April 2025

It's not quite time to wet our pants but it's not far off

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.

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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.

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