A joint venture of the Jets and Jets to form the Jets
The finals prospects across all three comps, the nature of immortality and the Newtown-Ipswich bid
Welcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.
Around the grounds
NRLM
Broncos (10th, 9-12): Don’t toy with me, you pricks. If you’re going to do this and crush the Dragons’ finals aspirations, then get it done. A 12-12 team with a good for and against might get in. The Eels and Dolphins are more than gettable. The history with the Storm is marginally more fraught but if they have nothing to play for and the Broncos will need a win to have any hope of the top eight, then it’s possible. Just don’t leave it to the last minute to give up. Do it earlier.
Cowboys (7th, 13-9): Finals ticket punched. After the Broncos played in the grand final last year and the Dolphins started well this year, the Cowboys might be the only Queensland team in the top eight in 2024. North Queensland are one win outside of the top four but have two tricky games against the Storm and Dogs, while the Roosters and Sharks couldn’t have easier runs in to the end of the season. It feels like a glorious week 2 or 3 exit might be the ceiling for this team.
Dolphins (9th, 10-11): The much predicted backslide is upon us. The backend of the schedule has been too difficult and the head coach has been distracted by his next job, as if anyone considers his current one relevant. That distraction has leaked into the on-field product, which has been inconsistent to poor for some time now. The Phins need three-from-three against the Storm, Broncos and Knights to make a first appearance in the finals. That game against the Storm will seal the minor premiership for Melbourne, so you can do the math.
Titans (13th, 8-13): It’s definitely season over now. A sigh of relief is exhaled by the three remaining sickos that held a candle for Gold Coast rugby league and the audience of The Maroon Observer because this is the longest possible time before we have to talk about the (men’s) Titans again.
NRLW
Somehow, we are already halfway through the NRLW regular season, although strictly speaking, this mark won’t be reached until 12.40pm-ish on Sunday. The Sharks are undefeated but with three difficult games of five remaining on the schedule. The Roosters have the highest Form Elo rating in the league, effectively a line straight upwards from the start of the season, the only blip being that missed conversion at the end of their meeting with the Knights in round 1.
The Q3 all sit on 2-2 records, with the Broncos in the boxseat and the top four thanks to their superior points difference. The Titans, having lost both Queensland derbies, are in sixth and the Cowboys a resilient seventh.
Last year, a 6-3 record was required to play finals. If the competition is marginally more even (i.e. not dominated by an undefeated team and a team that won every game bar one), then 5-4 with a good points difference might be enough. Having two losses on the resume makes it difficult but far from impossible.
Queensland Cup
With one round left, the finalists are more or less set. Here’s what’s left to play for:
The Clydesdales have their first wooden spoon in Queensland Cup history. Toowoomba finished second last in 1998, five wins clear of the hapless Bundaberg Bears, and in 2023.
The Magpies, Cutters, Tweed, Tigers and Jets may have had been nursing some hope but none of the needed results have come to pass, so they are all officially eliminated.
If the Capras are to make their (unprecedented) third consecutive finals series, they need a win over Tweed next week. A loss will allow the Blackhawks to take their place. A draw will mean the eighth place will be decided by points difference, which is currently 92 points in the Capras’ favour.
Since the QCup went to a top eight finals system, the grand final results have been 3rd defeated 2nd (2019), 1st defeated 2nd (2021), 4th defeated 3rd (2022) and 3rd defeated 1st (2023). Getting a top four finish is as important to premiership success as in the NRL. The Pride and Devils have locked up top four finishes. The Dolphins are in line for the third but most of the rest of the top eight could conceivably grab the last spot. The Hunters have a home game against the Clydesdales, which is as easy a gimme as there is, while the Falcons play the Devils. With a Falcons loss and a Hunters victory with of fewer than 27 points and PNG could be in the top four with a negative points difference.
The Pride have already secured the minor premiership, their first since the back-to-back minor premierships of 2013 and 2014. The Pride won the second of those premierships.
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Immortality
When the world turned off in March 2020, this was the first classic game that Fox re-broadcast with new commentary to pass the time.
Locked at 26-all, with mere seconds left on the clock, Lockyer scooped a ruck infringed pass, ran half a dozen paces, put in a perfect chip kick to set up Denan Kemp to score the match winner as the siren goes. It is such a perfectly Lockyer play. No matter what the situation was, as long as you got him the ball, Lockyer had it within his power to do something to win the game.
By the time you read this, you may already know who the next Immortal(s) is/are. It is no particular secret that Darren Lockyer was my favourite player. It’s also no particular secret that I think his resume and his on-field highlight reel are more than sufficient to merit induction into the realms of the Immortals. Four premierships, 355 first grade club appearances (of which 237 were victories, a rate of 66%), the most Test caps for Australia, third most Origins, dominated at two positions. We could be here all day.
My gut says the NRL are probably going to fuck this up and not recognise Lockyer as an Immortal. Depending on your view of the whole thing, this would be a travesty of justice or a perfect compliment to the existing oeuvre.
The Immortals originated as a promotional exercise to sell port and some copies of Rugby League Week.
Any time RLW’s circulation flagged, the concept would be dusted off and some new players would be inducted. It’s always been irregular and never quite followed the same process. Things got silly when Andrew Johns was inducted five minutes after retiring and I’ll be accused of extreme salinity if I elaborate further.
That the decision making is neither clear nor consistently applied undermines the endeavour. In other sports, understanding how players ascend to the Hall of Fame underlines the difficulty, and therefore the magnitude, of that achievement and the rarity of the talent being recognised. Having a second, higher tier within that Hall of Fame should be more rigorous still to recognise the demigod status of the player.
When Peter V’Landys gets it into his head to put together an unknown assortment of people to decide who’s going into the Hall of Fame or become Immortals on a few weeks’ notice, eschewing the previous administration’s attempts to standardise this clown car, the endeavour is most definitely devalued.
We don’t know who the judges are, what they were told to consider or when this will next come up again. If Lockyer doesn’t get in this time, is that it? Or will he be reconsidered again at some point in the future? No one, least of all PVL, can tell you.
Rugby league draws a distressing amount of its mythic power from nostalgia, which should be considered an extremely distinct phenomenom to an appreciation of history. Rugby league loves rolling around in the muck of remembered things with no reference to any of the artefacts that might introduce a frightening and unwelcome dose of reality to those memories.
As a cultural institution, rugby league has no idea what to do with its history. In most tellings, rugby league exists in a hermetically sealed bubble from the society around it and is a dry topic for the recounting of premiership winners and try scoring statistics. It can’t officially reconcile the Super League war. It can’t imagine a world in which Sydney’s competition was not anachronistically predominant. It can’t even properly decide who is the best player each year.
A Hall of Fame is both terrible history - it flattens a team sport into the accolades of a handful of individuals chosen for arcane reasons - and terrible nostalgia - it is hard to be nostalgic for the exploits of Dally Messenger when he died nearly three decades before I was born. The Immortals makes it even more confounding.
But the greatest offence of all is that the NRL does it badly. For a sport whose guiding mantra is to hand as much content over to the brainless woodchipper of the broadcast partners, quite why the NRL bothers to do any of this when News Corp (or some sort of weekly publication dedicated to rugby league) would gladly produce and then recycle the same content ad nauseum for their own benefit is a mystery. It would be just as meaningful. Let a thousand pointless Reddit arguments bloom.
Fundamentally though, these are all expressions of the same chronic problem: no one of any importance has bothered to actually think about any of this.
Yes… ha ha ha… YES!
Finally! Something worth considering. Newtown and Ipswich form historic partnership to revive the Jets moniker in the NRL:
The team name will simply be called the Jets. Newtown and Ipswich share the same moniker which they will keep in the name, mirroring that of the Dolphins' decision to not have a region attached to it;
Ipswich and Newtown would be joint owners of the NRL franchise;
The team will be permanently based in Ipswich. They will train at Ipswich and aim to play at least six homes at Suncorp Stadium;
They will wear Ipswich’s traditional green jersey whenever they play in Queensland but outside of Queensland they will have a Newtown Jets-inspired blue kit;
The potential to play one home game at either Henson Park or Leichhardt Oval;
A plan to have an NRL trial at Henson Park where the Jets team will take on a fellow NRL side. The curtain-raiser would be a match between Newtown and Ipswich.
The problem with this round of expansion is that all of the reporting has been too focussed on being the “one” to confirm that PNG/Perth/Perth Bears are a DONE DEAL, LOCKED IN, CONFIRMED, and those ideas range from bad to prosaic.
As evidenced by the actions taken by the Controlling Body over the years, expansion is not about growing the game, either from an investing to increase the audience perspective or trying to deepen the available talent pool. If it’s not those things, then it should really be about kind of silly ideas about what the game could be. I don’t think anyone, other than maybe the lunatics on the League Unlimited expansion forum, has ever proposed a joint venture of the Jets and Jets to form the Jets1.
It kind of works though. There’s a suburb in Ipswich called Newtown. You wouldn’t even have to change the name!
Ipswich has a better built-in rivalry with Brisbane than Gold Coast or Redcliffe, one that dates back to the 1840s when both cities were vying to be the capital of the soon-to-be-separated Queensland colony2 but also through more recent rugby league, like the Bulimba Cup.
Newtown ticks a box for a mawkish revival of a moribund intellectual property and dusting it off for the new century and a confused audience. That seems to be a pre-req for this round of expansion, as being in Brisbane and owning a small commercial property portfolio was for the round that anointed the Dolphins.
There is a theoretical nostalgia play here, even though Newtown were kicked out of the NSWRL before I was born and the Bears were gone before some 25 year olds entered the human race. That might appeal to the kind of old men that tell Peter the Great the Short what to think, because I’m pretty sure the sweaty man himself has no fond rugby league memories, or even firmly held views, of his own, other than an overwhelming desire to be seen Getting Things Done.
Playing in alternating jerseys is the kind of dumb detail that gets attention - people will mock it, even though they are not the target demo, but the fans will not care and the sickos (me) will love it - but it’s also not substantive. It feels like self-confessed coward and supporter of war crimes, John Singleton, just tossed a text message to whomever but it also seems to have the full support of the board.
Where are the fans to not care about the silly jersey swaps? Who’s running this? Where’s the money? What interest do broadcasters have? Where are the other five home games to be played? Who knows. The journalists don’t care enough to dig because the Bears are on POLE POSITION.
A stated thesis of this newsletter is a 20 team NRL should have one fewer Sydney team, one more SEQ team, a second New Zealand team and Perth and Adelaide, which would provide a reasonable and relatively realistic geographical balance to the league, even though in a Lionel Hutzian utopia of rugby league there would be zero teams in Sydney and Newcastle would be treated with deep contempt. The order in which they are admitted isn’t important, although the sudden epiphany that Perth might be a good market by the same people who swore up and down four years ago that WA was a no-go zone, is highly suspicious.
In the real world, we will never lose another Sydney team and there seems to be little prospect of Adelaide arising (there is a potential for a shotgun marriage there I guess during a future economic depression), but if we let PNG go the way it should go (or acknowledge that there is no funding available for a second NZ team), then there is a slot for another club in south-east Queensland in the 20 team NRL. A western-ish SEQ team would be ideal. Will it be the Newtown (Ipswich)-Newtown JetJets or the Yarrabilba-Flagstone FireTigerHawks? I don’t know if a menage-a-trois with the Easts Tigers could be worked out to form a $150 million WESTERN CORRIDOR SUPER BID but that would be the kind of thing that gets a bit of momentum behind the concept of SEQ4.
Oh Billy
AAP:
“It's pretty red hot from a few, I suppose, fake fans to say Kevvie's not the right man for the job," he said.
“He took this team from a wooden spoon (in 2020) to within five minutes of a grand final (win in 2023) so I think it's pretty red hot to try and turn around after one season with the injuries we've had to say he's not the right man for the job.”
I’ve been a fan of this team longer than you’ve been alive, young man. It might pay to think back about the last five minutes of that grand final.
That’s you isn’t it, Billy? Interesting. Now remind me if your dad was the one that picked you to play.
Intermission
Oh sure we could do the Tabuai-Fidow chase or the Kini kick-off return to the house or Jake Clifford or Julia Robison scoring great tries but can we really go past Reed Mahoney getting treated like a bitch?
Upcoming Slate
NRLW - Raiders vs Cowboys in Canberra, Saturday 12.45pm
The Raiders are looking weak and vulnerable. North Queensland just beat the goddamn Titans with a field goal. Shaniah Power and Makenzie Weale both return for this one to bolster the Cowboys’ rotation. There’s never going to be a better time to get them. Tip: Cowboys
QRLM - Tweed vs Capras at Piggabeen, Saturday 5pm
Carter Gordon is starting to get hype, with the Brisbane Times bravely declaring, “He was once the Wallabies’ future. In three games, he’s screamed NRL quality” earlier in the week. I haven’t watched Gordon yet but one long looping spiral pass in Port Moresby came across one of my feeds, in a game the Seagulls lost handily. Somehow I think the Capras might just manage to contain this guy and lock up finals. Tip: Capras
NRLW - Titans vs Roosters at C-Bus Super, Sunday 12pm
Tough one for the Titans to draw after a two game losing streak against their fiercest rivals. The road back to something like relevance begins here against the in-form team in the league. There’s nothing wrong with this squad but they got it horribly wrong against the Broncos and were unlucky/had no business being in that position against the Cowboys. Sienna Lofipo should make it better. Still… Tip: Roosters.
(Tips 36 / 71)
Watch Guide
Notes
I usually don’t bother re-reporting signing rumours - the internet is full of it already - and just wait until one club or the other pulls the trigger but now it’s official: Dragons announce signing of Valentine Holmes
Breaking my own rule to relay that Tesi Niu is maybe going to Leigh where he might face former teammate Corey Oates at St Helens.
Stats: If play the ball speed means something but mostly nothing, what is a better metric?
Addendum to the potential sale of Foxtel: it makes the Controlling Body’s supposed desire to lock in a new rights deal ahead of schedule even more strange. Surely you would want to know who you’re getting into bed with and staking your future on? America's Kayo, Venu, a JV of Disney/ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery, will launch imminently (once the anti-trust injunction is dealt with) at US$43/month. That's about AU$30-40/mo more than Kayo charges so that'll be fun when Hubbl realises there's money on the table, irrespective of who owns it.
Fox Sports, AFL, NRL sued in US over alleged misuse of Meta tracking
Eighteen years in the making, Burketown cheers live rugby league return
Brisbane Design Alliance I Northshore Vision 2050. Why is it on its own island? Why are there trees in the upper tiers? Why is the perspective of the field so clearly fucked? Who draws on 1984 for architectural inspiration? Why build half a roof? Are those toothpicks holding up the access ways? Three sets of architects and no one to tell them this was a huge waste of render time.
I have done thought experiments about what the NRL might look like if BRL clubs had either been brought into the NSWRL (the BRL clubs would have all gone broke even faster), formed merged clubs that joined the NSWRL (gone broke two or three times over) or formed JVs with some of the existing NSWRL clubs (the BRL clubs would have been swallowed like North Sydney, Balmain and Illawarra) but never thought anyone would publish it where other people could read it.
For the record, the deciding factor was that the Brisbane River provided a deeper harbour than Cleveland. Ipswich wanted to bypass Brisbane and become the focal point for export from the Darling Downs to the Empire by shipping goods via rail to Cleveland. As anyone who has been to Cleveland will attest, the idea of getting big ships into the southern end of Moreton Bay was insane on the face of it.