box to fix it:

If nothing else than your own sake and sanity, what you don’t want to do is start the first new NRL club in 16 years and end up just like the last new NRL club. That leaves the Dolphins with a singular goal for 2026: make the finals.

Let’s pop over to The Almanac and consult the all-time NRL luck table.

In three seasons, the Dolphins have underperformed their Pythagorean expectation by a total of four wins. If they had played to anywhere near the level of talent suggested by their ability to score points, the Dolphins would have been in the running for a finals spot in 2024 and would have replaced the Roosters in the post-season of 2025. In fact, the miss in 2025 is in the top decile of biggest misses in NRL history.

It is time to right that.

As a club, the Dolphins are past the cliched honeymoon phase. Queensland has the dual defending premiers in the most populous corner and a massive northern swathe occupied by the most parochial and offline fanbase. The Dolphins find themselves squeezed in-between, on the northern suburban edge of Brisbane and, notionally at least, up through Capricornia. They can choose to be overwhelmed or they can choose to plant a flag.

It is not that a failure would pose an existential crisis. The Dolphins will return next year and the year after that and the year after that again. It does become difficult to convince fans to not just remain loyal but grow in number without some glimmer to offer them. Showing those fans you’re not the Northern Titans or the Far Northern Knights - and once applied, shaking those tags will take decades - starts with delivering on the promises of the performances of the last two years.

Putting aside consistently atrocious performances against wobbegongs like Newcastle, the Dolphins have had three problems. The first is that they always seem a forward short of rolling over the top of their opposition. Matches that are potentially close become blowouts as the Phins are unable to control the endgame. The return of Tom Flegler, and another pre-season into Tom Gilbert, should right that, provided the rotten injury luck (or, perhaps, strength and conditioning incompetence) that has afflicted the club since mid-2023 does not return.

The second is that they have been consistently underdelivered defensively. The Dolphins have never finished in the top half of the league in points conceded. I do not have solutions for this, other than they have to get better. Every try conceded by the Dolphins seems to be accompanied by confused Jamayne Isaako face or exasperated Kodi Nikorima face. Something is not clicking. Giving up 20 points a game instead of 24 dramatically alters the winning percentages.

The third is that while the Dolphins have generally had a high octane offence, which has helped conceal the defensive lapses, it took five weeks and an opposed session against the Titans to get that offence moving last year. In part, I attribute this to Katoa’s idiosyncratic tempo of play. While it fools opposition players consistently, those who can’t get into a groove played at 11:9 and are used to a more pedestrian 4:4 time, it also has a similar effect on unfamiliar teammates. Once that’s bedded down, they can all play hot ass jazz.

The Phins’ strengths are underreported. They have a very good, possibly excellent, backline. Katoa went from concerns about the pace of his development to being compared to Cam Smith in about eight weeks. Kodi Nikorima remains serviceable and has Brad Schneider as first drop. Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow, something of a bespoke fullback for this offence, won an Origin series at the position. Jack Bostock will return from injury and join Jamayne Isaako in scoring tries. Selwyn Cobbo comes in, looking ready to deliver some astonishing highlights in between some exasperating lowlights for six weeks, after which there will be notable absenteeism. Herbie Farnworth needs to learn to pass but otherwise, should be excellent again. Mercurial but talismanic Jake Averillo was going to Super League but hasn't? Good, I didn’t think they should be shipping him out if the alternative is Max Feagai or Tevita Naufahu (the latter may prove useful down the track). The Phins also get back Trai Fuller, probably the best backup fullback in the league.

The fowards have been a weakness. While trial try scoring Tom Flegler bolsters that, the importance of no longer relying directly on geriatric Bromwiches and effort merchants like Ray Stone and Mark Nicholls cannot be overstated. One hopes there will also be less reliance on starting Felise Kaufusi and one shudders to think about the hairstyle that will be debuted in round 1. Molo, Saifiti, Lemuelu, Finefeuiaki, Plath, Flegler and Gilbert is enough of a rotation to put the opposition on their ass. Even after losing Aublix Tawha to the Broncos and losing Oryn Keeley to the Storm next year, Morgan Knowles has an extremely tall order getting in to the team. Provided, that is, they can all stay healthy.

In a league full of half-cooked teams, the Dolphins have a good 1-17. Their coach doesn’t seem to be brain dead. They attract relatively little attention but command huge commercial potential. The Phins are used to adversity and coping with injury crises. Luck has not been on their side, so it is due to turn. The Dolphins just need to put it altogether.

If the Phins can get over the Knights, they’ll make finals.

If the Phins get over the Broncos, look out.

The Dolphins are full of potential…

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]]><![CDATA[PREVIEW: 2026 Gold Coast Titans]]>https://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026-gold-coast-titanshttps://www.maroonobserver.com/p/preview-2026-gold-coast-titansThu, 12 Feb 2026 23:01:19 GMT

Project 2026 was a bust. We’re here now, in 2026, a time that once seemed way off in the future, and the Titans’ attempt to line everything up to make a push for the premiership under Hasler didn’t even yield a finals appearance. Gold Coast were extremely fortunate to avoid the spoon.

The Titans have a new coach, Josh Hannay, and one of their few advantages is roster flexibility. It is so flexible that, until very recently, the Titans were half a dozen players short of a top 30 squad. Fortunately, there was plenty of flotsam and Ipswich Jets-am around to plug the holes.

Reagan Campbell-Gillard, always an odd signing, lasted one (1) year of his three (3) year deal and is now captaining the London Broncos, who are not in Super League. David Fifita, who at half ass is one of the all time great Titans, is now at Redfern, looking for something a bit more stable to build on. Given the recent history of soft tissue injuries at Heffron Park, that says quite a lot about Parkwood.

Perhaps more bemusingly, Brian Kelly is now an Eel and Lofi Khan-Pereira is now a Warrior. Carter Gordon has made the rare leap from the Ipswich Jets to the Wallabies. I’m not sure anyone noticed or has considered what that means for the state of rugby union in Australia.

The Titans have used that flexibility to give the Tino deal to Jayden Campbell, which is not the worst decision for a promising playmaker in a market where you will have to compete with Perth and other has-been franchises for his services. At 25, that investment should (has to) start delivering at any minute now. Tino himself seemed to be wavering, considering the Bears, which was presumably a gambit to extract more money or security out of the Titans, which he did while giving up his ludicrous options. If he had left, the Gold Coast would have gone from a team with too much invested in the forwards to trotting out a QCup pack in the space of 18 months. Now that’s flexible.

This gives the Titans a core of Fa’asuamaleaui, Brimson, Kini, Fermor and Campbell with a new, untested coach and an anonymous cast of interchangeable characters padding out the roster. Oh and I keep forgetting this piece of news but it makes me laugh when I remember that the Titans signed Greek Brodie Croft:

The Gold Coast Titans are pleased to announce the signing of halfback Lachlan Ilias on a two-year contract, securing his services for the 2026 and 2027 NRL seasons.

We have, generously, five seasons left for the Titans to win the two premierships they set themselves as a goal as part of their interior design. There isn’t time for another rebuild and Jaimin Jolliffe already died.

I am not holding my breath.

Thank you for taking the time for our annual dive into the abject horror of Titanstown

The only way from here is up.

The Titans are a deeply strange football club. Cast your mind back to last year’s preview:

In their 2021 road map, the Titans’ stated goal was two men’s premierships by 2030… If (when) this doesn’t come off, heads have to roll, and sooner would be better than later. One of the handful of details included in the road map is the importance of accountability. Act like it.

I don’t know if turning over the roster of owners, rather than players, counts as accountability but it sure is something:

The Gold Coast Titans are entering an exciting new era, strengthening the club and delivering on its strategic ambitions, by welcoming a diverse consortium of new equity partners who are leading specialists across rugby league, media, business and entertainment…

Brett and Rebecca Frizelle, who continue as the club’s major shareholders, said the consortium represents a transformative opportunity to build a community-connected, commercially powerful NRL and NRLW club that achieves sustained success on the field.

The Kellys are out and it is unclear if they left or were pushed or both. Incoming are not five new owners but five new pairs of owners, including:

  • Matt & Trish Johns

  • Gorden Tallis & Jemma Elder

  • Hedley Thomas & Ruth Mathewson (journalist and “journalist-nurse wife”)

  • Billy & Jackie Cross (entertainment promoters, specifically Thunder from Down Under)

  • Michael and Jodie Atkins (McDonalds franchisees)

The size of the stakes have not been revealed, and I assume they are small, but it strikes me that the Frizelles are one very unlucky draw of keys out of the fishbowl - or one very bad but more conventional break-up - from this strategy being a complete disaster.

Naturally having no access to the Titans’ boardroom or communications, it is unclear what value these people will add, although some read like the kind of people you’d want on the board of your football club (e.g. former managing director of Personalised Plates Queensland, Jemma Elder) and others are Matthew Johns. If you were an optimist, or have been married for a while, perhaps you accept taking the good with the bad as a part of life. The rest of us are less sanguine about this.

It was also strange to read about the Titans’ members’ forum last December:

[N]othing was off limits for the club’s most invested fans as they asked questions across the high-performance facility, recruitment, on-field success, team selection, team song, Membership changes and more…

On the panel was co-owner Rebecca Frizelle, CEO Steve Mitchell, NRL head coach Josh Hannay, NRLW head coach Karyn Murphy and Director of Football (NRL) Scott Sattler.

Members were allowed to pre-submit questions which the group answered, before opening the floor to all Members.

Club co-owner, Rebecca Frizelle opened the night addressing the new owners that joined the club recently and the impact they can have on the organisation going forward.

I am not a Titans fan but I don’t think the team song would be in the top ten of my concerns with the way the club is operated or how it performs on the field. At least the existence of a members’ forum suggests an acknowledgement that things have to change and the dwindling membership is of existential concern.

Hannay, Murphy and Frizelle seem to have given some cliche responses to the obvious questions of how the Titans are going to get better and what the club actually stands for. Personally, I suspect a longer term plan of waiting for the Gold Coast to demographically issue the Titans with a hoard of talent that they simply cannot mess up, a la the Panthers of the early 2020s, may be the winner.

Like a hot dog eating contest whose prizes are $2000 and a corporate box to watch the Titans against the Tigers, issuing a post to confirm you’re not celebrating 20 years this year but next year —

The Gold Coast Titans will enter a significant milestone when they take the field in 2026, marking the club’s 20th season in the NRL.

While the upcoming campaign represents an important chapter in the Titans’ story, the club has confirmed that major anniversary celebrations will take place in 2027, commemorating the full 20 years since the Titans first entered the competition…

Further details on the club’s 20-year anniversary logo, events and celebrations will be announced later in the year as planning continues.

— is something no other club in the NRL would give you. Never change.

The Titans are painful but you’re pretty much at the end…

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