Welcome to the Pony Picayune, a regular, independent newsletter about the Brisbane Broncos.
The Pony Picayune is often not just wrong, it’s also rarely early. The theme of each of last season’s editions reflected the most recent result, a monument to short term bias and a shortsighted inability to see the forest for the trees. Surely when the Broncos went down 34-6 to the Sea Eagles at the end of May, that was it.
While the subsequent results disproved each of the previous edition’s theses, the theses did reflect the prevailing sentiment of the time. I feel less silly about being wrong only because being disappointed is the rational response to a 28 point loss to an average Manly team coached by a guy who is now fired. Everyone who saw it felt the same.
People like things in threes: the father, the son and the holy ghost, or the maid, the mother and the crone, or the rule of thirds and the rule of three. In the pre-season, I posited that the Broncos could be good, bad or mediocre. Halfway through the third game of this season, that one against the Storm with the Broncos down 14-0 at half time, following a bizarre performance against the Eels, 40-32, and an absolute battering at the hands of the Panthers, 26-0, I thought the best case scenario might be that we’d see all three versions of the Broncos at stages through the year. A trinity of uncertainty, if you will, and this was the ugly leg.
That wasn’t right. Once the Broncos stopped dropping the ball quite so much, they began conceding fewer and scoring more points. Once the Broncos dropped Shibasaki and got Piakura back, the edges tightened up and the staunch defence the real aficionados of the Broncos have come to appreciate over the last few seasons returned. Once injuries forced a tweak to the playmakers, things started to click into place and the obviously blinding attack that everyone has noticed over the last few seasons returned.
The Broncos are basically good. They’re going to have bad games but even a 26 point bashing from the Panthers in round 1 looks fine considering only one other team has gotten any closer (the Sharks lost by 20) and even if you changed nothing else about that game than reducing the handling errors to a more typical rate, the Broncos would have only gone down by a respectable 12 to our erstwhile overlords.
There’s a case, maybe not a strong one, that Brisbane are the second best team in the league. Whether they can close that gap to Penrith, as they did in 2023, or eclipse them, as they did in 2025, that’s what the next five months of the season is to figure out. Figuring out not just the if but also the how is the job of the coaching staff. Taking down the Panthers in 2026 is not going to be a straightforward task and while there has been a considerable tumult in that part of the club, they’ve shown themselves up to the task before.
Until then, there’s an injury crisis to deal with. Here’s what the NRL’s official injury report has:
Reece Walsh - broken face, return round 11
Ben Hunt - knee, return round 14
Adam Reynolds - groin, return round 8
Grant Anderson - knee, return round 16
Del Hoeter - broken fibula, return round 15
That’s a lot of experience, replacement level skills and Reece Walsh on the side lines with our autistic king, Billy Walters. The Broncos have made do without Walsh before, just as they made do with Haas against the Dolphins, but it’s not the life to which we’ve grown accustomed.
That the first drop fullback is Jesse Arthars is not particularly encouraging but better than having to rely on Selwyn Cobbo or Tristan Sailor (excluding 2023). It’s possible Arthars’ time in the wilderness has successfully communicated that he can be part of this team but only if he wants to be. If not, there’s others who want that job.
The halves are a bigger challenge. Ezra Mam has put together maybe 50 good minutes in 400 so far and will now have to drag around Tom Duffy, Josh Rogers or another much more exotic combination, thrilling only in its possibilities of chaos or new levels of incompetence. Without Walsh, that’s a lot of playmaking that’s going to have run through a guy that, in the absence of being booed for nearly manslaughtering a child, still needs to find form.
Anyone who can tell you what is going to happen with certainty, especially without a Tuesday team list, is lying. All we can do is look at the recent past and guess at a near future. The next few weeks are going to be challenging but with the disruption to the heart and soul of the roster, that’s hardly surprising and it will be hardly representative of what this team can be.
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