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.

Subscribe, share and upgrade

A true Broncos fan would subscribe to what I think is the only independent, regularly written fan content about the Brisbane Broncos.

Word of mouth from you is the easiest way for the Pony Picayune to find new subscribers and new subscribers keep the Pony Picayune in print. Share or forward this email to anyone you think is interested.

Share

Upgrading to a paid subscription is both deeply appreciated and will get you access to what’s below this line, which includes player stats, notes on the feeder clubs and a rewind to 2001.

UPGRADE TO PAID

Thank you for your support.

Read more

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

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…

…so that means you probably enjoyed this enough to share it?

Share

Word of mouth is the most effective way for The Maroon Observer to pick up new subscribers and new subscribers is what keeps the newsletter going.

Thank you for your support.

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

• Signatures: Georgia Bartlett, Amanii Misa, Lillian Yarrow, Shannon Mato (!)

• Extensions: Brianna Clark, Bree Spreadborough, Shalom Sauaso, Destiny Brill, Lauren Dam

• Departures: Hetherington (Sea Eagles), Baker (Bulldogs), Hufanga, Nuuasala, Waaka (Warriors). Oh but you won’t hear about it!

• Injuries: Brendan Piakura (back in ~4 more weeks)

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

I don’t really get writer’s block. You tap at the keyboard and get something, anything, down. Even if that first attempt sucks, you can bash the words into some shape as the idea clarifies. Not everything has to be Tolstoy, or even Tolkien. With all those years of practice and that low bar to hurdle over, I still find myself at a complete loss for words trying to process the Broncos’ premiership victories.

There are four emotions. Firstly, there’s screaming joy: the boys and girls did it, they got it done, this is a lifetime highlight for everyone1. Secondly, there’s overwhelming relief: they didn’t fuck it up, there were plenty of opportunities but they didn’t. Thirdly, there’s a hint of guilt: even though I spent most of the game calming down myself and anyone who would listen2, because I knew intellectually it was all in hand, I didn’t really believe it until it was done.

Brisbane? The Broncos? Two premierships? On top of the Lions? Oh, ye of little faith.

Finally, there’s a space where an emotion used to be: an absence of something hanging over us, even if it is very small in the grand scheme of our ordinary humdrum existence, that has been there for a long, long time. The drought is over and we don’t have to worry about it anymore. After spending the preceding 24 hours with the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that precedes any two hours of high octane stress, it is no longer my problem. I thought I would cry at full time and I didn’t3. It is done. The rollercoaster is at its terminus. The holiday is over and we’ve come home. It dissipated in an instant. Why were we ever worried?

At the risk of making the season review of the single greatest year of Brisbane Broncos football all about me, the protagonist of the universe, I suppose I could have worked overtime to show the parallel lines of the history of the city of Brisbane and that of the Broncos. You can pick a starting point at 1988, at 2006, at 2011, at 2015, at 2020 or at 2023 and trace an arc to around 8.30pm on Sunday, 5 October 2025. Plenty of the post-match coverage did exactly that, so I won’t belabour the point.

Plenty more tore the game down to its individual atoms and then rebuilt a narrative from there. The women bashed the absolute shit out of the Roosters. Amazing what happens when you don’t spot the opposition 18 points in the first 12 minutes. Lauren Dam was right about getting off the bus earlier. The men played with a resilience I haven’t seen in decades, with efforts normally reserved for Origin. Crazy what happens when that outrageous confidence is tempered and channelled. Keep booing Ezra, it only makes him stronger. The Broncos lost both of their veteran halves and everyone was out of position by the end. There was an unnecessary amount of very unseemly analysis of refereeing4. Julia Robinson, Shalom Sauaso, Ali Brigginshaw and Tamika Upton. Deine Mariner, Payne Haas, Ben Hunt and Reece Walsh.

There’s potential for a tortured metaphor with the ways that the 2000s drought changed everyone forever and the premiership drought, and its eventual relief, did likewise. Too hard, timelines don’t align. Being a fan is Catholicism: deleted. Isn’t it interesting how all of these emotions are mediated by phones and the internet? No, no it is not. Take a leaf from the Broncos and don’t overthink this very simple moment.

I could have done 500-1000 solid words of hating5. OK, real quick. To the Raiders, who could not find a gear to compete with the Cronulla Sharks and still think they could have won this competition. Please. To the Panthers, who thought they could swan in from last place in round 12, not bother even competing for a top four finish and still win the thing. Have some respect. To the Roosters, good on you for throwing hands at full time and if only you'd brought that energy to the rest of the game instead of fracturing each other’s faces. Here's a comp your geriatric, wannabe mobster boss couldn't buy for your dozen fans.

To the Storm, who insisted on resting players in round 26 so they could go full strength against the Broncos in round 27 and lost, and then lost again in front of the biggest audience for a grand final in Australian history. Enjoy your regular season record against the Broncos because it’s all you have. Brisbane won the only games that matter. Would the Storm have been better off keeping Nicho Hynes or Scott Drinkwater at fullback? Marinate on that this off-season.

For the rest of the league, specifically the Bulldogs but also the rest, what do you goddamn morons get paid for? The most wide open competition in a generation and you let the team that everyone hates so much that they can’t even admit it to themselves win the whole thing.

Anthony Seibold. Hahahaha, go fuck yourself, you smarmy loser. You’re not fit to polish Kevin Walters’ boots.

If that doesn't seem like the usual 100 mile an hour fastballs, what can I say? Bringing the heat when we won and they didn’t would be unbecoming.

There are some apologies due. To Michael Maguire, I’m sorry I wasn’t familiar with your game. I’m still not entirely sure how much credit you should be given for Reece Walsh’s premiership but you get to keep the job, criticism-free, for a little while6. If nothing else, that was clearly phenomenal management through the final six weeks of the season. To Gehamat Shibasaki, for all the nasty things I said about you in your first stint. To Billy Walters, for all the nasty things I said about you up until about halfway through this year. To Hayley Maddick, for me being pissed at you for not being Tamika Upton.

There is some credit to be given to the Storm. It was close. They were good. Thousands of quantum sliding doors of that game do not end with a Broncos premiership. Still, the Victorians just couldn’t find the best when they needed it. Munster went missing for the first time in half a decade, Hughes tried to get dirty, Papenhuyzen had an incredibly poor game, and the spine was meant to be their strength. The rest of the team couldn’t stand up to their Broncos counterparts. If there was a plan to deal with Reece Walsh, it was not in evidence. There’s no pity, no sympathy and there never is. It’s only sport and the beauty of sport is that you win or you lose and everyone has to make peace with their choices in life, even as the ramifications extend over decades.

The path to the trophy was always going to involve defeating some demons. The way the ladder shook out meant that unless the Broncos got spectacularly lucky, they were going to need to beat the Panthers, tormentors of the 2023 grand final collapse, and the Storm, the club’s long standing bete noire, en route to the grand final. The Broncos didn’t give either of those teams anything to motivate them. The former by never truly challenging them, except for patches here and there until the second half of the preliminary final in which the Panthers finally folded, much to the relief of the NRL, and the latter by always losing in unusual ways, except for the biggest games of all.

This resulted in one of the greatest finals runs in the history of rugby league, perhaps in Australian sport. The 2025 Broncos are the first team since the 2015 Cowboys to win the premiership from outside the top two and the first to win a grand final from fourth since the 2009 Storm, and the first to actually keep the premiership since the 2005 Tigers.

Three come from behind victories combined for a total margin of victory of seven points. The 99 Storm (a 24 point defeat followed by three wins of two points each) and the 21 Panthers (a six point loss followed by three wins of eight total points) are the only comparable examples in the NRL era. Of the premiership winning teams that didn’t drop a finals game, the 16 Sharks totalled 16 points across three games, more than twice as many. The Broncos didn’t lose a game, won by a total of seven, all in come from behind victories that were down a total 30 points at halftime. Nothing has been quite like that or will ever be like that.

Here’s a weird fact. The last Broncos premierships, in both competitions, were the year before the Titans entered in 2007 and 2021. The Broncos have won their first premierships since the little Gold Coast franchise that couldn’t started getting in the way. Don’t have to worry about that anymore.

This isn’t a restoration. The advantages that allowed 1992 through 2006 are gone and aren’t coming back. The nature of those victories will not be seen again. 2025 was a campaign victory in a salary capped league, with another cap on football department spending, with equal central distributions - as level a playing field as you will see in professional sport. After decades commercially subsidising loser franchises like the Knights and the Tigers, we finally get something back.

People not from Brisbane aren’t really going to get what this win is like. Nine did a full hour of live coverage from Suncorp Stadium as the trophies were presented in front of 10,000 fans. The players looked like they’d rather be anywhere else in the world than under the spotlights, clearly hungover. Gayle Broughton spoke well. I’m going to miss her contribution. I was less enthused by David Crisafulli’s presence. This ain’t for Cowboys-loving dinguses based on the Gold Coast. This is for Brisbane.

The reason Nine would commit resources normally reserved for an election is that the Broncos appeal across an entire city. The Broncos are the first team to win the men’s and women’s grand finals on the same day, an achievement that should surpass Penrith’s four grades in 2022 but watch the octogenarian curmudgeons pay this no mind because there are no reference points from when they were kids. This is for tomorrow’s adults.

The Panthers’ four-in-a-row didn’t set Sydney on fire because most of Sydney is at best apathetic, and at worst derisive, of Penrith. While Melbourne and Sydney teams have won the AFL and the NRL in the same year, that suburban tribalism that the NRL prides itself on, undermines the magnitude of what that achievement could mean for a whole metropolis.

Maybe you would see something similar in Newcastle, if they ever get out of their own way, but Newcastle has a quarter of the population of Brisbane. This is big deal for a big city. This is still, effectively, a one team town. Famously, they are Redcliffe. Now, the one team town has two trophies. The overwhelming majority of Sydney-based media is never going to get it.

Oh well, that doesn’t matter now. Plumber out.

Thank you for reading Pony Picayune

If this your first time, you might like to subscribe to get future free versions of these newsletters below.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing with the people you think it might interest.

Share

Men’s player of the year: Payne Haas

It’s probably something of an oversight to have waited this long to give this completely insignificant honour to Payne Haas. While I could have been justified in giving this to the two previous winners, and he was not the most outstanding in the grand final, Haas’ season was monumental. Look no further than the preliminary final. Haas carried the team all season, motoring down field, covering in defence and largely invincible. A high five from a fired up Haas would sever my arm from my shoulder.

Previous winners: Reece Walsh (2023), Kotoni Staggs (2024)

Women’s player of the year: Tamika Upton

It would be hard to nominate anyone other than the two time Dally M medal winner. The return of Upton to her first club, no longer chasing the dollar and needing to be closer to home, was seen as the thing that would take this team from the clear third best in the league who couldn’t win a finals game to premiership winners. It would be unfair to ignore the contributions made by numerous players - see below - to shaking that tag, but Upton was the most obvious. The attack and a non-trivial part of the defence runs through her and long may she reign.

Previous winners: Ali Brigginshaw (2023), Stacey Waaka (2024)

Advanced metrics

All metrics are regular season only.

Notes

• Why the similarities and differences between Cameron Munster and Reece Walsh will decide the 2025 grand final

• I was born into the Broncos’ last dynasty but this Sunday could be the sweetest victory of all

• ‘I can’t mix my food’: Broncos star Billy Walters reveals autism spectrum diagnosis

• Broncos bolter: how I nearly lost my eye (second story)

• Broncos exorcise ghosts of past to hold nerve, claim title

Rewind

See you next year.

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

Reece Walsh is a mutant, extraterrestrial and several other words which, despite being dehumanising insults, are meant to convey his superhuman capability. It turns out this side does not need Adam Reynolds because Ben Hunt will do. We can even survive without Ezra Mam because Billy Walters seems intent on playing big boy football. A functional first grade hooker exists in the aggregate of third and fourth string choices. Put Walsh out there behind a pack led by Payne Haas, and if Jaiyden Hunt could just get off the field permanently, the sky would be the limit.

By now, you might have heard that the Brisbane Broncos beat the Melbourne Storm on the evening of Thursday, the fourth of September, 2025 in front of nearly 45,000 at Suncorp Stadium. It was the first win over the Storm since 2023, the first in the regular season since 2016 and the first regular season win over Melbourne at Suncorp since 2009. To say we've been waiting a while for this is an understatement.

The normally passive, chatty crowd got increasingly hostile as redundant set restart was piled on top of redundant set restart, less gifting the opposition any advantage so much as gesturing to how useless the referee was planning to be in dealing with Melbourne’s laggardly ruck work and inviting Brisbane to do likewise. When Mariner got sin binned, I thought Atkins might need a police escort to make it off the field at half time. Smartly, the referee took Asofa-Solomona out too (who should've been sent off for not running off the field, per the rules) and took some heat off his back and out of the stadium. Despite the painful efforts of the ground announcers to drown out the game with a constant stream of exhortions to mindlessly chant, the home fans remained loud throughout the second half.

Moments and conditions like that, Walsh manhandling Coates, the 40/20 and the relentless effort in defence were the fulcrums around which the result was brought to bear. The underlying Asterix-esque magic potion was a little toilet water, consumed for for its benefits in recovery. If there aren't dozens of kids in greater Brisbane looking at their porcelain thrones and wondering what if? then the sport of rugby league is dead as we know it.

To the extent that any explanation is needed for the performance against the Storm, Walsh's eau de toilette is as good as any. A normal person might suggest that last night was the first time the Broncos put it all together: a 90% completion rates, a huge win in error margin and the only boneheaded penalties were awarded because Grant Atkins is a [redacted].

A smarter person might realise that since the end of May, the Broncos have lost just two games. The first was against an Eels side that played up, played well and will be a thorn in the competition next year. The other was against the Storm in the inverse of last night's game: 62% completion rate, a comfortable loss on errors and boneheaded penalties galore. That's a 10-2 record since that pathetic loss to Manly. Now the Broncos have locked in fourth place and head to Canberra to play the minor premiers.

Unless the Broncos are currently paying 17 plumbers to install brand new toilets in 17 Broncos homes, a repeat of that level of performance seems unlikely. The Raiders have been the second most annoying team to watch the Broncos play over the last few years, with their niggle, their pack and their self-belief. In many ways, that describes a much better version of the Storm the Broncos just put to bed. If the team is shown the way forward by Reece “Toilet” Walsh and the Haas of Payne can inflict damage, then why not?

By finishing fourth, the premiership task has been reduced to three hard fought wins in a row. The team is stacked with plenty of hardened veterans, so the scale of the occasion should not be an impediment. Those games are each 80 minutes long and the Broncos really only need to string together 40 really good, non-consecutive minutes in that 80 and they can blow any other team out of the water.

Then again, Canberra might show us why they’ve won 19 games and counting and the Broncos could trip over their shoe laces against the Roosters in the second week and it will be all over. Or the Broncos could be dealing with the Panthers or Storm in week 3 and it’s a different ballgame, both of which offer chances to permanently vanquish ghosts or summon them anew. Or any other possible permutations. I am not getting my hopes up and everything good that happens from this moment on in the season will be a pleasant surprise.

For the women, the situation is different only in tone. We are so obviously just waiting for the finals to start. Second place is set in stone with two games to go against the Warriors and the Cowboys. These will be useful preparation insofar as there is any in this league but the only place the Broncos can go is first if the Roosters lose to either the Raiders or the Sharks and the Broncos win more games than they do.

A preliminary final win is not only necessary to advance to a grand final against (almost certainly) Sydney City but it would break the drought of finals wins that extends back to 2020. In their rush to hand wring over the state of the competition and whine about good players returning to play for their home club, commentators often overlook that the Broncos ain't done shit in years. It's time for that to change.

Thank you for reading Pony Picayune

If this your first time, you might like to subscribe to get future free versions of these newsletters below.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing with the people you think it might interest.

Share

If you really enjoyed it, considering upgrading to a paid subscription to access what's beyond this paywall.

Upgrade now

Read more

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

I started this season by admitting that I really didn’t know what 2025 was going to bring for the Brisbane Broncos. It’s now August, I’m writing the July recap and I still really don’t know what’s going on.

Every time I’ve tried to pin down a defensible position based on the most recent results, the ground has shifted under me. Broncos look good? Cue a four game losing streak. Broncos look bad? Give me a five wins in a row. Selwyn Cobbo out the door? Hey, welcome back buddy!

I’m looking like a right dingus here.

In July, we got a hilarious depantsing of the one-time premiership favourite and ever-gutless Bulldogs, a par-for-the-course execution of the Titans, a bye, a bad but not that bad loss to the Eels and the complete and utter destruction of the Rabbitohs. That seems fine? Maybe even not a crisis?

We do not need to give much consideration to the Storm game because the Broncos always lose to the Storm. The rapid sprint of injuries to Reynolds, Mam and Cobbo almost renders it eligible for the Young Principle but then, every loss is bizarre because the Broncos are always innovating new ways to lose to Melbourne, so the outcome is much more pedestrian.

With four games to play, the Broncos are 11-9 with a reasonable points difference. They really only need one or two more wins to seal finals. The Broncos could realistically rise as high as fourth or drop as low as ninth but a week 1 elimination final is the most likely outcome.

It’s not clear what happens after that. The competition’s openness has been remarked upon to the point of cliche. No team has managed to imitate convincing for multiple weeks on end and every team is carrying at least a moderate flaw. The premiership race seems likely to coalesce around the Raiders, Storm, Panthers and an un/lucky Make-a-Wish club that will briefly get to enjoy the limelight of a preliminary final.

The Broncos could be there but the idea of this team, with its particular brand of inconsistency, stringing together three or four weeks of their best football seems out there. Then again, basically this roster did basically that only two years ago. So here’s 500 words to say, “I dunno”.

2025 has looked a lot like what I feared 2023 was going to turn into in the early days of that run. It seemed impossible that the breathtaking riskiness would be sustainable - that the passes would stick, the offloads would generate points, the insanity would pay off, that the goal line defence wouldn’t crack - but after six weeks, it was clear that it would. I think 2025 is what happens when the passes don’t stick, the offloads cost territory and possession and the insanity is just frustration. Don’t look at the defence.

A pessimist will tote that up and conclude the Broncos are either missing finals or exiting very early in proceedings. An optimist would suggest it won’t take much from Maguire to put them back into that gear. I don’t know who to listen to.

For the women’s team, things could only be better if the first 20 minutes of the game against the Roosters could be deleted from history. Other than that, the NRLW Broncos have been playing if not flawlessly, then close enough. It is a sign of just how good the Broncos are, especially up through the guts with the likes of Lenarduzzi, Nu’uausala, Sauaso and I had been enjoying Bree Spreadborough’s work, that there’s room to make mistakes and not have to operate with a clean, ruthless efficiency, and still win almost every game with ease.

At 4-1 with the best points difference in the league, thoughts are turning to beyond August. Despite consistently being one of the three best teams in the league, the Broncos haven’t won a finals game since the 2020 grand final, losing semi-finals in three of the last four seasons. With a likely top two finish in sight, especially if they can knock off a surprisingly punchy Newcastle in two weeks, that likely gets them a bye into week 2. That only ratchets up the difficulty in breaking that finals drought but, assuming they get off the bus a bit earlier and stay awake, a win would get them into a grand final.

From there, anything can happen.

Thank you for reading Pony Picayune

If this your first time, you might like to subscribe to get future free versions of these newsletters below.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing with the people you think it might interest.

Share

If you really enjoyed it, considering upgrading to a paid subscription to access what's beyond this paywall.

Upgrade now

Read more

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

There’s a game that comes to my mind frequently; unbidden but frequently nonetheless. It is not a grand final and it doesn’t even involve the Broncos. In fact, it’s a specific three minutes from a week 1 Queensland Cup final in 2021. The Wynnum Manly Seagulls, then and now a Broncos feeder, end up winning 22-14 over the Burleigh Bears.

For the Gulls, Selwyn Cobbo took the number 1 fullback jersey. In the 14 for Burleigh was a relative unknown, in only his tenth Cup appearance, but a definite talent of the future, Shallin Fuller. Like Ezra Mam, whose career trajectory is well documented, and Jokadi Bire, that other ephemeral prospect of 2021 who, after being felled by a heart condition, is now an electrical engineer in Port Moresby, Fuller was a new athlete emerging from the sporting vortex of the covid pandemic, set to shake up the competitive status quo.

Here are the two plays that stick in my mind.

This first play, 60 minutes in, is almost entirely Fuller. He engages the line, pops off a short pass to a teammate on his left, who manages to simultaneously flick it back again and tangle up three defenders, clearing space for Fuller to break the line. Fuller rolls this into a short kick, re-gathers, turns Cobbo inside-out with two dummies and scores a spectacular try to put the Bears back into the game.

Three minutes later, Fuller probes the same seam in the Seagulls defensive line by shaping to kick. Fuller opts to put on a step and then grubber through the line. The Seagulls are bamboozled and only Cobbo is ready. He swoops on Fuller’s kick and returns it to the house in front of a full and cheering Chook Pen. It would be the match winning try.

This scene would be a prescient summation of Cobbo’s career, getting turned inside out on defence, setting his sights on revenge and performing acts of electrifying brilliance with the ball. It was also a younger, fitter, faster, hungrier Cobbo, with his first grade career started but by no means assured.

This was Fuller’s apogee. Fuller signed with the Titans for 2022, broke his tibia in a pre-season trial for the Bears and that was it. Even after recovering, he was never sighted again in Cup, let alone the NRL. Fuller played a bit of A-grade for Burleigh in 2023 and now seems to be playing for Marist Brothers in Lismore.

As Cobbo went on to play for the Broncos and the Maroons and the Kangaroos, I always thought there was something melancholic but poetic about the divergence of Cobbo’s and Fuller’s paths; something about the nature of sliding doors moments, the transience of potential, a Pratchett-esque ‘life is a bit funny when you get right down to it’.

Watching Cobbo drag his ass around the field for Wynnum over the last few weeks has been not exactly dispiriting but sombre. Unlike David Fifita, who did everything that was asked of him and it was not enough, Cobbo deserves to be here.

One of the first things I wrote on The Maroon Observer was that there was no separating the rocks and diamonds from some players. You get the diamonds because of the rocks. In that 2021 final, Cobbo drops the kick off. It’s a package deal that you have to sign for.

Even now, returning to his alma mater, Cobbo still makes diamonds because he is bigger and stronger than his opponents but he is clearly not as motivated. Ben Farr is the better fullback, even though Cobbo has access to means Farr likely does not possess. There’s a universe where this is the end of the road for Cobbo: a winger for $50,000 a year in QCup. If so, he would still likely end up being one of the best to ever do it.

Then with the news of Cobbo’s signing with the Dolphins for 2026, the poem apparently has a coda. Whether Cobbo comes good, or excels, is up to him. It is clear that is unlikely to occur at Red Hill as Cobbo tumbles down the depth chart. With Redcliffe’s injury record, there will be opportunities to play first grade regularly for the Dolphins. There might not be a better back five in the league than Tabuai-Fidow, Isaako, Cobbo, Farnworth and Bostock, if all are on form. Perhaps there are whole stanzas still to be written about Cobbo.

Cobbo is not going to get many better opportunities to make good on his potential. For that matter, he may not even get another NRL opportunity on the east coast, irrespective of its quality, especially if he has no desire to leave the Southeast. He should perhaps reflect on that game in 2021 and consider how sharp the tipping point of one’s career can be.

Thank you for reading Pony Picayune

If this your first time, you might like to subscribe to get future free versions of these newsletters below.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing with the people you think it might interest.

Share

If you really enjoyed it, considering upgrading to a paid subscription to access what's beyond this paywall.

Upgrade now

After the paywall, we're spotlighting Ben Talty, stanning a Willison extension over Hetherington and rewinding to 1998.

Read more

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

We’ve accumulated enough evidence, from the end of Bennett’s second tenure to now, that the Brisbane Broncos aren’t good. We’ve churned through Seibold, Walters and now Maguire. We’ve toppled Paul White and raised the flag of Dave Donaghy, with an associated purge. The assistants are different. The players and the results are the same. There are enough different kinds of embarrassing losses that the performance against Manly was more familiar than repulsive.

The core problems seem to be that the players aren’t particularly good, most of the time, and aren’t very resilient. Traditionally, sporting organisations replace players that lack qualities they need to win. The Broncos have not done that, preferring to stick by their guys. They’ve tried replacing the coach, with each replacement bringing a different philosophy. Strangely, the vibes of Kevin Walters was the only one to show any return on investment.

But here's a thing you don't want to be talking yourself into doing just as two new teams join the league in the next three years, after the league expanded two years ago: a rebuild. Putting yourself on the market to compete with the Bears, the PNG team and whatever other dreck ends up at the bottom of the table (Knights, Titans, potentially others) is not a recipe for medium-term success.

That's not to say that there isn't room for churning of the last half dozen rostered guys for other replacement level talents or a rebalancing of the salary to proven capability ratio but to think you can dump most of the starting 17 onto the market and sign up better replacements is fanciful.

The replacements, even in the middle tier, aren't there for anything less than a king’s ransom. The good ones have already used the coming market desperation to get themselves dollars and security of tenure. Keano Kini and Dylan Brown, good but not great players who are currently resetting what platinum tier players are going to expect, are proof enough of that. If everyone plays in front of good crowds now and has good facilities, what exactly is the Broncos’ differentiation? Or is this just the moment before we accept the Broncos are more like the Knights and Titans than anyone would care to admit?

What's particularly problematic is that there aren't a lot of capable young men surging through the ranks to paper over the cracks. Most of the prospects that should be hitting their prime and commanding the cap now were lost during the Seibold years - think Max Plath, Sam Walker, Tom Dearden and the Va’a brothers - or haven't panned out - see Tanah Boyd and possibly the Va’as again. The surplus of just about first grade talent that could be relied on for four weeks’ work from Queensland Cup all have top 30 contracts now, mostly at Souths and the Phins. The farm is bare and it's not looking like raining any time soon. It shouldn’t really be this hard.

Sometimes simple outcomes, e.g. footy team lose games, has complicated foundations:

1. Roster needs churn and re-balancing

2. Coach not up to it

3. CEO who hired the coach has never hired a coach before

4. Pathways have been on autopilot and selecting for the wrong traits

On the last, there are people out of the spotlight, between the CEO, coach and playing group, whose job it is to fix these problems. There’s a lot of work to be done, which in this context means processing a lot of information and making some good decisions. That hasn’t been the strong suit of this organisation, possibly ever, but the NRL is more competitive than ever. The tide is heading out and the swimmers we used to wear floated away a long time ago.

It is a results-driven business.

Thank you for reading Pony Picayune

If this your first time, you might like to subscribe to get future free versions of these newsletters below.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing with the people you think it might interest.

Share

If you really enjoyed it, considering upgrading to a paid subscription to access what's beyond this paywall.

Upgrade now

After the paywall, we're reviewing the last month, looking ahead to the next month and rewinding to 1994.

Read more

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

I didn’t particularly want to start this month’s newsletter with another hemming and hawing dissertation on whether the Brisbane Broncos were any good or not. Thankfully, the Magic Round fixture against the Penrith Panthers convinced me that the Broncos are probably not good.

It is easy to imagine Brisbane finishing towards the end of the third quarter of the ladder - we saw it in 2022 and 2024 - but also punching as high as fourth, only to be crushed into gravel by the post-season. Both results would be much of a muchness for me. Your mileage may vary.

Since last publication of the Pony Picayune, the Ponies have beaten the Tigers, as expected, and the Bulldogs, completely inexplicably, while embarrassingly losing to the Roosters, after smashing them in the opening weekend, the Warriors and the last placed Panthers. That may be a 2-3 record but the three weighs very heavily. Of the earlier wins, you would be silly to bank on the Broncos beating the Cowboys now and would have an even tougher time against the Dolphins.

Stringing together one good night is indicative of what the team is capable of (and also that the Bulldogs have a whiff of fraud) but not necessarily of what they will reliably deliver. I predicted in the pre-season that the Broncos would get hot to start, which they were, but hinted that I thought they would come off the boil and we’d get a real sense of the mediocrity underneath.

This is it. This is who this team is. We can litigate who’s good (Payne Haas, Kotoni Staggs and surprisingly, Shibasaki has held up) and who’s bad (Kobe Hetherington, Ben Hunt and surprisingly, Pat Carrigan is stat padding) and there’s plenty more material to that end beyond the paywall for those subscribers so inclined but my personal hierarchy of responsibility is something like this:

• If you can isolate a couple of players as the problem, then those issues are the players’.

• If you start seeing whole of team problems, that’s on the coach.

• If you start seeing repeatedly poor higher level decision making (like recruiting bad coaches or signing big money deals with no payoff), that’s on the CEO and/or board.

It feels too early to get into what Michael Maguire can or can’t deliver, and whether or not he should keep his job. Being head coach is complicated. The players go out and generate production. Except when they turn up as big numbers in the loss column, intangibles are by definition hard to quantify but the coach’s remit consists almost entirely of them: morale, identity, discipline, philosophy, cohesion, cleverness, awareness, engagement and purposefulness, along with more concrete aspects of the game, like fitness and schematics.

The coach is a manager of staff but when all their work is added up, the coach cops it when it all goes wrong. That’s what the million dollars of practically guaranteed money is for. We are seeing team-wide issues with the Broncos.

Last year and early this year, the lazy tropes trotted out by Badel and co gave us to understand that Maguire was going to a hardass, a disciplinarian, that was going to fix the Backstreet Broncos Boys and turn them into real men. Given the evidence to date, either that was at best, a mischaracterisation, and at worst, mislaid toxic masculinity. The team is undisciplined, unfocussed and shows less spine than Andrew Abdo.

My overwhelming fear, at least in the relatively low stakes confines of the NRL, is that the attitude of this team is going to be spun into a player problem, rather than a management problem. Why do the Broncos lack any sort of tenacity? The press conference isn’t going to tell you but we’ll see the passive voice stories in the Courier Mail soon enough.

That all will end up laying the groundwork for a Rebuild. The players’ aren’t the right mix so we have to dump the refuse and restock the roster with more willing players. Maguire’s kind of guys. Maybe that Isaac Moses chap can help?

While that may prove to be true and beneficial in the long term (some roster churn, not Isaac Moses), and Maguire has had slow starts, it also entirely coincidentally buys a lot of people in managerial positions two to three years’ worth of insulation to extend their own jobs. I am not waiting for close to 2030 to get back to where the team was in 2023. If Donaghy fires Kevvie for a winning record and a grand final loss, then the handpicked Maguire is expected to do substantially better than that.

The roster is the roster. Make it work.

Thank you for reading Pony Picayune

If this your first time, you might like to subscribe to get future free versions of these newsletters below.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing with the people you think it might interest.

Share

If you really enjoyed it, considering upgrading to a paid subscription to access what's beyond this paywall.

Upgrade now

After the paywall, we're going into Michael Maguire’s resume, farewelling Tazmin Rapana, going through my diary and planner and looking at the players’ form by the numbers.

Read more

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

I was mix of pissed off and mystified - this is something close to my ground state, to be fair - when Gehamat Shibasaki’s name was thrown into the mix of the Broncos’ potential starting line-up before the season started. This looked like an easily avoidable error. I had some paragraphs in the chamber.

Maguire flubbed player selections in his recent representative career. The 2022 World Cup Kiwis and the game 1 2024 Blues were odd teams. But he eventually got it right and Maguire handed the Kangaroos their biggest loss ever in 2023 and took the series for the Blues in 2024.

Part of Maguire’s job is to shape what he has into something resembling chicken salad and, it may take time, but seemingly he can do it. There is no better demonstration than the rise of Gehamat Shibasaki to a level of play heretofore unknown.

Shibasaki was one of that generation of Broncos players who simply arrived in the NRL at the wrong time. Jaydn Su’A, David Fifita, Tesi Niu, Xavier Coates and Ethan Bullemor might also fall into this microgeneration of 2018-21 prospects, depending on your views of their respective capabilities. While a player could succeed at the Paul White Broncos, it was easier to do it elsewhere.

Shibasaki debuted under Wayne Bennett but played a dozen games in 2019 under Anthony Seibold. It didn’t go particularly well, becoming a target for my increasingly frustrated ire (by which I mean I yelled at the TV and tweeted a lot). “Clueless” is the adjective that springs to mind. That could be applied to multiple players and those two facts have several clues embedded within about what was happening at the time. By the end of the season, Alex Glenn was starting in the centres and Shibasaki was coming off the bench. One wonders how Parramatta did not score more points that day. 58-0 seems unders in retrospect.

That entire era reached its pathetic nadir in 2020 under Seibold, a man intent on smashing the biggest club in the league into a brick wall, despite numerous off-ramps and warning signs, foot pressed firmly to the floor to guarantee arriving at the scene of the accident as fast as possible. Some players who might have otherwise became first graders looked completely unable to cope with the sport.

Shibasaki wandered the earth, ending up in Newcastle in 2020, then Chiba at some point during covid, before returning home to North Queensland in 2022. He slid off the Cowboys’ roster into the safe harbour of the Townsville Blackhawks and earned a surprise call-up to the Rabbitohs last year, a route that could only be established thanks to internecine North Queensland rugby league politics. I figured his return to the Southeast was a train and trial at best before being claimed by a Queensland Cup team for the year. He did the off-season, showed more of what Maguire wanted and now he has the position in the starting team.

In four games, Shibasaki has been pretty good. He’s not Herbie Farnworth or Kotoni Staggs, and can still make poor reads, but he has three tries, a Battle medal (for what that’s worth) and shown a greater willingness than Deine Mariner to do what Maguire wants. His reward is the jersey, and the trust that comes with that, and a development deal for the 26 year old:

“When I did come back the game had gotten too fast and the prep to come back into first grade was too different.

“I got injured and was lucky to be back home (in Townsville) to get my head space right. I had a year off and I thought I’d give it one more crack.

“From ringing Wynnum up and getting a train-and-trial to getting selected for round one (for the Broncos) was a long shot, but all the hard work I did is now paying off.”

Shibasaki plays his 35th NRL game against the Wests Tigers this Saturday night and says the penny has dropped.

“I am a bit older now,” he said.

“I have realised the change (needed) in my preparation, my responsibilities at home and at training.

“I am one of the older ones now (at the Broncos).

“We have a lot of young boys at training so I want to show a good example with my prep and what it takes to be a professional athlete.

“I am truly grateful for coming back. I am back this year and I don’t want to let go of it. I missed this joint.”

Similar to last year’s re-evaluation of the career of Tesi Niu, I am not expecting Shibasaki to become Gene Miles but if he can hold down a Jesse Arthars-level of play in the backline, then that will be good enough for a team that features Haas, Carrigan, Hunt, Reynolds, Walsh, Staggs, Cobbo (when he deigns to turn up), fifteen hooking options, including a similarly revitalised Cory Paix and Ezra Mam still to return. If Deine Mariner can’t exceed that expectation, that’s disappointing for him and his potential.

The lesson here is not just the redemption arc, although that and his heritage (“his grandfather was a Japanese pearl diver, you say”) both make for good copy, but the influence of coaching on players’ careers. Stars will be stars in almost any scenario - Payne Haas is not on the same trajectory - but for the fringe guys, whose grasp on first grade can be tenuous at best, coming in under the wrong dipshit at the wrong time can derail their career1.

We should all be grateful for the opportunities we get because we don’t always get a second shot.

Thank you for reading Pony Picayune

If this your first time, you might like to subscribe to get future free versions of these newsletters below.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing with the people you think it might interest.

Share

If you really enjoyed it, considering upgrading to a paid subscription to access what's beyond the paywall.

Upgrade now

After the paywall, we’re spotlighting the Broncos’ edge problem, you can read my diary and planner and we’re rewinding to 2006.

Read more

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

Let’s just not have any expectations.

I’ve joked before that at least a few of the noble truths of Buddhism apply to rugby league as in life. I can’t sense any future in which having expectations about what the 2025 Brisbane Broncos are going to deliver is going to result in anything bar disappointment, so let’s take a deep breath and act accordingly.

The hard ass act we’ve been fed about Michael Maguire smacks more of marketing than anything of substance. The kind of fan the Broncos imagine they have - and the Courier Mail also shares this lazy view of the world - is expected to be impressed by Maguire cracking down on the show pony pop stars by making them wear their shirts. The irony is that the Broncos’ actual fans want Riki, Walsh, Carrigan, etc, etc to hit their back walls and are more than happy, slavering even, to see them sans shirts.

Except the training shirt mandate was enforced for sponsorship reasons, as revealed in a dull interview conducted with Peter Badel. Madge’s (I find his nickname cringe) posturing has much in common with Seibold - albeit less smug smartass and more tough love dad in tone - and I expect I will be wanting Walters back when that gets tiresome. That this, a retread whose methods may prove to be outdated very quickly, is meant to be the fresh new change in the organisation is mildly depressing. It might work. Let’s just see how it goes.

Part of the malaise is that I think rather than looking at 2023 as the expectation, it is the exception and cannot be relied on. Tristan Sailor serves as a clear example. He’s a guy I thought was not good enough in 2022, had a great year as a depth fill-in in 2023, returned to being a pumpkin in 2024 and is now in Super League with Keenan Palasia and Brodie Croft. Over a long enough time scale, the Dragons were eventually proven right, which is about the scariest thing I can conceive.

Sailor, like Riki, Walters, Hetherington, et al, all just happened to have great years all at the same time and it was enough to take the Broncos to within a quarter of a game of a premiership. It wasn’t enough then and when those guys returned to earth last year, it was never going to be enough. Kevin Walters paid the price for this fact with his job.

Ben Hunt would have been enough to put this team over the top in 2023, if only to limit the amount of time Billy Walters was on the pitch but unlike the signing of Tamika Upton, the 2025 men’s team is further away from that goal than many seem prepared to acknowledge. Hunt, the only really big signing in the off-season, has returned to Queensland to pick up a last pay cheque and cash in at one of the few places where being Dozer matters. While the Broncos will be better with him than without, it also doesn’t really fix the yawning chasm where the second row exists. If Piakura or Riki don’t work out well, or get injured, I’m not clear on if there’s a plan B or what it could look like. If that problem wasn’t immediately obvious at the start of 2024, it was certainly clear enough at the end.

At the other end of the depth conundrum, the Broncos have a half dozen hooking options. None of these are elite, although there is an opportunity for the right pairing to create an elite hooker in the aggregate. Whether its the possibly injured and unproven Mozer, the obstinate Paix, the Super League-bound Smoothy, the ex-nepo baby Walters, train’n’trial Eggerling or minutes from old man Hunt, there are far too many combinations and I can’t help but feel they’ll all be injured simultaneously at some point.

This is not a long preview, nor is it a fun, nuclear hellfire preview, even if we get a full 24 game slate of Reece Walsh. There are too many unknowns, too many problems that remain unresolved, too much mediocre recent football for any sort of picture to resolve into an uplifting clarity. Despite their history, their self-regard, their premierships, you won’t often go wrong starting with the assumption that the Broncos of the 2020s will be bog average and letting them prove you wrong. Wait for them to explode out of the gates but the truth will out later in the year.

Attention: Broncos fans

If you are planning on coming back for any future editions of the Pony Picayune and are not a paid subscriber, this is exactly where the paywall would be and you wouldn’t get all of the cool stuff that follows/an Ezra Mam essay that is way too long. I am showing you this one time so you can see what a paid subscription would get you.

Upgrade to paid

The price of the brick goes up with kickoff in Vegas so sign-up for this introductory offer now.

If this is your first time here, it might feel like a bit much for me to ask you for money. Instead, you can give me your email address.

Or if you don’t like Substack or recurring subscriptions or both, but still want to support this endeavour, give us a tip on Ko-fi.

Deep Dive

The traditional Deep Dive into the 202X NRL season has been split up a little this year. Each of the Q4 will get theirs embedded in the longer season preview and then I’ll cover the rest of the league in a Stats Drop.

Explainers for metrics:

More about sims/PRVRS here.

The executive summary for the Broncos:

• When projecting players forward, the next season’s stats normally look a lot like last season’s stats. Based on the past metrics, the Broncos played like a 10-win/12th placed team and did just that. Based on the future projections, the Broncos will play like a bottom half of the top eight team, probably around 6th or 7th. This is indicative of the degree of underperformance that 2024 served up.

• The Broncos were dead last in net possession and second last in net metres. This is what we nerds refer to as ‘shooting oneself in the foot with a howitzer’. Giving opponents an average 200m head start and a heap more ball is not a winning strategy. Fixing this will go a long way to making the Broncos competitive again. Maguire will look like a genius if Brisbane revert to mean on ball handling ability.

• Despite this, the Broncos performed merely poorly in defence, around the 12th to 13th mark, and at a slightly above league average level in offence, coming in around 7th place.

• Other than the machine-like output of Pat Carrigan, many Broncos played with a floor close to their career levels but with a reduced ceiling from what we’ve come to expect.

• According to the PRVRS ratings and the draw, the Broncos have a 51% chance of making the finals.

Reminder that Datawrapper embeds look and work best on desktop, next best if you tap through on mobile and least best in email.

Ezra Mam

I, for one, am glad that I did not feel compelled to race to the keyboard to broadcast my thoughts to the world after Ezra Mam crashed his car head-on into an Uber. There isn’t much to say about the accident itself, other than Mam is clearly a shitty driver and has an understanding of consequences that is common among 21 year olds. Other than the people involved in the accident, it doesn’t affect anyone else but if you were to gauge it by the reaction, Mam is the greatest villain in a sport that cheered the return of Jack de Belin, had an administrator be the focus of an episode of Four Corners in the 80s and holds Graham Langlands up as an Immortal. Don't forget Mitchell Pearce's canine antics, Todd Carney only pissed in his own mouth, etc, etc.

While it’s tempting to play a (very long) game of ‘yeah, well, but what about this other bag of dog turds that plays in the NRL,’ that’s not the point. Mam did wrong, is being punished by the legal system, the NRL and the Broncos. That punishment has been decided with respect to laws and precedents, and not just a little public outrage. That the punishment handed down by the rugby league portion of the judicial system has the flavour of ‘well, a kid getting hurt is worse than a racism but it’s still an accident, so I guess it’s eight weeks plus one and some cash’ is also immaterial.

I have several stories of being hit by cars while riding a bike. The most recent was a little over a decade ago and the people who pulled out in front of me were leaving a funeral and didn’t see me. The moral of all of those stories - not related in the interests of brevity - is that you can be killed by a car at any time just because someone is having a bad day, never mind the tired, the drunk, the distracted, the careless and the unlucky (see Sandon Smith). There is nothing special, unless you count multiple layers of stupidity on Mam’s part, about his case. It is as reckless as it is mundane.

Perhaps people were now confronting for the first time the idea that driving is the most dangerous thing you, and your family, do on a regular basis. Getting hit by a car travelling at just 50km/h as a pedestrian has a 90% fatality rate. In 2024, 168 people died on the job nationwide but 302 people were killed on Queensland roads. In contrast, a handful of people died from flying, all in light aircraft, and even fewer from sharks. Embarrassing yourself to death while public speaking recorded zero fatalities for the ten thousandth year running. So if I was being generous, I’d say some of the outrage is confusion born of cognitive dissonance as some people are starting to reckon with what car culture means for us, our lives and our cities and that there is a heavier price being paid than is generally believed. Here’s a barnburner of a primer and another if you’d like to know more.

In reality, the furnace was stoked by a few aggrieved racists - the man that made such a big deal of being called a monkey has his own flaws! - but mostly it was the off-season, it was the Broncos and, overwhelmingly, people thinking that get angry online is the same as doing something about the thing making them angry. Given that particular pump is nearly constantly primed by our society and media ecosystem, the output has to go somewhere. A lot of sound and fury signifying very little.

If you truly believe that laws and penalties should be changed, and that’s a reasonable view to hold, and aren't just positing some heroic things about yourself that won't hold up when we check the tape, then this is technically still a democracy. All those dead bodies and their families brought us to this point, so I don't know if one unlicensed P-plate rugby league player who did coke and injured three people will move the needle. This is a country that routinely locks up refugees from actual war zones. If one-tenth of that rage could be brought to bear usefully, we would have the road toll, domestic violence and climate change sorted out by next week. None of that resembles the reality in which we live.

The media’s coverage of the story was unhelpful. The story was extraordinarily confusing as journalists raced to print before Whatsapp groups could spread the (for a refreshing change, mostly correct) rumours. You needed to read both Ninefax and the Courier Mail every day to find out what was true enough about the accident to be printed without threat of libel. Then again, I imagine most people stopped at the headline, the photos and the broken hip that turned out not to be broken and decided that was enough for Mam to be hanged. Personally, I don’t feel generalised and hysterical outrage means we should bypass the principles of rule of law on which our society is built on but then again, I don’t think we’ll have to wait all that long for that to be business-as-usual.

Notable was the silence of former players, who were only too happy to come down on Jackson Topine but were unusually quiet over a player driving like an asshole with drugs in his system. Quelle surprise. Even the alcoholic professional opinion havers managed to keep the volume down, except for Phil Rothfield whose main beef was that the Broncos dropped a press release late on Friday night when he couldn't possibly be expected to do anything like copying and pasting that press release into an article. Then again, why risk a lawsuit with a spicy take when a lawyer went nuclear on TV and told everyone Mam was facing 14 years in prison?

Against all odds, Kia are continuing as the Broncos’ major partner, which should tell you all you need to know about this incident. If nothing else, Mam should be extremely relieved by that.

Thank you for reading the Pony Picayune

Sharing or forwarding the Pony Picayune will help new readers find this newsletter and new subscribers is what keeps The Maroon Observer operation running.

Share

Or you can follow TMO on Bluesky, the posting retirement home, where I guarantee any posts will be of lower quality than the content in the newsletter but you can… “re-skeet”… is that what they’re calling it? jfc… links.

Rewind

Let’s take a whirlwind ride through a bunch of guys who inspired the haircuts (including a Kirk Reynoldson) of the footy boofheads at my high school.

One of my old man takes is that the Broncos of the golden era really did play with a different attitude to their modern counterparts. You can see it in this game where a nascent Storm team that is not quite there take it to one of the best in the league. Melbourne lead 18-4 as time expires in the first half, only to be beaten by a simple Lockyer chip in behind the defence on the hooter. The Broncos are not phased to be playing from behind and turn the tide in the second half, capitalising on the noticeable fatigue of Cam Smith of all players, to come home 34-26 winners.

The Broncos would only win another half dozen times against the Storm in the 20 years that have since elapsed, including one grand final. Part of that is the Broncos’ almost mundane but very real and steely resolve seems to transfer from Brisbane to Melbourne.

Notes

• Farewell to Corey Oates. You were an all-time great for this club and, despite your reluctance to commute to Burleigh, I’m glad you went before you became Darius 2.

• Big M Signatures: Walsh (!), Hunt, Willison, Taupau, Football Operations Manager, and not Broncos but lol, Seibold.

• Dub Signatures: Upton (!!!), Clark, Dam, Lafaele, McGrath, Rapana, Spreadborough

• Injuries: Hayze Perham is on the Andre Savelio path

• Roosters, Raiders, Cowboys and Dolphins is the kind of slate we’ve come to expect to start the Broncos’ season. One of the premiership contenders from last year (normally it would be the premiers but the Panthers seem to love Vegas). Then you get something more pedestrian (not even on FTA) followed by the now-traditional round 3 meeting with the Cowboys.

• Brisbane Broncos give Star Entertainment sponsorship payment reprieve. It’s no secret that Star are on the brink of collapse but, for now, they are operational and paying their bills. The brain geniuses on Reddit insisted, if they were in that position, they’d cut Star loose. As if proof was required, these guys have never been anywhere near a big money deal. What do you think is better: Star being extremely likely to pay out at least half their deal and probably most or all of it but on a delayed schedule, or going to the market four weeks before the season starts, trying to find a sponsor at a similar level when everyone knows you’re desperate and having to reprint a bunch of shit to replace The Star logo? Take a lesson from Morris Levy: you take what you can get, because something is better than nothing.

• Maguire is an upgrade on Walters - but his dated methods and dismal club record suggest it will end in tears at the Broncos. Mm-hmm.

• ‘Zero interest’: Broncos respond after intriguing report of UK Super League club takeover. It was a fun ride while it lasted (two days).

• We have been denied Ben Hunt returning to the Ipswich Jets, reprising his role from one game against Norths in 2017, but Ben Hunt would look good in the red, white and green of Wynnum Manly.

Welcome to The Pony Picayune, a monthly newsletter about the Brisbane Broncos.

In news from a weird parallel reality, the Brisbane Lions won a premiership, ending a twenty year drought and proving that it is possible, easy even, to lose a grand final and go one better the following year.

That same week, in the same city, the Kevolution came to an end. Bells pealed across the city at City Hall and St Stephen’s Cathedral, at Hamilton and Sandgate, at Wynnum and Sunnybank, in a mix of solemnity and optimism. When asked what the long term ramifications of the Kevolution would be, Mao Zedong1 replied that it was too soon to tell.

Like the French Revolution, the Kevolution had its twists and turns but its march was largely upwards until it wasn’t.

Walters, a well-known hero of an earlier era, was called to power to clean up the mess of Anthony Seibold, a little piggy blowhard on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect. In the middle of a pandemic and dealing with the attendant psychological stresses, turning 3-17, a wooden spoon and the worst season in the club’s history into 7-17, fourteenth and the second worst season in the club’s history was not nothing but it did lack a certain je ne sais quoi about the club’s prospects. Then Adam Reynolds and Kurt Capewell threw their lots in with the Broncos. The Kevolution had momentum.

Walters’ Broncos posted a winning record in 2022, 13-11, even if they missed finals thanks to a mix of what would become a trademark blend of myopia and hubris, paired with a chronic lack of ability. The result was a classic Broncos chokejob where everyone could see it. This famine of results was meant to make the Broncos hungrier still for success, a prospect that seemed extremely dubious until Reece Walsh, a brash and ambitious prodigal son, returned home, now unwanted by the Warriors but older and (somewhat) wiser.

A levée en masse of effort, every player contributing the absolute peak of their powers, in 2023 allowed the Kevolution to reach its greatest heights, a commanding and bombastic artillery that loudly announced the arrival of a new great power in the league. 18-5, second place, a 26-0 shutout win over the Storm in the finals, followed by a crushing victory over the Warriors in the preliminary and some of the best damn football you’ve ever seen. An Ezra Mam hattrick all but sealed the premiership and you know the rest.

2024 started poorly - Vegas, Spencer Leniu, injuries, etc - and then faltered, first slowly then all at once. There was talk of when, not if, we make finals. There was inexplicable resting of players to that end, even though that end was nowhere in sight. Casualties mounted. The victories never came. The losses got worse. 10-14, well outside the finals and three big fat Ls to the Titans and Dolphins.

A narrow loss in a grand final didn’t seem like much of a prize anymore. Everyone looked fed up, inept and out of ideas but it was very clear. No one actually believed in the Kevolution.

Thank you for reading the Pony Picayune

I would have said the club was far too timid to take a swing on a lesser known up-and-comer but I also didn’t think we’d be discussing the dismissal of Walters in Vendémiaire 233. Installing a former coach into the directorate is a retrograde move. Retreads are not exactly what gets the people singing.

But there were no ideal candidates available, and few even among those that aren’t available, so Dave Donaghy tapped the former Kiwis, Tigers, Rabbitohs and Wigan coach, Michael Maguire to play Napoleon to Walters’ Barras and Seibold’s Robespierre.

That Maguire is the current Blues coach feels distasteful, at best, but perhaps this is a sign we are finally growing up as a club, maturing into an apathetic middle aged stasis of mediocrity (perhaps I am just projecting?), instead of hanging on to the petty injustices of the past. Also, at least it wasn’t Trent Barrett.

Undoubtedly, the chorus of Thermidorian old boys will be in the background, baying for blood over this decision. It will not be clear blood of who, exactly, or for what purpose, but blood nonetheless is demanded.

If we are in need of a restoration of autocracy, Maguire might be the most promising option. I am personally less convinced that is what the Broncos need and isn’t just people talking themselves into a decision they found out about yesterday, a decision that was clearly made weeks, if not months, ago if the speed of the coup is anything to judge by.

In lieu of setting unrealistic expectations shortly after the formal announcement is made, there are two early signs I’ll be looking for.

If Maguire’s first act is to punt the nepobaby Billy Walters and his contract into the Enoggera Reservoir, that’ll be something. Even if everything that follows is a total disaster, and it may well be, it’ll be worth it for that. This mooted total disaster would also still not invalidate the decision to punt Walters the Elder in the first place.

If the word “rebuild” passes anyone’s lips, it’s over and could not be more over. Red Hill doesn’t need a rebuild. Brisbane needs someone to carry the work of the Kevolution through to a post-revolutionary utopia2. There will be nods to the past, to sate the old guard, but what is needed is a new and coherent cultural force to smash the prevailing, outdated modes. If things start poorly in 2025 and there is a single mention of rebuilding, it will be the first signpost on the Seibold express to the guillotine.

The civic nightmare is dead. Long live the civic nightmare.

Intermission

In what was a pretty crappy season, there are still worse ways to spend your time than punching in “Brisbane Broncos best tries of” to YouTube and enjoying the results.

The women’s Broncos team haven’t won a finals game since 2020’s premiership. That’s three prelims in four years with zero to show for it. The seasons might be short but four years is still four years. It’s the difference between a young up-and-comer and a grizzled veteran.

It was a four team league the last time the Broncos got it done. The Roosters have the best regular season record since then (21-7), won the 2021 premiership and have punched their ticket to the 2024 decider. The next best are Newcastle and Brisbane, tied at 18-10, but whereas the Knights won the 2022 and 2023 premierships, the Broncos won nothing. The expansion epoch has not been kind.

In 2023, Brisbane did well to take it to Newcastle and only lose by six, after just scraping into the finals in fourth place. In 2024, the Broncos were minor premiers and had beaten their opponents just two weeks earlier. Cronulla lost to the wooden spooners the week before. Brisbane could not be heavier favourites.

The early phase of the game featured a boatload of Sharks possession. There was a point with eight minutes to go in the first half that the Broncos, down six, finally had the ball in good field position. It was a chance to right the balance. Pressure built over the next five minutes in which the Sharks only touched the ball to set for drop outs. Brisbane were surely on the verge of breaking the line. The Broncos eventually turned the ball over with a kick too deep. Five minutes of possession, no points and it wasn’t even close. They were in trouble.

It wasn’t that the Broncos had reverted to their early, inconsistent form, the kind that I was deeply suspicious of in the pre-season. In this game, the Mares defended well, conceding only two tries plus a third that really should not have been given. This was well down on the 17.3 points conceded per game during the regular season, the franchise’s best rate since their last minor premiership in 2021. The offence that carried them through that early awful phase into seven straight wins, running at over 30 points per game (a rate bettered in the NRLW only by the ‘22 and ‘23 Roosters), went missing.

The forwards going up the middle couldn’t get going. There were no seams around the edges to probe. The outside backs had no space or, if they did, dropped the ball. As the game went on, as Keilee Joseph and Ali Brigginshaw took on more responsibility to force their will to get downfield, the attack went further sideways. It was horizontal by full time.

Everything that had worked stopped working. Their reward is that they get a good long time to work out how it all went wrong.

Again.

News

• Cobbo shopping around for a mil? See ya buddy. Newscorp reported the Broncos have signed Latrell… Siegwalt… on a train and trial… to see if he can replace Sailor. Or maybe it'll be Hayze Perham? Ben Te’o, incoming assistant from Redcliffe, publicly asked someone to sign Valynce Te Whare. The Raiders had a sniff around persona non grata, Cory Paix. Most of this is stale, and worse irrelevant, because Maguire will undoubtedly have Some Ideas about recruitment.

• Lot of news about backs, where’s the bloody news about forwards? Reagan Campbell-Gillard alone isn’t going to cut it and he’s not even really in the frame. I don’t know if Maguire can yell Jordan Riki into a functional first grader.

• Robert Craddock wrote an incredibly stupid column - Was Anthony Seibold really the problem at Brisbane Broncos? - whose final paragraph was a reasonable thought but the conspicuous omissions and ball gargling of Seibold along the way was hilariously bad. The Sea Eagles’ subsequent loss to the Roosters, 40-16, was suitable punctuation, with some bold and italics added when those same Roosters were dicked by 30 the following week by a real team. The Broncos are more than capable of losing by 60 to the Storm as is, thank you very much. But since the Broncos fired Walters, I have no desire to vivisect this (or the player blaming one if the headline is anything to go by, I didn’t dignify it with a click) to make us feel better.

Rewind

As we bid farewell to Kevin Walters, we remember his other Broncos swansong as a player. We will forget his handful of games at the end of a pretty average 2001 season, much as we may as well forget the time he spent as coach after the 60 minute mark of the 2023 grand final.

The full game on the NRL website wouldn't load (see thesis #7) and I don’t remember things that happened 24 years ago, so we’ll just have to take these 12 minutes as a complete representation of the 80 minute grand final.

The 2000 NRL grand final featured the so-called Sydney Roosters, reprising their role as the Washington Generals of the 90s. The Blues-stacked side seemed to mostly serve as traffic cones for the Broncos offence, rarely seen with the ball in hand.

Kev doesn't feature a whole lot in this package himself but he's there and it's briefly referenced that he's coming to the end of his career, which featured six grand final wins, five with Brisbane and one with Canberra. There wouldn't be many players with a more highly decorated club career.

See ya, Kev. I don’t hate you - the highest praise I can offer a departing coach - although I will not miss you, especially as you are going to parachute back into a job on Fox.

Welcome to The Pony Picayune, a monthly newsletter about the Brisbane Broncos.

Conflict on Caxton III

There’s no way the season should have come down to this. If you can’t get up when the season is on the line, what are you doing? If you can’t get up to play your closest rival, why bother? If it is both, and you go down limply by six scores and only landing a solitary blow when gifted the softest sin bin, then to what extent can you really call yourself a coach?

One of the curses of the decade and a half of Broncos’ success is the chorus of meatheads past who thought that dominating a professionalising league while playing for a team whose ownership made salary cap compliance somewhat optional meant they were special. Worse, they’re convinced that their opinions on anything are worth hearing now, decades later. Indeed, one of their own is in charge.

The mouth-breathers are lining up in the pro and anti camps as befits whatever posture selected by their producer or editor, accentuated by a blood feud dating back to some perceived slight at the Norman Hotel in 1997 or 2005, or a blood brotherhood formed on a drinking binge at the Normanby in 1994 or 2007, or possibly both, because who can really remember the details, as applicable.

The pro-Walters camp will point to the injuries and blame the players, not understanding that the game is faster and harder than in their day and more is expected than ever was in the olden days, or that the other clubs seem to not only manage the same injury and motivational problems but also solve them. Moreover, if the players’ job is to coach and motivate themselves, then why spend any money on Kev’s salary? No one is expecting a tactical genius but where is the vibes management? The squad’s attitude couldn’t be further in the toilet if it was effluent being treated at Pinkenba.

The anti-Walters faction will point to the record: 50-47-1 with some world class players, a terrible but acceptable 2021, a finals fade out in 2022, a grand final fade out in 2023 and another finals fade out in 2024. On paper, it is still not bad enough for the board to be brave and knife Walters in the off-season and the excuses provide convenient fig leaves for a braying public desperate to be told what to think.

It’ll serve to cover the front office’s ignorance of the smoking crater where the best pack in the league exploded under market pressure and the solution was a half-hearted Piakura, business-as-usual Jordan Riki and a bunch of nobodies no one wants to see near a Broncos jersey again but still manage to appear on the bench every week. Also, Corey Jensen was there and, I can’t believe I’m writing this, Tyson Smoothy was not.

However, like Holbrook’s repeated 20+ point collapses at the Titans, the pattern is clear and established, despite the win-loss ticker. It’s just a question of when this all becomes untenable for Donaghy and co. At least, Walters will take his large and completely useless adult son with him. I can’t help but notice that others get benched when they miss tackles leading to tries but Billy is free to overrun as many attackers as he likes without any career consequences. With his resignation from Triple M, he’ll want to think about dusting off the tools or shipping out to Castleford or Huddersfield because I’m pretty sure Walters are personae non gratae in Perpignan.

The only other relief is that the Dolphins finally ended the Broncos’ season. Contrary to Walters’ assertions in the post-game press conference, it’s been over for a while but now it’s official. The hopes of thousands of fans have been mercifully euthanised by Redcliffe. The forthcoming Storm result - and it is easy to predict which way it will go - is irrelevant in every conceivable way and we are free not to care.

Try not to spend the offseason thinking about how dogshit the comp is this year and how badly the team has been managed.

More:

Thank you for reading the Pony Picayune

Last month

Round 22 (M): Titans 46 defeated Broncos 18

Billy probably did not get Maccas on the way home.

Round 2 (W): Roosters 28 defeated Broncos 12

24 points in 18 minutes of game time and if you slow it down, you can pinpoint the exact moment Aiken extinguished the life out of the Broncos. That all of these points arose directly from poor play made it all so much worse. After putting in the hard yards to go with one of the best teams in the competition for most of the first half, to blow out beyond any possible grasp of Brisbane in such a short amount of time, is disappointing but not unexpected.

Round 23 (M): Broncos 42 defeated Cowboys 18

A win! In the Big Game! Look how happy Kev is:

While the Disappointed Dad routine has come late, as it ever does with Kev, the final 30 minutes reminded us what this team is capable of doing on the football field. Unfortunately, it was not the well crafted attacking raids of 2023. The highlights were more reminscient of the individual brilliance of the less fondly remembered years of early 20s Broncos. It’s better than the nothing served up against the Titans. The forwards did well to challenge the Cowboys in the second half and lay a platform. The side didn’t panic when a few handling errors offered North Queensland opportunities to apply pressure. It was refreshing to see the side rise to the (limp lettuce leaf of a) challenge of their fiercest rivals.

Round 3 (W): Broncos 44 defeated Titans 4

This is the Queensland derby in the women’s game and Brisbane own it.

With a more established three-quarter line, comprising Robinson, Hufanga, a returning Ciesiolka and the fantastic debut of Olympian Stacey Waaka, the Broncos looked a different team. With more reliable centres and wingers, the deficiencies at fullback were less pronounced. Gayle Broughton also returned, reducing some of the dependence on Ali Brigginshaw’s game (I’m loath to call Brigginshaw washed, having done it at least twice and been proven wrong both times, but give me something to work with here that isn’t late Langer grubbers into the legs of defenders and a chip and chase that was dated in 1989). With a better hold of the ball, it all became so much easier. Instead, the Titans were the ones doing dumb things, forfeiting precious possession and after 25 minutes, tackling themselves out of contention for the victory. The Titans lost by 40 points and 662 metres. The only quibble is that it could have been 50 if Hufanga had just put her head down.

Round 4 (W): Broncos 28 defeated Raiders 22

This shaped up as a pivotal match in the course of both teams’ seasons. The performance, composed enough in the face of what Canberra had to throw at them, has established the Broncos as the contenders people expected them to be and left Raiders fans slightly more concerned about their prospects. Stacey Waaka is something special but I’m wondering if while she’s learning the game, if she can just learn the role of the 1 jersey and cut to the chase. Julia Robinson surely wasn’t the first woman to successfully execute a diving winger’s try but not many others are coming to mind.

Round 25 (M): Broncos 30 defeated Eels 24

People will invariably look past the disastrous first 20 minutes of this game in which the Broncos looked like they had sown up the wooden spoon and were merely completing the footballing minutes to which they were contractually obligated. They shouldn’t. For a team that seems to believe that 12-12 will be good enough for finals, to start flat enough that a team that may well finish last this season to put 16 points on in ten minutes, is incredibly concerning.

Still, it turns out that Parramatta are truly dreadful. Defending just a handful of sets early in the game had them on the backfoot, looking for answers and energy. By the time I was about to drop “pretty pathetic the Eels haven’t scored in 20 minutes” in the group chat, the control of the game had been wrested from the Eels and the Broncos managed to find the minimum form required to win the game. There was no danger of them losing it once they got in front. Look at the relief:

Round 5 (W): Broncos 44 defeated Tigers 14

You can trace the improvement in the Broncos’ form from a disastrous round 1, a better start with a futile finish in round 2 to crushing the Titans, outlasting the Raiders and now outclassing the Tigers in three consecutive matches. The Tigers did their best to win contact, slow down the ruck and play with energy - all classic strategies for bad teams trying to beat good teams - but it became painfully apparent that Wests did not have the engine to deliver on that for 70 minutes and that the classiness and patience of the Broncos would eventually prevail. Reading back to where we were a month ago to now is like watching a speedrun of a 24 round season in 5 weeks. Is Tafito Lafaele having a breakout? [postscript - yes]

Round 26 (M): Dolphins 40 defeated Broncos 6

They don't even realise how much trouble they're in. What until they get this spray. That'll fire the boys up to make a run for finals against the minor premiers (and also requiring another eight results to go their way).

Wait, whoops.

Round 6 (W): Broncos 38 defeated Cowboys 12. I’m glad they won by a lot, for the usual and obvious reasons but also because, without the Cowboys fans here, I’d be inclined to have a whinge about refereeing and throw in the tiresome but annual ‘is Brigginshaw washed?’ I would instead like to sing the praises of Mele Hufanga, who is no longer just a human battering ram but also has a bit of footwork, some defensive sense and can run a line. It’s quite a skillset that she’s put together over the last 12 months.

The structure of the game unfolded in a highly encouraging way: being willing to get into the arm wrestle for the first act, then win that wrestle with superior firepower in the middle of the field in the second act and then capitalising on that in the endgame and blowing out the margin. Perhaps more encouraging still was the red zone defence, which found itself more than capable of repelling the Cowboys. Unlike their male counterparts, the women’s team has worked out who they are, what they do well and then they go out and do it. It’s extremely refreshing. It was about this point last year I started to believe too.

Intermission

I was expecting another THIS IS OUR HOUSE moment from Kotoni so we’ll have to make do. Nice to see an emotion other than barely restrained aggression or a 1,000 yard stare in the coach's box.

Next up

Round 27 (M): Broncos vs Storm (Suncorp)

Treat this game like plutonium-239 or highlights of the 2023 grand final. Don’t look at it, just leave it alone and notify the authorities if you find any concerning residue.

Round 7 (W): Broncos vs Knights

The Knights have looked a pace behind where they usually are, dropping games they would not normally, as the Knights of recent seasons normally would waltz through without losing any games. Far be it from me to point out the 2023 Cowboys’ 2-7 coach is not able to drive the Knights to better than 6-3 (or worse - with three Queensland teams to play, there are no easy outs left on the schedule) in 2024.

It’s too early to preview this with any degree of certainty. If the Broncos play like they have over the last three weeks, they’ll probably win with the Knights current injury problems. If Keilee Joseph is the median mode of production from the pack, then that’s a very good place to be. A win here would move the Broncos to 5-2 with the best points difference in the league and just about wrap up a finals place.

Next month for the gals

• Rd7 at Knights (McDonald Jones, Newcastle), Sunday 6.10pm

• Rd8 vs Sharks (C-Bus Super Stadium, Robina), Saturday 12pm: The Sharks are the surprise packet of this season, having improved greatly on last season and now boasting the best defence in the competition. The Broncos have the best attack, which is now responsible for 114 points in the last four weeks. Grand final preview? Perhaps but I’d be happy to lose that because that means the Broncos will win when it matters.

• Rd9 at Dragons (QCB Stadium, Townsville), Saturday 1.30pm: Given the Dragons have beaten the Broncos exactly once, in 2022, by a single point, I don’t think I’ll be too on the edge of my seat for this one.

The final Pony Picayune for 2024 will be a season review, published after the women’s season concludes.

News

• Sailor sets sail to St Helens. Faretheewell, we’ll always have the three months of 2023 that you were pretty good. It saddens me to report that the Dragons got something right.

• Corey Oates seems less likely to join him now that Saints look to sign his nemesis, Kyle Feldt.

• Kobe to Tigers? This is barely a rumour and usually below my threshold for re-reporting but if it did come to pass, that would give some consolation that someone at Red Hill might still have a brain that can discern good from bad after the disaster that has been the pack depth this year. It would be nice to have that optimism again.

• Ezra Mam has had surgery for his ankle, as has Reece Walsh for his hand. Reece might inexplicably return for the Storm game.

• The Walsh/Oates thing is the biggest media moron story of… well, the last month. Only to be eclipsed by Billy Walters quitting Triple M.

• Clint Gutherson is on the Darius Boyd career trajectory.

Rewind

Huh, so that's where that came from: one of the most cocaine drenched sporting franchises in human history. I love the idea of Paul Morgan and co visiting America to learn about American pro sports and being like, “This is pretty good. They won't possibly know we stole it. How could they?” Listening to podcasts, bucko!

I should've known something that felt entirely too early 90s Australiana was in fact recycled mid-80s American garbage. This is like finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

Welcome to The Pony Picayune, a monthly newsletter about the Brisbane Broncos.

What is this?

You are already a subscriber to The Maroon Observer. The Pony Picayune is a spin-off newsletter that is dedicated to the Brisbane Broncos rugby league football teams.

The PP will run at the end of each month during the season, with a recap and look ahead with some light analysis. I’m not planning on making this particularly complicated. Think strategy, rather than tactics, and impressions and vibes rather than bench rotations and forward minutes. It couldn’t possibly be worse than the uninformed hyperventilation turned out by Courier Mail reporters at training and the brainless drivel on talk radio.

If you don’t want to receive a dedicated Broncos newsletter, that’s fair enough. You should be able to unsubscribe via the link at the bottom of this email but remain subscribed to the main Maroon Observer newsletter, which will continue each week in-season from here until I get tired of doing it or get sued out of existence.

I was thinking about launching this newsletter for next season but with Walters’ ass now firmly welded on to the hot seat and my love for getting down in the muck and slinging mud when things are bad, it’s important to not let an opportunity to experiment go to waste

The hot seat

It won’t surprise anyone if I state for the record that I don’t think, and have not really ever thought, that Kevin Walters was up for the job of head coach of the Brisbane Broncos.

In 2021, I thought that the best case would be he’d stick around for a couple of years, clean up Seibold’s mess, get stuck on the wrong side of mid-table and get punted for someone who can drive the club back towards the top end of the ladder. That has more or less turned out to be what’s happened, albeit with a grand final appearance in there to complicate the assessment.

Walters had enough skill and genuine playing talent at his disposal to deliver a winning season in 2022, albeit capped with an all-time capitulation over the last six weeks, and rode the tsunami of vibes to a grand final in 2023, with a similarly historical capitulation in front of a national audience.

My nature is to be pessimistic but in what I’ve written in the last 12 months or so, I’ve tried to be optimistic (and failed but I tried) that the grand final appearance, as harrowing as the final result turned out to be, was indicative that Walters had gotten it together and figured the job out. 2024 was definitely going to be another year of contention, even if Brisbane in all likelihood wasn't going to reach the final weekend.

Sometimes you just don’t want to be a party pooper.

Following the loss to the Bulldogs, Pam Whaley did a good job of opening this week with an all-time, very public whaling on the entire concept of the Broncos before the Cobbo news - whatever that turns out to actually be - broke.

You might be tempted to chalk this up to News throwing their stablemates under an oncoming bus for clicks, and it is definitely a little bit of that (see also: this newsletter), but it is also entirely justified.

Gorden Tallis’ heroic attempt to Hodgson-ragdoll the playing group into Walters’ place in the path of the bus is less justifiable. To suggest Adam Reynolds, who has barely played at all and hid his face from the cameras when on the sidelines out of sheer disappointment when injured, be stripped of captaincy for the poor results is more evidence, as if it were needed, that former players rarely have the answers.

What’s gone wrong in 2024 to bring the Broncos down from the lofty heights of all but 20 minutes of the 2023 season is normally reserved for a post-season post-mortem but it feels important to attempt diagnosis on the fly.

The Broncos lost an Origin-calibre forward to the Dolphins, another (ostensibly) to the Warriors and also Keenan Palasia, who I’d struggle to pick out of a lineup, to the Titans. The Broncos did not sign any second rowers to fill the yawning chasm that Kurt Capewell hadn’t really filled while still in the maroon and gold and has relied on Brendan Piakura for mixed-to-poor results.

Jordan Riki’s career year in 2023, like Billy Walters’ and Kobe Hetherington’s, ended mid-grand final. Reece Walsh has been in and out of the lineup and Tristan Sailor hasn’t found the form of last year to make up the difference, so he’s off to Super League (for reals this time). Adam Reynolds and Jesse Arthars were missing for longer and the drop to their replacements was chasmic.

Tyson Smoothy has been fine but is hardly a game breaker. Mam is a game breaker but has looked lost with the increasing playmaking responsibilities placed squarely on his 21 year old shoulders. Carrigan and Haas are exhausted from having to carry these bums. The third starting middle is Corey Jensen. Cobbo, Staggs and Mariner are rarely afforded the space required to flex their muscles and spread their wings.

A lot of which sounds like recruitment problems, injuries and bad luck. That’s one way of looking at it, and almost certainly how Red Hill will view it when all is said and done and so Walters will still have the job in 2025.

There are other issues. The secret sauce of 2023’s success was not the lightning attack but the staunch goal line defence, which has completely deserted the team this year.

The lack of yardage and field position is symptomatic of a team whose pack is nowhere near as effective. Good forwards get you down field and pummell the defence while doing so. It becomes much easier to find the opportunities for the nuclear line breaks that the Broncos rely on when the defence has been tenderised (see round 15 last year versus the Knights for the archetype of this style of play).

The Broncos are spreading it wide early in 2024 because they know they can’t get through the middle. Without the fatigue of having to stop the gut punches, the opposition can then better keep up with the long range ICBM attacks and wait for the inevitable handling errors. As a result of these collapses on both sides of the play, confidence vapourises, desperation builds and results erode away to nothing.

Why don’t we have solutions to these issues? If Walters is simply letting the players decide how they play without steering to more successful strategies, and perhaps offering some (seemingly ineffective) motivation along the way, while making dubious decisions (remember the players that were rested earlier in the year?), then it’s not clear what value is being gained for the expense of his salary.

As it stands, the Broncos are as likely as not to finish on single digit wins, beating out only the interim coached Eels and Rabbitohs, the eternally hapless Tigers and, if they’re lucky, a year one Des Hasler at the least successful franchise in the sport.

Walters may be a very nice guy, which is not something I usually acknowledge, but he’s a meathead who is out of answers and can’t even manage the vibe and so in other news, Brisbane Broncos poach Ben Te’o from Dolphins to join coaching staff in 2025. “Walters is also understood to be considering Parramatta interim coach Trent Barrett for another assistant’s role from next season.” Yeesh. I do not like Trent Barrett, Broncos interim coach, one bit.

If there’s one thing to be optimistic about, it’s that it could always get worse.

Thank you for reading the Pony Picayune

Last month

Round 18 (M): Panthers 14 defeated Broncos 6

After I spent a lot of time making fun of the Blues for their BRAVE performance in game 1, it would feel a little hypocritical to praise the Broncos’ very BRAVE performance in holding the tide of Panthers’ football at bay for a bit over an hour. Sitll, it was brave and spoke to things that might possibly be returning to where we expected. Then again, in the depths of the wooden spoon season, the Panthers won 25-12, so it’s just not a fixture that gives a reliable sounding of progress.

Round 19 (M): Dragons 30 defeated Broncos 24

Obviously, the score does not reflect that this wasn’t a particularly close game. When mediocre teams have the game in the bag and take their foot off the gas, suddenly springing to life is not indicative that there’s something there. It’s a sign the opposition has decided to show you some degree of mercy. Sure, the Origin guys were out but that didn’t matter last year. I didn’t expect much, the Broncos delivered less and it was after the third try conceded in ten minutes that I resigned myself that there wasn’t going to be much to look forward to in the rest of this year.

Round 20 (M): Broncos 30 defeated Knights 14

As I said in that week’s The Maroon Observer, this looked a lot more like what we saw of the Broncos in 2023 than what has been served up this year. There were plenty of frustrating mistakes but the other team was so completely overwhelmed that Brisbane still managed to put up a decent score flying down the sides while letting in a few tries at the end to make it look more competitive than it was.

Round 1 (W): Eels 22 defeated Broncos 10

Is it bad if you, a potential premiership contender on paper, lose to a team that bookies had pegged in the race for the wooden spoon? That seems less than ideal. Four of those points were scored from a length of the field Julia Robinson intercept that is cool but not sustainable, as evidenced by the only other points coming from a bargeover from the ever reliable Chelsea Lenarduzzi. The Eels’ points all came in a half hour spell through the middle of the game and given their playmaking options are not that crash hot, indicates something wrong at the Broncos. You’d hope that a lot of this is round 1 rust.

Round 21 (M): Bulldogs 41 defeated Broncos 16

*loud farting noise*

The first half was fine, poised in the balance for a late comeback, but c’mon guys. A field goal of disrespect from the Bulldogs, a team that by all rights should have spent this season in the mire with the Tigers? Give me something to work with here.

Intermission

While the loss was absolutely devastating for the season’s prospects, this is still an absolutely phenomenal try.

Also, Julia Robinson: good.

Next up

Round 22 (M): Broncos at Titans (C-Bus Super, Gold Coast)

An early afternoon game that should be prime time by virtue of the biggest market team playing its oldest rival (more or less) but isn’t because I guess Fox really doesn’t want to share that just-woke-up-from-a-nap south-east Queensland audience.

This shouldn’t be the make or break part of the Broncos’ season. Putting that fate into the hands of the Gold Coast Titans seems extremely ill-advised, given the willingness to trip over the Titans’ rakes in the last few years. I missed the loss earlier this season while on holidays but personally attended the ‘slow your brain’ game last year, so the crack of the handle hitting forehead is still fresh in my mind.

This just really hinges on who turns up. The Broncos back five and their halves are clearly better than the Titans’. The packs and benches are less clear cut but most of Gold Coast’s players would be lucky to not have their skulls crushed by Payne Haas. Keep a lid on Fifita, don’t let Khan-Pereira get outside Arthars and the rest probably takes care of itself if you hold on to the damn ball and put a little effort into it.

Round 2 (W): Broncos at Roosters (New SFS, Sydney)

With a sample size of one and some of the shadows of last season to jump at, it’s difficult to plot a reliable form line. The nature of the women’s premiership is that it is both a) short and b) low-scoring, which means that defence goes a long way and there’s not a lot of room for figuring things out as the season progresses. Either you have it figured out and win twice as many games as you lose or you don’t play finals.

The Roosters looked fine, maybe even pretty good, but not exceptional in their first game. The Broncos did not look either of those things, so advantage Sydney I guess. I expect Brisbane to aim up but to fall short because they’re going to waste a month working out what works, again. In the meantime, there are plenty of seams for a competent side to pick at. Do not look up who the Chooks’ Maroons-calibre halfback is or if I spent a lot of time praising Jocelyn Kelleher earlier this year.

Next month for the boys

• Rd22 at Titans (C-Bus Super, Gold Coast), Saturday 3pm

• Rd23 at Cowboys (QCB, Townsville), Saturday 5.30pm: Trying to imagine this group stepping up when the pressure’s on in a big game is possible but it has been a long time since we’ve seen it actually happen. Maybe 23 September 2023? The Cowboys have been steadier of recent weeks but still lack the steel of top class teams, which makes them gettable. Oh and I just remembered Scott Drinkwater dropping four thousand balls earlier this year - fun.

• Rd24 BYE: Oh thank god.

• Rd25 vs Eels, Friday 8pm: If Brisbane come into this with two wins from the last two, then they should take care of business against a Parramatta who have nothing to play for and whose club is slowly disintegrating in the media. That’s by no means a sure thing.

• Rd26 at Dolphins (Suncorp, Milton), Saturday 5.30pm: Note for attendees, this is the same night as River Fire, which should make things nice and easy trying to get to a 52k sell-out.

Next month for the gals

• Rd2 at Roosters (New SFS, Sydney), Sunday 1.45pm

• Rd3 vs Titans (Totally Workwear, Coorparoo), Sunday 1.45pm: The one true rivalry in the women’s game. The Titans handed the Broncos only their second ever NRLW loss in 2021 (the first in 2019) by two points, were beaten back in 2022 and then won in 2023 off a Lauren Brown field goal in golden point. If they’re going to get it together, beating a bunch of former teammates from down the road should be enough to get them up for it.

• Rd4 vs Raiders (Totally Workwear, Coorparoo), Saturday 11am: Provided they get out of bed on time, this is a good opportunity for Canberra to prove their worth this season and to make good on last season’s flogging handed out at the Broncos’ 2023 high water mark. Brisbane, unlikely to be in the top tier with the best of the best, need this win to keep ahead of their rivals, like the Raiders, in the second tier.

• Rd5 at Tigers (Leichhardt, Sydney), Sunday 1.45pm: A trap game if coming in 0-4 but a possible get right game if results have been mixed and morale isn’t in the toilet. Simply too far out to reliably predict but the Broncos have more than enough talent for the Wests Tigers.

Notes

• For the record on Selwyn Cobbo:

  State of Origin star Selwyn Cobbo has been questioned in relation to an alleged domestic disturbance, 9News understands.

  Police were called to Moorooka in Brisbane's south yesterday.

  The 22-year-old has spoken to police but they stress he has not been arrested.

  Others have claimed an investigation into domestic violence but without naming the player, which suggests you can skirt rules against legally prejudicing potential jurors if you don’t name the accussed in connection with DV, merely a “disturbance”. Alternatively, you can imply DV against a person without naming them because everyone knows who you’re talking about. It is not just pointless but counter-productive to speculate further, so we’ll just have to see what happens. Cobbo is not named this week.

• Hamilton resident Fletcher Baker was due to return in round 22 but has not been named in the 22. Karapani, Rogers and Sailor are in the reserves with Tyson Smoothy, who has lost his spot to Blake Mozer.

• After throwing hands in the first game, Annetta Nu’uausala is going sit for four matches, having been tried in absentia by the criminals at the NRL judiciary. I’m told it is not great to lose your starting prop for half the season.

• If you google ‘Lavinia Gould suspension’, it brings up her doping suspension from 2013 but she also copped a one gamer.

• Destiny Brill is named for round 2. Ciesiolka and Broughton are still listed as ‘TBC’.

• Maybe the Broncos are interested in Corey Horsburgh? I don’t like him but beggars can’t be too choosy and it’s clear Jack Gosiewski (or Cory Paix for that matter) doesn’t offer a whole lot but is somehow signed through next year.

Rewind

I just pulled this at random from a Youtube playlist I have of old rugby league content, not out of any particular sense of nostalgia for this game or this era, although the players on the field hit all the right buttons for me as the “new” (i.e. post-90s) Broncos.

Would you believe it was a real backs-to-the-wall performance from a gritty and determined Broncos team? Shane Webcke was the only guy left on the bench with ten to go and they hung to win. It’s not just a myth, it really happened! This used to be a football club.

Watch for a very young Paul Gallen try to start something with Andrew Gee late in the game. It was the second first grade loss in what would be a prodigious career of losing for the then-young Shark, now old media bloviator.

Also Bill Harrigan chastising the players with, “That’s not a scrum, that’s six blokes having a pow wow.” That’s a lot less bigoted than I would have assumed was par for the course in 2002.

Any pretensions we may have had about the Penrith Panthers’ dynastic run have been obliterated. Their motivational fire has not been extinguished. Their will to win is that of a cyclone. They are become death, destroyer of worlds. The Panthers play an incredibly specific style of football and that has served them as the best team of the NRL era and perhaps? probably? the greatest of all time1.

It’s about energy expenditure, burning carbohydrates to produce wins. There’s lots of running, there’s lots of impact, there’s lots of tackling and there’s never, ever, ever any laziness. There’s also a lot of ineffectiveness and inefficiency in attack but that can be afforded when there’s a several hundred metre advantage and a couple of percentage points of possession that can be relied on each week.

The athletes Cleary the Elder has at his disposal can do this like no one else. While Vlandoball has something to answer for, the ‘20s Panthers would be one of the fittest rugby league teams ever to grace a field2. To be on the receiving end is about as interesting as drowning, or watching a mountain erode to a mound of dust: seemingly nothing happens for ages, then something dies. Elemental forces are all that’s comparable.

Kevin Walters and his Brisbane Broncos are modernists. They’ve undertaken a Manhattan Project and there’s no force of nature that can’t be solved with some nukes, whether that be mountains or hurricanes. Rather than get into the trenches and play the game on Penrith’s (or Parramatta’s or similar) terms, it’s easier to lob ICBMs from their own end, two or three at a time, and turn the opposition’s chances into a radioactive wasteland, glowing green glass, shadows where opportunity and football players once stood.

No team starts with a clean cut from the previous year, not even the Dolphins. And so the Broncos started 2023 with traces of the horrific collapse of 2022 in their game. They’d be slow to start, have lazy lapses in defence and fritter opportunities with errors - as ever, you saw it against the Storm in round 11 - but for the most part, in the last quarter of the game, the Broncos would turn the keys, enter the codes and there’d be a two score lead. Before you know it, we’re on the deck of the USS Missouri, celebrating VJ Day.

As the season wore on, the defence tightened, certain brains were slowed and the highlights reels were some of the fastest accelerating men in the game, scoring tries for fun from their own 40 metre line. The 2023 Broncos are responsible for some of the most mind-bending highlights in rugby league history, the kind where you shout “No! Don't do that!” before being made a fool. See: Cobbo vs Dolphins at the Gabba, Mam vs Knights at Suncorp, Farnworth vs Eels at the Gabba. It wasn’t perfect and we saw what goes wrong when the Broncos fired duds, as against the Titans in round 17. I thought that would happen a lot more than it did.

I’m not even convinced Brisbane believe in the concept of traditional running metres anymore. They’ve gone avant garde because sure, you can compile them eight metres and one tackle at a time but isn’t it much easier to blow the defence apart and run 60 metres in one go? Why venerate tradition so? That way lies reaction.

While the rest of the game is looking for yardage backs, the Broncos have let one of their key ones go to the City of Moreton Bay and replaced him with a guy that’s more in the mould of Cobbo and Walsh in Deine Mariner. They’re undoubtedly fast and skillful players and enthusiastic runners but they also rarely bend the line with the ball in hand to start sets. I hope Staggs has been doing his reps because he’s about to get a lot of carries.

Naturally, this characterisation of their field position strategy is an exaggeration, but only just. The Broncos could rely on one of, if not the, best pack in the sport to pulverise defences before bombing runs were launched, as against the Knights in round 15, and to give them plenty of close range shots at goal. Three current Origin players, one former Origin player and a rusty gate minted into a future Kiwi international comprised the starting rotation in 2023. Whether the rusty gate stays lubricated and whether former junior Origin players and also Fletcher Baker are good enough to maintain that peak of performance remains to be seen. Certainly, Flegler is a loss but not as important as Carrigan or Haas would have been and you just can't keep all those guys. Capewell had reached his used-by date, despite having an annoying habit of doing something very good every other week. Oh and Keenan Palasia has gone to the Gold Coast. Not sure I could pick him out of a lineup.

Was the 2023 grand final an inflection point in the way the game is played, in the same way the 2020 final proved to be in hindsight? Is trench warfare giving way to a nuclear blitz? You don’t have to play the game on their terms. There’s no substitute for speed, speed kills, etc. Whether this strategy proves successful will depend on the Broncos’ ability to keep defending. Conceding 18 points a game is fine if you’re going to score 26-plus but the best teams tend to be a few points tighter.

Or will the psychic mass of how that grand final played out blow up in their faces? It’s possible but to come back from the end of 2022 and put on 2023 makes me think that the end of 2023 will only spur them on to more of the same in 2024.

Irrespective, with highlights like this, who cares if they’re winning?

Guess: 16-8, 2nd

Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer

Stats Drop

A refresher on the metrics. The projections are built from a weighted average of the last three years of player TPRs. It tends to extrapolate what has happened to the future, which catches most of the league, but it misses the occasional explosions. Last season, backs had an unusually productive year compared to forwards and while the numbers are adjusting to this potentially new reality, the system is in transition. As usual, 1-17 is as per League Unlimited with some tweaks to account for news since publication.

• Regression: The Broncos had the second best points difference in 2023. Their Pythagorean expectation was equivalent to 16.5 wins, compared to 18 actual wins. If the Broncos play like a 16 win team again, we might expect only 14 or 15 actual wins. The Broncos will need to win at least 14 games to hit the overs on the disappointment line.

• Projections: The Broncos project as ninth best in the NRL by per game Taylors. They are one of seven B-grade teams, i.e. projected to produce more than 90% and less than 95% of the Panthers’ projected per game production, the best of the Q4. There are three projected A-grade teams (Panthers, Rabbitohs, Storm - provided Ryan Papenhuyzen plays), one C-grade (Cowboys) and six D-grade (Dolphins and Titans).

• Experience: The Broncos’ 1-17 has 44% of the career WARG of the top rated team by this metric (Rabbitohs, 74.2), and approximately one-third of that total was added in the last season. Only two players have more than five career WARG: Reynolds (8.7) and Haas (5.002). Walsh should join them by the end of the season, provided he plays a decent number of games.

• Talent: The Broncos have a NRL-average distribution of talent, per pre-season TPR projections. Six players are projected to produce more than half the team’s Taylors: Walsh, Mariner3, Cobbo, Haas, Staggs and Reynolds.

• Coach: Kevin Walters extracted more out of his players compared to the pre-season average than any coach in the league (coach factor of +8.9). His total coach factor from 2016 to 2023 is +9.5, which is now the fourth best in the league behind Bellamy (+33), Bennett (+20) and Cleary (+16). The Broncos have added 110 class Elo rating points since Walters took over, the fifth best current tenure in the league.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: that was an almighty bottling. A colleague assaulted me with “a classic Broncos choke job” on the following Tuesday and in the following ten seconds that I tried to compile a defence of the Broncos, I realised that all of the most public hallmarks of this franchise over the last decade have been very much public chokings on the biggest stages the sport has to offer.

The Broncos should not have let Kyle Feldt score in the 80th minute of the 2015 grand final and definitely should not have dropped the ball on the golden point kick off. The Broncos should not have let Latrell Mitchell score in the 74th minute of the 2017 qualifying final, putting the Broncos on a path to destruction at the hands of the Storm in the preliminary final. The Broncos were disintegrated by the Ben Hunt Dragons in 2018 and atomised by the Mitchell Moses Eels in 2019. While these latter examples were admittedly very far removed from the concept of choking, which implies victory was at some point attainable, they were matches firmly in the Not What You Want category, mostly serving as dackings in front of million-plus audiences.

In the following years, Brisbane enjoyed the level of anonymity that is only afforded to very bad teams. It was in 2021, Kevin Walters’ first year, that they became a team that couldn’t close out games. Then in 2022, they couldn’t close out finals, even with a 13-11 record. Then in 2023, they became the team that blew a 16 point lead in a grand final. While the Kevolution appears to have a The Arc of History Bends Towards Broncos Victory trajectory, it’s also worth remembering that The Arc of History is a line of best fit. One could equally argue that the defining quality of Walters’ regime is an inability to finish the job.

In any defeat, there were always going to be a thousand off-ramps from the A1 route to disaster. It happens in every big game, whether it be nervous play the balls, exhausted errors, drop-outs that flop, injury niggles that become writ large, tackles that would not normally have been missed, being run over by Stephen Crichton or, in this specific case, the cost of spending so many kilojoules defending dumb mistakes in the first half and being unable to make the payments demanded in the second.

Like any horrifying aviation accident, avoidance of any one of these hazards would have left the desired result intact. It wasn’t to be. Given the choice between choking to death after an Ezra Mam hattrick and a good defensive effort of an hour and change, and being pushed into industrial food processing machinery for the full 80 minutes to be turned into a fine paste, as the 2022 Eels were, I guess I’d take the former. ‘Tis better to have have had a huge lead and blown it (or a small lead and thrown an interception), than to never have had a huge lead (or a small lead and thrown an interception) at all. Just ask the Lions.

While losing in such a manner is profoundly disappointing, even though I would then and now trade a Broncos premiership for a couple nights’ of uninterrupted sleep (both remaining annoyingly out of reach), nothing grated so much as the awful post-match commentary. The refereeing was an invertebrate refusal to enforce even a semblance of the rules to cater to the Paleozoic fossils that make up the bulk of NRL commentariat and their consumers. They will maintain their positive view of this approach until their team is on the wrong end of it, at which point they will not have time to engage in self-reflection as the rise in blood pressure will cause cardiac infarction and send them the way of the trilobite. Nathan Cleary is going to need to do a lot more than fail to break down the Broncos’ defence for the entire first half, despite being offered an endless series of opportunities by Broncos errors, and win by more than two points in a game where his team had a 300 metre advantage and 56% possession if he is to claim a title as the greatest player of all time.

To be fair, these were just the headlines and I refused and refuse to consume any analysis or re-watch the match. I am happy to concede that the Panthers are the greatest of all time - the palmares are unassailable at this point - and if any Cleary deserves credit, it’s the elder one who has gone up substantially in my estimation in a way I’ve yet to be able to articulate.

The 2023 Brisbane Broncos were still a very good football team. Perhaps as important as the results was the panache that the Broncos played with. That the Broncos can play such a fast, breakneck, electrifying, exciting brand of football is satisfactory in and of itself. Brisbane scored more tries and broke the line more frequently than anyone else, while putting up an entirely middling completion rate, but crucially also solidified into the second best defensive outfit in the competition. That they won 18 regular season games - the most since 2011 and five or six more than I thought was possible in the pre-season - and two home finals along the way was gravy. It sure beats the shit out of plodding to 17 regular season losses and zero finals games.

Kevin Walters has been given some credit and perhaps deserves more. Undoubtedly, he has had a guiding hand in rebuilding club from its lowest ebb to its current high tide. His ability to bring capital-v Vibes and to trust his troops and stay the course played out well this year, even if there were certain players who almost certainly should have been dropped more ruthlessly than they were and there were some strange decisions that were made at critical points (e.g. the Cory Paix affair) but still paid dividends.

Walters and his team wanted and delivered more defensive steel than the Broncos have shown in many years. The game plan to give the ball to the two or three of the best forwards in the game to assault the opposition and then give it to two or three of the most audacious backs in the game to find a way to score points worked pretty well. The out and out improvement in what had been the ass end of the roster, the likes of Jordan Riki, Billy Walters and even Tyson Smoothy over his brief stint, should be Walters’ crowning achievement.

Much of this year’s success was built on players having career years, an inexplicable amount of time spent in Queensland and relatively few injuries. Whether that is replicable to the same degree next year remains to be seen. If I’m only now willing to extend credit to the three-time premiership winning coach, then Kev might need a few more runs on the board.

There are few-to-no plaudits left to be written about the mainstays of the 2023 squad and little to be gained by recounting how fast they can run or how sharp they look or how hard they hit or how risky they like to play. If you have eyes, you’ll have noticed the same. I’m less concerned about losing Keenan Palasia to Gold Coast but it is a shame that Herbie Farnworth and Tom Flegler are leaving for Redcliffe. They are, however, not irreplacable. Deine Mariner, graduate of the Selwyn Cobbo Finishing School at Kougari Oval and 2023 Wynnum Manly Dude of the Year, is not a one-for-one replacement for the Englishman, given their respective toolkits, but he is more than capable of holding down a first grade spot. Flegler is an Origin forward and only the third best middle on the team when he isn’t doing something insanely stupid. One of Willison, Te Kura or something other huge young man will fill that void if not next year, then the year after. If Walters can turn Tyson Smoothy into something resembling a functional bench hooker deserving of a minimum salary, then let’s see what he can do with the talent at his disposal and the Broncos conveyor belt finally fired back up and running near optimal capacity.

The women’s season was less sensational, in all the senses of that word. The Broncos faced revenge games three times over, and lost their revanchist rematches with Tarryn Aiken and the Roosters, Lauren Brown and the Titans and Tamika Upton and the Knights. Otherwise, they destroyed the Cowboys, took the long way against the Eels, destroyed the Raiders, had a boot hovering over the Sharks before letting them thrash about a bit more, took the long way against the Tigers and destroyed the Dragons. A toughly fought loss to the Knights in the semi-finals seemed an appropriate end with a scoreline that slightly flatters to deceive about the Broncos’ performance and ability.

2023 was defined by scrappy play, as if the pieces were there but didn’t quite fit together properly. It was not a bad season’s work to be both as rough around the edges as they were and still somehow the fourth best team in the league, albeit at a distance to the top echelon. The Broncos would fall behind at the most inopportune times but, perhaps borrowing from the men’s side of the fence, would hit hard through the middle and then chuck the ball around a bit until the requisite points were found, either from Broughton snaking along the line, or Brigginshaw scheming with a kick behind the defence, or handing off to Hufanga in space and letting her get to work. Lenarduzzi showed she still has the spark and the work rate. Robinson and Ciesiolka were their usual high output selves, although the other wing spot should be occupied by Dam more often than Werner if it can be helped. Brill, Gray, Teitzel and Denman were all good but the next tier of talent down did feel at times anonymous, although most were better than Maddick.

Perhaps that’s the shadows that this team stands in. The 2018-20 women won the trifecta with consummate ease, their female rivals down the road made the grand final (albeit, they blew it) and their male counterparts ransacked the NRLM, completing a glorious return from the covid spoon (albeit, they also blew it). In that context, being good but not great is more prone to camouflage than spotlight. There were worthy individual moments but it took a good two-thirds of the season to prove that the team even had a concept, which proved in the end to be not quite good enough to compete with the best.

The Broncos seem to have more than most of the NRLW clubs of their ‘23 squad returning for ‘24, with only Brigginshaw, Ciesiolka, Robinson, Brill and Brianna Clark signed out to 2025. With multi-year contracts in place for the first off-season, the tumult of transfers should be at its most settled since the inception of the NRLW. That offers the opportunity to build some coherence, but a similar opportunity is offered to all but the Eels and Roosters, and so it remains to be seen what can be manufactured out of the component parts. That’s as much a task for the coach as any.

If both teams share a commonality, other than a propensity to kick down the door of middling teams and play fast and loose on offence, it’s that they’ve been found one to several steps from the summit. There are two premiership-winning men whose job it is to get their respective sides to take those final steps and finish what they have begun. 2024 will show us what they’re really made of.

NRLM Player of the Year - Reece Walsh. The only season preview I wrote this year was for Beyond the Fence, in which I called Walsh the club’s only important signing as a replacement for the replacement level work of Te Maire Martin and the sub-replacement efforts of Tesi Niu. That set the bar far too low for a player who, if he can redouble his efforts in 2024, will trigger a tectonic shift in how the league goes about its football. Honourable mentions to Payne Haas, for obvious reasons, Patrick Carrigan, for obvious reasons, Adam Reynolds, for obvious reasons, and Ezra Mam, for obvious reasons and being my favourite player.

NRLW Player of the Year - Ali Brigginshaw. While this is the lazy answer, Brigginshaw demonstrated once again that a) outside of goal kicking, she’s the best and b) despite her age, you can never write her off. In games where the offence refused to get going, Brigginshaw would just chip and chase to herself, in the mode of peak Wally Lewis, and let the cards fall where they may. Honourable mentions to Julia Robinson, whose absence was sorely noted mid-season, and Mariah Denman, as the most impressive middle.

Men’s Win of the Year - The lifting of the burden as the Broncos defeated the Storm, 26-0, in the first week of finals is a higlight whose luminance will be obscured by what happened a few weeks later but should not be underestimated as a marker of how far this team has come and how good they were. Pitching a shutout against a team that the Broncos haven’t beaten at home in nearly two decades, and lost to twice in the regular season, is good stuff.

Women’s Win of the Year - In a year where the Broncos did not beat of any of the teams better than them, and most of the remaining wins were somewhat disjointed, the Broncos defeated the Dragons, 46-12, in round 9 stands out as the best proof that this team might cohere into a team in 2024.

Stats Drop

Feeders

In 2023, Brisbane had feeder arrangements with the Souths Logan Magpies, Wynnum Manly Seagulls and Norths Devils. This doesn’t necessarily extend beyond the Hostplus Cup team, however, we will consider the full structure of the clubs as part of the Broncos’ farm system.

Norths announced that they were joining the Dolphins for 2024, and were immediately dropped by the Broncos, transferring Jock Madden and Xavier Willison to Wynnum for the remainder of the season. The Devils will be replaced by the Burleigh Bears, returning to the Broncos’ fold for the first time since 2009.

Souths Logan Magpies

• Queensland Cup: 2nd, 14-4-2, +196, defeated in week 2 by Wynnum [season review]

• QRLW: 1st, 7-0, +130, defeated in the semi-finals by Wynnum

• Colts: 8th, 6-7-1, -86, eliminated in the first week by Redcliffe

• WU19s: 12th, 1-5, -56

• Mal Meninga Cup: 11th, 2-4, -12

Wynnum Manly Seagulls

• Queensland Cup: 6th, 12-8, +112, defeated in preliminary final by Burleigh [season review]

• QRLW: 4th, 4-3, +52, runners-up to Burleigh

• Colts: 7th, 9-5, +134, eliminated in the first week by Sunshine Coast

• WU19s: 6th, 4-2, +42

• Mal Meninga Cup: 3rd, 5-1, +72, defeated in preliminary final by Redcliffe

Norths Devils

• Queensland Cup: 12th, 8-10-2, +21 [season review]

• QRLW: 5th, 2-4-1, -24

• Colts: 10th, 4-9-1, -180

• WU19s: 13th, 0-6, -94

• Mal Meninga Cup: 8th, 3-3, +6

Thanks for reading The Maroon Observer. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe below to receive all the latest about Queensland rugby league.

Subscribe now

If you really enjoyed this, please forward the email on to someone who might also enjoy it.

Share