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

What.

The.

Hell.

Just.

Happened?

But also not just what, but how?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Welcome to the Phin Review

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

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

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

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

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

It is time to right that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the Phins get over the Broncos, look out.

The Dolphins are full of potential…

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Notes

• Does this mean there'll be a Titans newsletter soon? Ha, no. There'd be (way) more interest in a Chiefs newsletter and I can’t think of a snappy name for it anyway.

• Arrivals: Morgan Knowles

• Unclear: George Williams?

• Extensions: Herbert Farnsworth (end of 27), Connelly Lemuelu (end of 27)

• Departures: Oryn Keeley (terrible decision)

• Injuries: JMK out until round 6, Bostock in round 10

To the extent anyone outside of these pages paid any attention to the Dolphins, it was when they crushed the cross-town rival Broncos, 40-6, justifying their entire 2024 campaign and the baffling call to move Jake Averillo to five-eighth.

For those whose sense of the NRL is more than a handful of premiership contending protagonists and rivalry embarrassments, there was a sense that the Red Fish had let an opportunity slip by not qualifying for the finals in their second season. I thought that making that an expectation, rather than a stretch goal that might be nice to achieve, was setting the bar too high. Pre-season, I thought they would be 11-13 and finish 12th (the Dolphins went 11-13 and finished 10th1) and that would be fair enough.

Most expansion teams take a while to do anything and the Dolphins already had a bunch of highly visible scalps to build up a bit of a rep. Let’s comparing how the Dolphins fared in the second year compared to other recent expansion teams. Not everyone is the early Storm or the early Broncos, and not everyone is the early Cowboys or the returned Souths.

The Dolphins are in the middle, right on where the Reds, the Titans and Knights were after two years in the league. I think we can rule out the Western Reds as a point of comparison, and perhaps we’ll revisit this once the Western Bears enter in 202-whatever, but sitting next to the Knights and the Titans provides some food for thought about what was realistic for a second year expansion team and the possible futures ahead of this club. I did say the NRL should look for another Titans, not another Broncos2.

None of this is to comment on the Dolphins’ capability. 12 would have been enough wins to qualify for the finals with a nil difference in points, and Moreton Bay racked up 11. In more than a few games, the Phins were a Tom, either Flegler or Gilbert, short of the effort to push them over the top. One win from any of the four narrow mid-season losses would have been enough. It is a stretch to call this disappointing per se but it was most definitely an opportunity proffered but not taken.

In this club’s case, moreso than any other in the NRL, the difference between the record of last year and the prospects of this year could not be more stark. It’s a “rookie” coach following one of the all-time greats whose successors often fail to live up to the standard set. It’s still a new venture and doesn’t have the historical touchstones or rigidity of culture that they might otherwise fall back on. We have a pretty good roster with what I expect, but don’t know, to be a pretty good coach but not much more to go on.

In what will be a recurring theme of these club previews, especially the south-east Queensland ones, I don't know what to expect so I am not expecting much. Another season of survival, to set the bar and to have the organisation coalesce into what its going to be seems the minimum. The finals seem possible if Woolf gets comfortable quickly in the big chair, the roster finds a groove and avoids the injury plagues of the last two years but I would want to see something before I staked my life on it.

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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 Dolphins:

• That the Dolphins performed at exactly the level of their 2nd order wins, and one win under their Pythagorean expectation, means that what we saw on the field was closely reflected in their record. It would then follow for Moreton Bay to get further up the table will require a real improvement in performance, rather than relying on luck/mean regression.

• The Dolphins had one of the most efficient offences in the league, turning their breaks and metres into actual points at the third best rate in the competition. Their overall ratio of production to tries rate was more mediocre, only eighth best. The Phins’ ability to put points on was undermined by a lack of possession: ranking 14th by net time of possession and 16th in net sets started.

• The projections for both Toms are 40, because neither played the minimum number of games in 2024 to qualify for a Z score on which to project. If both return to the field at anything like their career averages (95 for Flegler, 70 for Gilbert), then the Dolphins will look a lot better on paper, despite neither of these being particular spectacular levels to aspire to.

• I didn’t include a table of metrics for Kristian Woolf because it would have been all zeros. One day I will be able to link QCup, Super League and NRL coaching together but we are not there yet.

• According to the PRVRS ratings and the draw, the Dolphins have a 26% chance of making the finals.

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Notes

• Signatures: Lemuelu extends to 26, Donoghoe extends to 25

• Farewell to Tesi Niu. You played some absolute blinding football for Norths, so I am willing to call your time in the NRL even.

• Farewell to Valynce Te Whare. Let’s hope you return one day because, again, we had some great times in Cup.

• Dolphins NRL bid for centre of excellence as if the local government just hadn’t paid for them to get a 10k stadium and not put the name of the city on the team.

• Family guy Feagai embraces twin challenges in Phins move

• Injured Bulldogs playmaker Karl Oloapu is eyeing a return to junior club Redcliffe following talks with the Dolphins

• ‘Time to get it done’: Inside the Dolphins’ long-term succession plan

• Anglo American to review De Beers value amid weak diamond demand. We’re doing this again.

The Dolphins were 7-5 after round 13, the approximate halfway point of the 2023 season. The next dozen games would only yield another two victories and ten defeats. Of those ten defeats, five were horrific pantsings, two were respectable losses to the eventual grand finalists but three were losses by a total of just four points, including two against the two worst teams in the NRL. While a 9-15 season could have easily been an 11-13 season or even a split 12-12, it would not have been sufficient to make the finals, nor would it have it particularly changed the tenor of the campaign.

If you ignore the on-field results from June onwards, Redcliffe’s first season in the NRL was a success. Piling up the signature wins in the first half of the season was a stroke of luck - getting to nine wins by taking a scalp every two to three weeks would have seemed far less impressive - and by the time the focus shifted to Origin and then to finals, the Dolphins’ golden start was well established and the horror finish was of no consequence. We did get a firm understanding of what the Dolphins’ foundational philosophy was going to be and it was straight out of the Bennett School. Carrying a noticeable talent deficit to most of the league, the Phins served up a simple and stoic flavour of football most weeks.

The Red Fish would always take what you give them. Lacking an outstanding skillset, the offence wasn’t sparkling, except on the rare occassion someone decided to go off-script and Make Something Happen, but it could be effective. While the defence might be busy conceding a million points, the offence would generally make the most of the chances presented and at least put something vaguely respectable on the board.

But the defence was bad. It was really, really bad. There would be afternoons that clearly got away from the Dolphins very quickly and they’d punch in the clutch and roll home. They knew they weren’t getting to the post-season, most of them were being held together with Elastoplast and duct tape and it was better to save that energy to fight another day.

The Dolphins probably didn’t experience many more injuries than the typical NRL franchise goes through in a season but the drop-off in quality from the starting rotation to the next tier down of player was significant. Depth was their weakness, and that turned out to be problem for more than a few NRL sides in the expanded competition, while bearing in mind their starting lineup was good enough to have most pundits tipping the Dolphins for the spoon. Fortunately, there were too many other disasters-in-waiting and the Bennett School would be enough to make that an unrealistic prospect.

It was clear at the time, and moreso on a re-watch, just how bad the back five was. Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow started the season brilliantly and then began to fade as the Dolphins’ supernova ran out of fuel. My pet theory is that Tabuai-Fidow picked up a niggle mid-season and due to the absolute dearth of depth, soldiered on and his move to centre was part of managing the amount of load he had to take on. My less preferred but still plausible theory is that he can ride the highs but isn’t great at the lows, and his switcharound was a shot across the bows from Bennett to make an attitude adjustment.

While the injury crisis the Dolphins faced impacted the backline, there were often week-to-week changes in the back half of the season that seemed to be performance based, rather than health based, only to be reset a few weeks later. If there’s anything to criticise Bennett for, it’s this and consequently, making the job that much harder on the players.

Bringing Farnworth and Averillo to the centres for 2024 will immediately and massively improve the quality of this platoon. 2023’s top try scorer, Isaako will retain his spot in the #2 jersey, Tabuai-Fidow will return as starting fullback and so only the #5 jersey is up for grabs in a full strength Dolphins line-up. Whether that goes to Tesi Niu, and most readers will be already familiar with my feelings towards him, the young aerial threat of Jack Bostock, a slimmed down Valynce Te Whare or the bottom of the barrel options in Edrick Lee (2020 was an Olympic cycle ago) and Robert Jennings (remember that try he blew in the monster comeback against the Titans?), Bostock is probably the best pick long term but he will have to perform to keep his spot.

Having Te Whare and Aitken in the three-quarters depth chart and, theoretically, Nikorima or Farnworth being able to switch back to fullback, and O’Sullivan, Katoa, Nikorima, and Milford chasing two halves jerseys, and the bright but young prospect of Harrison Graham shadowing Jeremy Marshall-King is the kind of talent structure the club needs to build on to continue moving forward. The Phins had the middle of the pyramid but neither the apex nor the base but now Kippa-Ring has started to fill those gaps. It will not be an impenetrable defence in 2024 but the side will stand up better against the cyclonic conditions of the NRL than the inaugural version did.

With a vastly upgrade backline, a tuned up forward pack adding an Origin-calibre Tom Flegler and the return of Tom Gilbert, and a season under the belt of Katoa, all signs look promising for the Dolphins. Bennett’s last year tends to see clubs punch above their weight but the Dolphins might be a few kilos short of the finalists’ weightclass.

It feels more like a year of consolidation, a campaign of turning wins on emotion into wins on skill, and turning narrow losses into narrow wins, and keeping the beatings to under two dozen points. It may not feel like a leap forward, adding at most three wins and stuck in a purgatory outside the finals waiting room, but it’s a more stable foundation on which to build the Dolphins and their future.

Guess: 11-13, 12th

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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.

I haven’t included Elo charts for the Dolphins this year for the fairly obvious reason that we only have one season to chart.

• Regression: The Dolphins had the sixth worst points difference in 2023, albeit it was better than the Raiders’, who made the eight. Their Pythagorean expectation was equivalent to 9.8 wins, compared to 9 actual wins. If the Dolphins play like an 11 win team, we might expect 12 actual wins. The Dolphins will need to win at least 11 games to hit the overs on the disappointment line.

• Projections: The Dolphins project as 13th best in the NRL by per game Taylors. They are one of six D-grade teams, i.e. projected to produce less than 85% of the Panthers’ projected per game production, and the worst of the Q4. There are three projected A-grade teams, seven B-grade (Broncos), one C-grade (Cowboys) and five other D-grades (Titans, Raiders, Bulldogs, Dragons and Tigers).

• Experience: The Dolphins are a moderately inexperienced team, with 58% of the career WARG of the Rabbitohs, which is 11th in the league. While Wallace (5.5) and Jesse Bromwich (7.7) are the most experienced by this metric, most of the really exciting players are in the range of two to four career WARG.

• Talent: The Dolphins’ distribution of talent is marginally below average compared to the NRL average, with fewer of the top end players and more of the bottom. Six players are projected to produce more than half the team’s Taylors: Tabuai-Fidow, Isaako, Farnworth, Bostock1, O’Sullivan and Flegler.

• Coach: Wayne Bennett extracted slightly more than league average out of his playing group compared to their pre-season expectations in 2023. His coach factor of +1 was the seventh best on the season and he has the second best in the NRL (+20) from 2016 to 2023. The Dolphins have lost 38 class Elo rating points during Bennett’s tenure, mostly due to being a first year expansion team, which is the second worst of the 14 current NRL tenures, mostly because the worse ones have been fired already.

The Dolphins’ ascension to the National Rugby League was met with a mixture of indifference, ridicule and hand-wringing1. The jerseys, both home and heritage, were ugly, with the wrong colours and the wrong sponsorship integration and the wrong logo design. There was no geographical component to the name - just, The Dolphins - despite ostensibly being the second Brisbane team and taking the City of Moreton Bay’s money. They were going to be located within spitting distance of one of Australian sport’s pre-eminent franchises, who had no previous compunctions about running rivals out of town and (theoretically, at least) had a strangehold on the locals, instead of somewhere more exotic, like Perth. The roster was a mix of has-beens and never-beens and the Dolphins could not land a marquee signing. It was a right mess.

As we were in the process of adjusting to a 17-team NRL, a few things became clear2. There is a stark difference between how the general public approaches the NRL and how the members of the NRL’s online communities approach the league. Due to an excess of time and mental energy invested, the Online overthink every detail about expansion while simultaneously Dunning-Krugerising their own understanding of the sport, its marketing and how to interact with normal, everyday people. The Dolphins were never about appealing to, or even considering, anyone who’s ever used Reddit or Twitter, let alone anyone who knows what a Discord or a Substack is.

In 2022, there were a lot of latent rugby league fans in Brisbane. The Broncos, or any of the other existing teams, just didn’t do it for them. Pick one or a combination of the Broncos’ history, either in annihilating the BRL or trying to do the same to the NSWRL; the other teams being out-of-town and mostly too Blue for a potentially parochially Maroon fanbase (or both in the Titans’ case); Thursday or Friday night games that are inaccessible for a not insignificant portion of south-east Queensland; unlikeable staff and players; an aversion to the patina of success in the absence of its sustainment; and/or contrarianism for its own sake.

Note that whether the Dolphins were the Redcliffe or Brisbane or Moreton Bay or Queensland or Sunshine State Dolphins is not on that list. Also note that whether the home jerseys looked like vanilla Coke cans was not a concern. The proximity to the Broncos was, if anything, a feature and not a bug. Brisbane, a city of 2.5 million people, probably should have a weekly appearance from the top flight of its favourite winter code and if that’s at Suncorp on Saturday or Sunday, so much the better.

While the roster was at least one legitimate star of the sport shy of anything approaching competitiveness and had the depth of Margate Beach at low tide, it’s also true that the worst team is usually not the one that wins the wooden spoon. In a salary capped and salary floored league as tightly regulated as the NRL, it is the teams that fall apart that taste the timber. For a new team seeking to establish itself with the greatest coach of all time, that was almost certainly never going to be the case. That re-doubled when there was, and still is, at least three Sydney clubs absolutely begging for the opportunity to collapse in on themselves because the NRL is the exemplar of the Iron Law of Institutions.

The Redcliffe Dolphins won the inaugural Artie Legacy Medal - the Arthur Beetson Medal being the name of several other awards - defeating the Sydney Roosters, 28-18, on a perfect late summer afternoon at Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium. It was the Dawn of the Dolphins. The Phins showed a cohesion and willingness to compete that would become the trademarks of this foundation team. More Signature wins followed this milestone. Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow crossed the line with three minutes to go to put the Dolphins in front of the Raiders in their first home game at Redcliffe. The Knights laid down their arms and the Dolphins ran in tries for fun, racking up a 36-20 score in Newcastle.

The first win, the first win at the spiritual home and the first road win were all ticked off in the space of three weeks, which brought the Dolphins to their first local derby. In terms of club match attendances in 2023, the 51,000 that attended Conflict on Caxton was only exceeded by the grand final and the Broncos preliminary final. In terms of TV ratings, the 1.4 million that tuned in was the most watched regular season match ever. It was a big moment for both teams. The match played out as a tense affair in which it looked like the Dolphins might spring an upset against their more fancied cross-town rivals as late as the 65th minute. In the end, Kotoni Staggs put an end to that but the Dolphins lost no admirers on that night.

A slide down to what we might have expected to be more of the Dolphins’ level followed, copping a 38-12 hammering from the Dragons that precisely no one cared about and a 36-14 hammering from the Rabbitohs that precisely everyone expected. In between these losses, the Dolphins beat the Cowboys, 32-22, in Townsville and beat the Titans, 28-26, in Brisbane in one of the greatest comebacks of all time. The Dolphins were being described with words we normally associate with building materials - as hard as concrete, a steely resolution - but also proving to be one of the most dangerous teams to play, outting a number of frauds in the first half of the year, provided the game was in Queensland.

The results alternated from good to bad: a one point loss to the Raiders in Wagga, a 20 point victory over the Sharks, an eight point loss to Melbourne, a 14 point revenge win over the Dragons. Around the middle of the Origin period, where the NRL gets especially soggy and the injuries and absences started to pile up, so did the defeats. Heavy losses to the Warriors, Sea Eagles and Eels followed and ended any finals considerations. The Dolphins bottomed-out and provided a more comprehensive performance in Vendetta on Vulture, wherein the Dolphins briefly took the lead over the high flying Broncos in the second half, and then snapped the streak by winning the second Brawl on the Beach over the Titans.

While it was now certain in mid-July that the Dolphins would not feature in September, they had been playing with house money since March. A cursory loss to the defending premiers was followed up with a strange run of three close losses in four games: one to the Bulldogs, two the Knights and one again to the Tigers. One final smashing from the Cowboys kept North Queensland’s season (briefly) alive before the Dolphins hosted a Warriors home game at Suncorp in front of 35,000 people to put the sword through their NSW Cup side. A final high note to cover the blemishes of what had been a good season with what would have otherwise been a sour second half.

Injuries and then the absences of Sean O'Sullivan, Jeremy Marshall-King and Tom Gilbert, all leaders of this team in different roles, are as good an explanation for the drop-off in form as emotional exhaustion or the rest of the league catching up to the Dolphins. Connelly Lemuelu has the potential to join a long list of “How could they let him go?!” players from North Queensland, joining Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow, who found another gear to get to Origin and (I think) was beset by niggles following. Jamayne Isaako became what we thought he might have been after 2018, albeit on the wing, a position he never seemed to have an affinity for. Conversely, Isaiya Katoa is exactly who I thought he was from his brief time in the NSW Cup finals.

There was the old man pack, of whom Ray Stone (age 26), was the youngest. Stone was joined by the Bromwiches, Mark Nicholls, Jarrod Wallace, Herman Ese'ese and Felise Kaufusi. While Kaufusi showed a delightful tendency to axe opposition players at random and Wallace showed occasional flashes of why he considers himself a frustrated five-eighth, these old bodies were somehow among the least productive forwards in the league and the most important to their team. They set the pace, they set the tone and they set the effort.

While he’s not quite at starting NRL standard due to his frame, his skills and his age, Kodi Nikorima still had a good season, refreshed by a shift to Rockhampton, then down to Moreton Bay. We saw rather too much of Anthony Milford. It’s a shame that there were few alternatives to Euan Aitken - who needs to find another leg up or hope that the defensive deficiencies of Valynce Te Whare are never fixed to retain his place in this roster - and Brenko Lee in the three-quarters but I mostly remain mystified that Tesi Niu not only is still in the league but was handed an extension.

The next two seasons are about the transition to and then the commencement of the post-Bennett era at the Dolphins. The trope is that Bennett leaves every club a smoking ruin but he is such a powerful force for good football - you can make what you like of his personal decisions - that every club is worse off for his departure. Even if Kristian Woolf is as good as I believe him to be, the absence of the best to ever do it in rugby league is going to be hard to fill. Woolf may have to bank on the roster improving enough by 2025 that no one will credit the difference.

That transition will have to feature an evolution from the simple Bennettian gameplan of maintaining possession, tough one-out hit-ups and holding the defensive line as best as possible - a shield that had numerous rapier-like holes poked in it by the better teams around the seams created by the edge-centre interface on both sides - that relies on effort, cohesion and application, supplemented with pure emotional motivation, to something more sophisticated. The league is transitioning from raw yardage to raw possession to being dominated by teams that can either deploy a lean mix of strength (Penrith) and speed (Brisbane). Naturally, the evolution of the roster and the evolution of tactics go hand-in-hand and that will have to be Woolf’s focus as he takes the reins.

In the end, it was all fine. The prognostications of a wooden spoon were wide of the mark because there were always too many teetering edifices elsewhere. The Dolphins found a Brisbane TV audience and attendances equivalent to about three-quarters of the Broncos’, which is to say the Dolphins were instantly a better commercial draw than all of the non-Broncos teams in the league. A 9-15 season and thirteenth on the ladder was probably unders if anything and a legacy of a season where injuries were too common, exposing a lack of depth that any expansion operation would have.

But it’s also worth considering that the Titans were 10-14 in their first season. In 2007, Gold Coast finished 12th on the ladder with a -150 points difference. This is the Dolphins’ first season and it’s too early to claim a permanent and everlasting success. We will have to see who turns up and in what numbers next season, now that the novelty has worn off and simply not finishing last is insufficient and their immediate rivals have gone as far as the last game of the year, to have a better idea of what course the Dolphins might plot through the remainder of the 20s. It probably won’t be until the 30s that we will understand if they are truly here to stay, to become part of the NRL furniture, and if the 1965 premiership might one day be recognised as on par with that of St George’s, or if they will be wallpaper.

Player of the Year - Isaiya Katoa. I suppose Katoa will have to get used to never getting any attention due to a) not playing in Sydney and b) the Dolphins living in the Broncos’ media shadow but he is 19 and I don’t think he got anywhere near enough credit for being the starting halfback in a brand new and quite bad team and carrying himself with a quiet professionalism and skill. Honourable mentions to the courage with which Jamayne Isaako put his career back together and the hitherto unknown skill with which Jeremy Marshall-King led the team.

Win of the Year - In round 1, the Dolphins defeated the Roosters, 28-18. Until the Dolphins beat the Broncos, it’s hard to think of anything else that could meaningfully compare. Between the custardy brass of the jerseys, the late afternoon summer sun and the result, this game has taken on a shimmering gold haze in my memory. Buying tickets to this game was one of the better decisions made in 2023 and those tickets will only be harder to come by as the club progresses.

Stats Drop

Feeders

In 2023, the Dolphins had feeder arrangements with the Redcliffe Dolphins and Central Queensland Capras. This doesn’t necessarily extend beyond the Hostplus Cup team, however, we will consider the full structure of both clubs as part of the Dolphins’ farm system. While there was an arrangement with the PNG Hunters to offer some NRL-level training to prospects, this is not a true feeder arrangement.

In 2024, Norths will leave the Broncos to join the Dolphins, collating the Queensland Cup teams south of Mackay and north of the Brisbane River, excluding Sunshine Coast who will remain with the Storm until 2027, under the red banner of the Dolphins.

Redcliffe Dolphins

• Queensland Cup: 5th, 11-6-3, +121, eliminated in week 1 by Sunshine Coast [season review]

• Colts: 5th, 9-5, +248, eliminated in week 3 by Easts

• WU19s: 7th, 4-2

• Mal Meninga Cup: 2nd, 5-1, won the premiership defeating Townsville

Central Queensland Capras

• Queensland Cup: 4th, 12-6-2, +124, eliminated in week 3 by Easts [season review]

• QRLW: 7th, 1-6, -100

• Colts: 12th, 3-10-1, -144

• WU19s: 8th, 3-2-1, +66

• Mal Meninga Cup: 14th, 0-6, -146

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