Fits of renewal
This week is a Kotoni Staggs-heavy newsletter
Welcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.
Conflict on Caxton vibe check
Back when I first started this newsletter, I thought regular coverage from the ground would be a worthwhile offering. I could couch the match day experience in a local idiom that might otherwise be lost to history, because the sport’s coverage tends to emanate from Sydney and cities and people and culture are constantly in flux.
It turns out that if you go to half a dozen games a year, they all tend to blur together and, actually, there isn’t all that much interesting about how often strippers pop up on Caxton Street, whether you wanted them to or not. Even Brisbane, which is undergoing one of its fits of renewal ahead of the Olympics, doesn’t change quite that quickly.
Instead, the match day report tended to serve as a review of the relationships of the clubs. Last Friday was the seventh meeting of the Broncos and Dolphins and I am pretty sure I’ve been to all of them but I haven’t written about it specifically since the fourth, the one and only Dolphins victory, at the end of 2024.
If you’re reading this, it is very likely that you watched the game, so you don’t need me to tell you how flat the Dolphins were, that their attack is still a work in progress or that the Broncos were fine without Payne Haas. You might be surprised to learn that Jordan Riki had a really good game and be equally unsurprised at how poorly Selwyn Cobbo went, targetted like a Dresden factory. Brisbane won, Redcliffe lost, and the Broncos go to 6-1 over the Dolphins.
What you might not have noticed on TV was the lopsided fan distribution. In the first game in 2023, it felt like the crowd was mostly Broncos or Dolphins with a noticeable slice of neutrals who came along to see the spectacle. The next year, everyone had picked a side. In 2026, there was nary a Phinatic to be seen.
Some of that is that Dolphins red blends in with the seating colours at Suncorp, some of that is the novelty of the Dolphins has worn off and a lot of people who were very excited in 2023 have moved on to other things, and some of that was the Broncos hosting, but Bronx Nation out-numbered Phinsland by 10-to-1. The return fixture later in the year will undoubtedly be less skewed but the Venn diagram of Broncos members and Dolphins members have significant overlaps.
The Dolphins’ fanbase isn’t just made up of lapsed or former Broncos fans. A material proportion are active Broncos fans. These Broncos fans can range anywhere from hostile or indifferent, getting a Phins membership because, perversely, that’s how you get to see your team, to sympathetic and even supportive, wanting to see locals succeed over the dreaded Sydneysiders, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of the Broncos. People, including Broncos fans, contain mulitudes and a survey of 100 would yield 16 different answers for their most hated NRL club. If you ask the right way, some might even respond with the Titans.
This presented a less raucous, perhaps more muted, vibe, not dissimilar to how recent Cowboys-Broncos games have felt when one team or the other is struggling to put a season together. Despite that, the announced crowd was the higher than either game in 2025, if only just, and the 714,000 people who tuned in at home was the second highest of the four games that have been broadcast on free-to-air.
For most people, their sporting rivalries are inherited. We are able to trace back to a time when the Cowboys and Broncos weren’t rivals, because both clubs are relatively new, even though plenty of bona fide adults weren’t alive when either club first played, and the Cowboys were so terrible for so long. The rivalry ignites in 2004 and combusts during the prime Thurston years around 2015.
That is an exception among the box office derby games in the sport. Easts and Souths may have been rivals back in 1908 but trying to understand that is going to involve anachronstic projections of how we do things now onto the past, painting an unreliable picture of how those clubs related to each other then. Even so, no one alive today would remember the spark, other than their proximity to each other and both clubs’ general odiousness. Each generation since has layered its own perspective on the substrate of the previous generation, forming a sedimentary briquette that keeps the flame alive.
In 2023, Kotoni Staggs hitting the Dolphins with “this is our home” and all of the Broncos’ overbearing insistence that there is only one team in this city - c.f. “we’re Brisbane, they’re Redcliffe” - felt over the top, almost cringeworthy. I thought that was all beneath the Broncos but they’ve stuck at it and in 2026, I spent most of the game waiting for Bart to say the line.
Whether people like it or not, whether it makes any sense, whether its cringe, ‘Our Home’ is the keystone of the rivalry. Another, it bears repeating, is that the Broncos almost always win. The Meanjin Matchup isn’t going to be like any of the others. We’re watching this develop in real time and it is going to do so under very different conditions to its predecessors. We would not have been able to embed an Instagram post into a Substack newsletter in 1908 or 2004.
Presuming our civilisation and its cultural institutions endure much beyond the end of my lifetime, which is by no means assured, the River City Rivalry will continue to develop, grow and change. Evetually, enough time will have passed that 1908 and 2023 will look similar to the people of the distant future, flattening what feels so vibrant with possibilities now into homogenised history.
Until then, it’s not going to be the same. It’s going to be its own thing.
Subscribe
If you like coverage of rugby league centred on its greatest state and, to a lesser extent, its capital city, then this is the newsletter for you.
Around the grounds
Roosters 26 defeated Sea Eagles 10. Is this the laundromat because everyone in it is WASHED. That’s it. Sorry. Except Bobby Toia. Probably not a great sign that the Roosters struggled to go with the spoon presumptives for so long, even if it was raining. Daly Cherry-Evans got booed. The best thing Anthony Seibold did for the Broncos was scaring off Sam Walker.
Broncos 26 defeated Dolphins 12. On one hand, the Dolphins were gifted 50% of their points but on the other, the Broncos only really kicked away in the last ten minutes. It wasn’t as tense or dramatic as their first meeting in 2023 but the same script was improvised on. Ezra Mam still stinks - what’s up with that? Jordan Riki and Cory Paix have been excellent, giving me no reason to curse their birth. Brendan Piakura’s return has been extremely welcome. People keep mentioning Morgan Knowles and I don’t know who that is.
Panthers 48 defeated Eels 20. Penrith good.
Cowboys 28 defeated Storm 24. Let’s hear from the fans:
A better Melbourne team wouldn’t lose a 24–14 lead with less than 15 minutes remaining. This isn’t that Melbourne team. We all need to get with the program on that. Too few players look to do the hard work. Too many fail to do the little things well, let alone adequately.
As a bonus for the Cowboys, this victory devalues the Broncos’ one by at least 40%.
Blackhawks 34 defeated Tweed 6. The Blackhawks moved the ball around, not really with any intent or forethought, and that was enough to completely disrupt the Seagulls early on. Townsville weren’t asked to do much, having 62% of the ball against a 70% completion rate by Tweed. Lindon McGrady had his career ended several times, as the Seagulls forward pack collapsed like the formation of a neutron star, burning interchanges very early on. Shaq Mitchell is probably not getting a call up anytime soon. Jack Campagnolo’s hair is starting to thin (solidarity, brother) but he still has it.
Titans 22 defeated Dragons 14. Even the 1999 Magpies won three games. Only the Titans would manage to give up a penalty for offside while in possession and they did it twice. What is the point of Lachlan Ilias? Why did I spend my Sunday evening watching this penalty-a-thon (on 2x speed)?
Super League highlight sprint, round 6. My overwhelming impression from this week is that it's not that difficult to get a major Super League team to stop trying, although some were more guilty of this than others. In contrast, Olympique went down 20 and took it to golden point. Lol, Toby Sexton was so angry down 22-0 at half time. Tyson Smoothy’s presence in Super League is as inexplicable as Tristan Sailor's presence is explicable. Buy Jason Qareqare. Wigan fans impotently booing as their team goes down to Huddersfield was very funny. What's with the weird 3D signage at Leigh Sports Village? It brings me no joy to say this but, sell Luke Polselli.
Stadium chat
I hoped they checked with the legal owner, Kotoni Staggs, first:
The Broncos have unveiled plans to buy into Suncorp Stadium and deliver Brisbane a world-class venue in a first for Queensland sport.
Exciting! Or is it?
“We want to invest in the stadium to secure its long-term future,” Broncos CEO Dave Donaghy said.
“It’s really important for our members, fans and players to have a high-quality venue.
“We understand some of the budgetary challenges that come with investing into an Olympic Games, but we don’t want to see Suncorp left behind.
“We have had preliminary discussions with Legends Global and Harvey Lister (CEO/Chairman) about those opportunities.
“We are looking forward to discussing that further with the government when they’re in a position to do so.”
So, actually, no plans, goals, dates or dollars. It gets worse. Mr Lister of Legends Global:
“Some additional seats would be great, but 8-10,000 seats is a big challenge cost-wise and probably doesn’t stack up commercially.
“We’re not seeing a massive demand for an increase in capacity, but the patron experience and the players’ experience are the two big things where we could invest substantial funding and make a real difference.
“There’s some new technology that we’re aware of. The Legends Global group is the largest operator of stadiums in the world and we see what works and what doesn’t.
I definitely want to be on the hook for upgrades to the “patron experience” as a taxpayer, ticketholder and Broncos shareholder. Installing a system that more effectively blasts Jim Beam ads into my cerebral cortex, improving the bottom line of the stadium operator and Diageo by 2.9%, sounds like a great use of my money.
Unless the thought of the Broncos taking a part share in an otherwise public asset and adding 7,500 seats with visual obstructions at a thousand percent markup gets you hot for some reason, let’s just park this idea, shall we? That is probably what the state government is hoping.
While the nation’s capital has a death trap for a stadium that will never be fixed, we’re drowning in new infrastructure. Starting up the road:
Brisbane Stadium, which seems to be what we’re calling it, will seat 63,000 around a pitch the equivalent (note that no one uses the word “same”) size to the MCG. It’s as close to Exhibition as Suncorp is to Roma Street, so that probably saves us a train station. More importantly, will there be cupholders?
Ms O’Driscoll explained the consequences of cup holders to the visitor experience.
“If you’re adding 10cm to every seat to provide a clearance, and you times that by 63,000 seats, it increases the venue significantly,” Ms O’Driscoll said.
“Those finite decisions are really important to understand. Part of the user experience and stakeholder engagement is having these discussions early, because the fundamental flow-on effect of getting that wrong is incredible.”
Walking between rows of seats is always difficult in a full stadium, she said, “even when there’s a good amount of clearance”.
“But when you’re hitting a cup holder, every step you’re taking, it’s not great,” Ms O’Driscoll said.
“Particularly if you’re spilling people’s drinks, they’re not too happy with you.”
Cupholders are the kinds of details that ordinary people tend to think are simple to incorporate but actually have huge impacts when magnified at that scale.
Finally, in a big week of announcements:
A Las Vegas-style 17,000-seat indoor venue will be built in the inner city, with new artist impressions revealing what the Brisbane Arena could look like.
It comes as two heavyweight consortia are set to battle it out for who gets to build the mega project.
Short-listed from a global field of eight bids, the Brisbane Entertainment Alliance — backed by Capella Capital, Lendlease, AEG and Legends Global — will compete against the Gather Brisbane Consortium, comprising Plenary Group, Live Nation and OVG.
Las Vegas-style means fancy, right? Presumably the main prize is the redevelopment rights of the Gabba site and this is the thing, we the people, “get” in exchange even though it is not required for the Olympics.
On the other hand, the fact that Legends Global - there’s that name again - and AEG and Live Nation might be directly investing, suggests the opportunity to fleece people on concert tickets is simply too lucrative to pass up, despite an out of control construction market because of the Olympic Games coming to town and an imminent inflationary pulse that is going to destroy a lot of balance sheets in the industry.
Jarrod Bleijie, who is apparently not a big sports guy, used this opportunity to be heard a lot, including the wonderful line:
“We’re doing the geotechnical studies for drill, baby drill, to get this project underway.”
People do love Donald Trump and his wisdom. Excellent gambit, sir. You should definitely be the political face of this enormous exercise in sports spending.
Intermission
Postcard perfect. From the Gold Coast gallery on the excellent Queensland Places.
If you need a footy highlight, check out the end of Jets-Magpies.
Hotseat
The Manly Warringah Sea Eagles have today confirmed that Head Coach Anthony Seibold will depart the Club effective immediately.
The Sea Eagles thank Anthony for his service and contribution to the Club and wish him and his family all the best for the future.
The Club is disappointed with its start to the season but remains focused on making the 2026 season a success.
Hahahahahahaha. Ahahahaha. Ha. Haaaaaaahh.
Kieran Foran has received the poisoned chalice on an interim basis. The only downside is that Manly have ruined their season - raising the question of why now and not last year - but not so comprehensively that the club’s first ever wooden spoon won’t come under Seibold’s direct supervision in a milestone anniversary season.
Seibold is an exceptional self-promoter. He white anted his way into Red Hill and did the same at Brookvale. Even after his ousting, there was at least one pro-Seibold column in a masthead beacuse if Nathan Brown got three cracks at it, then why not Seibold? The league is that silly, so the funniest landing spots for Seibold’s final tour are:
Cowboys, on likely availability of the position
Return to Souths where he was 2018 coach of the year after Wayne finishes up
Reunited with protege Sam Walker at the Roosters
I will accept that a return to Red Hill to repalce Madge would actually be the funniest but it would also mean the end of the newsletter after I self combust.
History has been made in Papua New Guinea with Willie Peters appointed as the inaugural Head Coach of the PNG Chiefs.
Peters, one of the most sought-after coaches in the game, has recently completed a record-breaking season in the UK, where he led Hull Kingston Rovers to the English treble for the first time in their history, including the Super League Grand Final, Challenge Cup and League Leaders’ Shield.
This breaks with the recent trend of hiring over the hill, past legends to front the organisation while a new, up-and-comer does all the real work and then takes over, and mericfully cuts to the chase. Presumably it would be hard to convince an already rich, retiree-aged man to spend his declining years in Papua New Guinea to fight off the Commies. That is, almost definitionally, a young man’s game. Whether Peters is up to that or not, we’ll see.
What drew my eye were these quotes, allegedly from Chiefs GMF1 Michael Chammas (emphasis mine):
PNG Chiefs General Manager of Football, Michael Chammas said: “This is one of the most important decisions we will make as a franchise. Willie wasn’t just available - he was in demand.
“The fact that he chose the PNG Chiefs, chose this challenge, and chose this country says everything about the kind of man and coach he is. He understands what this means - not just for rugby league, but for an entire nation.
“Tactics win games, but people win premierships. That’s a philosophy which is the foundation of Willie’s coaching career. His ability to connect with players - to genuinely earn their trust and loyalty - is something that we admired.
The ‘it’s not x, it’s y’ construction and the use of em dashes2 are telltale signs of LLM use. Did Chammas, a former journalist and presumably someone who is capably literate, use ChatGPT to summon up his quotes about his new coaching hire?
People are not reliable identifiers of AI but it’s possibly even more pathological if someone whose trade was writing words as recently as a few months ago organically generated that text.
Upcoming slate
No QCup or junior statewide comps this weekend because of Easter, which is now a traditional break instead of a mad scramble to inject footy into a weekend where people typically have more spare time to go to games but not necessarily put them on.
The British have decided to move their clocks forward for the summer as of last weekend and the southerners will be rejoining us on God’s own time (AEST) on this coming Sunday morning.
Hull KR vs Hull FC, Super League, Friday 9.30pm, Craven Park
Even at the greatest depths of my revulsion at the small-mindedness of the Super League and parochialism of its rivalries, disproportionate to both their place within the sport and in comparison to other sports, I still found a soft spot for the Hull derby. Both are coming off wins last week, after uneven (to put it mildly) starts to the season. FC suffered through a late comeback from Catalans but prevailed while Rovers kept the foot on the throat of St Helens, so if that means KR have uncorked themselves post-WCC/Vegas, we should have something here.
The 12.30pm Good Friday kick-off makes for a primetime game in Australia after Panthers-Storm. The smart move - and perhaps one PVL will insist on when his takeover inevitably goes through - would be for the Brits to schedule one game a weekend to roll on from Super Saturday in the NRL and get Fox to make a big deal about it to build a following in Australia. Would it work? Maybe, maybe not, but it also wouldn’t cost them much.
Broncos vs Titans, NRLM, Saturday 6.30pm, Cbus Super
All of the Queensland NRL games are rated two stars this week, reflecting weak teams, weak opponents or both, and this match is no exception. Some people like to imagine that the Broncos get an easy draw because they draw the Titans twice a year on their docket. The problem with that fantasy is that the Titans treat this like the grand final because lord knows they won’t be playing a real final and so these games tend to be more spiteful for the Titans than normal. Still, they’re going to get crushed. Formula 2 driver-ass-name-haver, Antonio Verhoeven, is on the six man bench for the Broncos.
Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer
Last week, we took an in-depth look at not just comebacks —
— but if you are a paid subscriber, you would also have read about MPL and WCL. It turns out Rooner Steve developed a similar metric to MPL in 2016. It is unclear if this influenced my thinking but I think it is funny that we devised similar metrics to compile lists of big beatdowns.
To get fuller access to this publication, you may want to consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get full access to the club newsletters, Stats Drop, The Almanac and The Dataset™, and commenting privileges. Your financial support keeps the lights on at The Maroon Observer.
If you don’t want Substack clipping your ticket or to commit to an ongoing subscription, Ko-Fi is also available for one-off tips.
Programming notes
A reminder that I am going overseas soon and so service will be reduced (possibly non-existent) through most of April. I would like to churn out the first round of club newsletters before I depart on the 10th, but we’ll see how we go.
Stats pop
The average margin in round 4 was exactly 14.0 points per game, which is bang on what we like to see. After a rough start to the season, the average margin has come in to a more moderate 17.0 points through four rounds. The 1995, 2021 and 2002 seasons have all moved ahead through the same mark in their seasons (18.4, 18.3 and 17.2, respectively).
Nickelware
Read this
Aaron Bower - Featherstone’s long and quiet Sundays in a rugby league town that lost its soul (cf recent discussion of Whitehaven)
Eye Test - The NRL’s setrestartmaxxing era and the value of consecutive play the balls and Penrith versus the field
The Sportress - Red Lines and rule books
Dominic Cansdale - The Gold Coast has transformed over 50 years. Its growth debate hasn’t
Notes
Am I the only one that thinks the league’s 5th tackle options are uniformly terrible? Even the good teams, except when an otherwordly pass is lobbed to the wing, have bad 5th tackle options. I understand the rationale for the decline of kicking on the last but, like the short dropout, it’s swung too far the other way. Cut it out and kick the ball as god intended.
Somehow, the Titans have to offload Phil Sami to clear cap space. This QCup-style roster is one that is ostensibly pressing against the ceiling, not the floor. I do not understand how that happened.
RIP Granderson (10-12 weeks recovery)
Player suffers seizures on field after tackle from ex-NRL prop Darius Farmer. Ugly stuff. Despite being unconscious for 20 minutes, “Johnstone said he spoke to Ramsden on Sunday morning and the prop confirmed he had been released from hospital. Ramsden underwent MRI scans that night which cleared the him of a major brain injury.” Unbelievably lucky.
Storm sign Jamayne Isaako. Remember the Jamayne Isaako game? Fun times. Saw the same face as he got bamboozled on Friday night There’s still an outside chance Isaako signs for the Cowboys after this and completes the Queensland set.
Gold Coast mayor yet to decide if he’ll vote on Trump tower after gifts. “‘I just don’t understand why the invitation should or could have been afforded to the mayor in the first place,’ he said. ‘And I just don’t understand why he would accept it, why he thought this was appropriately some part of his work representing the Gold Coast.’”
Presumably following rugby league’s lead of banning trans women from women’s footy in 2022 (which affected no one), the IOC is instituting mandatory SRY testing for women. This was the basis of gender testing through the 90s. Predictably, it did not go well: “Four years later, when eight women failed SRY tests during the Atlanta Olympics, a member of the IOC’s medical commission complained, “If we screen for sex by using this test, women will be screened out and men will pass.” More recently: “Andrew Sinclair, the deputy director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, said testing for the SRY gene was not a reliable test for determining biological sex. Professor Sinclair discovered the SRY gene in 1990 and has continued to work on gonad development for the past 30-plus years.” There’s no reason to think it will succeed this time, not least because the kind of society that allows its politics to be dictated by the author of Harry fucking Potter is one inching towards the dustbin of history in any case. Anyway, have a look at this if you would like a slightly better understanding of the complicated world of biological sex.
I am no longer writing out “general manager of football”, in the same way I am not expected to write out “chief executive officer.”
I didn’t know the differences between the kinds of dashes when I started writing, so just used normal hypens where others would perhaps “more correctly” use an em dash. That’s how you know mine’s legit. I have quirks dammit.