Conflict on Caxton III
Previously:
There was never any doubt that some of the emotive fuel of the Dolphins’ inaugural NRL campaign in 2023 would be the sheer novelty of a new team entering the league. Like a central Queensland coal mine, that was never going to be sustainable. If the general expectation was that a new franchise would hatch and a fully formed Broncos clone with red in lieu of maroon and a custardy brass finish would emerge, then those expectations were stupid.
Earlier in the season, there was some mild hand wringing among some fans about the crowds the Dolphins were pulling. Conflict on Caxton II only attracted 46,000 fans to a 52,000 seat stadium, although that was a Broncos home game and so entry was 10% more expensive than the return leg. Two weeks later, on a perfect April Sunday afternoon, only 18,000 made their way to Suncorp to watch the Dolphins fumble away an easy win against the awful Knights.
In the end, crowds for the Phins were down 15% on 2023, moving Redcliffe from the second best attendance in the league down to fourth. Considering there are clubs in this competition that will tell you they have been competing in first grade for a century and have never attracted this kind of gate, I think that can still be considered a success.
In assessing the vibe, I like to use an equally scientifically rigorous method of taking note of what merch people are wearing when I’m out and about. Broncos-wear proliferated in the post-covid, post-spoon Walters era, reaching an apogee sometime during the off-season before mean regression and injuries were of concern.
I live in the northern bayside suburbs. I like it here on the border of the Dolphins domain and the Broncos bayou, separated by a three kilometre stretch of tidal water and tensions could not have been higher in Alsace-Lorraine between 1870 and 19461. I spend a fair bit of time running along the Sandgate-Brighton Foreshore and sometimes I’ll venture across the bridge to the peninsula on my bike. I hadn’t seen that much Dolphins gear this year until I did Jetty 2 Jetty a few weeks ago and a guy in my starting wave was going to do a 10k in a full Dolphins jersey. I can’t imagine many clothes being less suited to an athletic endeavour than a $170 lump of NRL-replica polyester but to each their own. I burnt him off the start line and didn’t see him again.
Since then, the Dolphin logo has been more frequently sighted, blooming in the late winter heat like the jasmine. Most days there’ll be a white Dolphins sticker on the back of a car on the Gateway or a bright red cap down near the Jetty. But the team was bad but not crisis club du jour bad, their off-field woes - such as they are - receded into the background.
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Let me begin this by apologising. I referred to the administrators of the NRL and broadcasters as “clueless” in the last newsletter. That was wrong because even though they almost certainly are cluessless, they were, I am guessing based on the integrated Budget Direct advertising, acceding to a request from the Dolphins to give the day more of a vibe. Let me add then, with a giant banner on an aircraft carrier, mission accomplished.
I had feared Riverfire - to be attended by 450,000 people or roughly 20% of the Brisbane metro population - would make getting to and from the game impossible, severely underestimating the basic capability of council and the good people of Brisbane's attitude towards taking public transport to major events, clearing plenty of parking space in Spring Hill for rich assholes like me coming from the north side. My mate got stuck on a bus from the south side and was 45 minutes late and my wife, heading into town on a separate engagement, had to do two or three detours around closed roads that were not part of the publicised road closures, but that didn't affect me, so it may as well not have happened.
The lesson for the rest of the NRL is that jet flyovers rule and will liven up even a game between two 10-12 teams. Have them come over a few times and watch a thousand people gawk at the sound of where the jet was, the sheer noise pumping the blood faster in everyone’s circulatory systems. The military industrial complex may be a tool for violent imperialist oppression but the planes are also cool as hell. I wondered if someone was going to rappel out of an ARH Tiger to deliver the game ball when they flew directly over Suncorp.
If we ignore the oven-like westerly serving as a hellish harbinger of the next half century of climate suffering and raising the temperature five degrees above the absolute maximum of what should be possible in August, which I note is technically winter, and the face melting flame throwers in the stadium burning yet more fossil fuel, as if the jets weren’t bad enough, there's never been a better time or place to be alive than a rugby league fan in Brisbane waiting for Conflict on Caxton to begin. Your correspondent opted for a Broncos jersey, instead of neutrality or doubling up as a Brolphin, and sat in a Dolphins members section because they will sell a membership to anyone. They don't even check if you're a fan first. Not even a pop quiz!
Whereas the first time these teams met, there was a sizeable neutral contingent and the Dolphins and Broncos supporters were an even mix, this edition was heavily biased to the red in the lower bowl (where I was), with the maroon relegated to the upper tiers. It's weird to attend an away game in your home town and in your team's stadium. Nonetheless, I wasn’t concerned about anyone getting in my face. Based on previous experience, these people barely knew when to cheer; they weren’t going to be aggressive dickheads about it.2
Wayne Bennett announced some frankly astonishing shifts in his lineup mid-week. Katoa to the bench. Averillo to the halves. Tabuai-Fidow to the centres. These changes had to be made out of desperation, the old man finally bereft of ideas to combat his old club.
Kevin Walters got Payne Haas back to join Pat Carrigan in the middle. The Bash Brothers surely were going to kick in the door and trash the joint. Kotoni Staggs was going to be so fired up, he’d secure a hatrick before half time, this famously being his house and all. There was no way the team that made last year’s grand final would let these old farts end their season.
A recounting of events in the game would be redundant. You’ve watched it and you saw what happened. I saw the Dolphins’ newly minted five-eighth, Jake Averillo, turn former Bronco Herbie Farnworth underneath into gaping holes in the current Broncos’ line, twice, and blacked out from a mix of exasperation, frustration and heat stroke. When I came to, the game was lost. I briefly recovered to see The Rubens were performing their Hottest 100 winning song from a decade ago.
There will be time to prosecute the case that the Walters, junior but particularly senior, should be nowhere near their jobs. If you can’t turn up with the season on the line against your closest rival, when can you be expected to turn up? There is a Pony Picayune due this week to expound that point.
Once I had speedrun the grieving process for the Broncos’ 1.000 winning percentage against the Dolphins - denial at 18 points down, anger at 24, depression at 30 and finally acceptance when there were no garbage time tries forthcoming - I applauded the erstwhile rival and joined in the Mexican waves, likely breaking the record of five times around the stadium set during a particularly dull Magic Round blowout.
I’d previously observed the relative timidity of the Dolphins’ crowd, like they don’t quite know what to do with their hands or how to be vocal in the right way. Never mind that. The Redcliffe fans bayed for blood when Kaufusi got binned. They jeered when Willison was given a spell. They erupted at full time, having secured their first win over the Broncos, by a huge margin and, to loosely paraphrase the ground announcer, “THE DOLHPINS. ARE. IN. THE TOP EIGHT!” Cue wild jubilation. Stay in your seats because we’re going to show you a replay of Riverfire on the big screen, just as soon as we’re done singing the team song.
I decided last year that my father’s day tradition was going to be breakfast by the sea in Margate, a couple ks south of the Redcliffe jetty, and then to take the kids to the beach afterwards, where there’s less shit than Shorncliffe.
Breakfast is a minor hassle. The kids are hungry and so am I. They won’t sit still and wait because they’re children but it’s early enough that there’s not that many people to annoy but the other dads haven’t got their troops together to provide us with some cover. It’s fine, we’re done in less than an hour, and one year it’ll all come together to be really nice. I might even be able to drink my coffee while we all look at our phones in silence.
On the other hand, we’ve gotten going to the beach down to a fine art, bringing what we need and nothing else. The lack of waves suits the kids but despite the hot air temperatures, the water is still a touch on the cool side and they stick to the sand. I’ll be dragging them around on a Bluey body board in a month or two’s time.
Moreton Island is obscured in the haze, so I sit in the water looking back toward the boardwalk. Every second person walking past is wearing a Dolphins cap.
This is somewhat of an exaggeration.
This is not foreshadowing.