So stereotypical as to be atypical
The Olympic venues have been finalised, set restarts are ruining the game (again) and I read some books
Welcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.
Olympic City: Locked In
As of yesterday, the Olympic venues have finally been finalised. After the initial proposal and then two subsequent reviews, so much of what was confirmed was leaked in advance. So I think it falls a bit flat like the PNG team announcement but it is possible that this is how you’re learning that the rowing is going to Rockhampton (despite the crocodiles), hockey to the GC and archery to Maryborough.
The announcement was drenched in Courier Mail advertising, which seems an appropriate tone setter for a LNP-led delivery. Undoubtedly, their cronies (to be fair, Labor also has cronies) are rubbing their hands together at the potential for profit at the taxpayer expense. ‘The whole world is watching and we’re going to be pretty embarrassed if we don’t sort this out’ is going to justify a lot of notices of delay and contract variations. Witness: Queensland government breaks election promise of rail line to Maroochydore, presumably to sell off the corridor to real estate developers before we do the same song and dance in another couple decades when someone realises the commercial hub of a large city should be connected to the rest of the region.
Some other quick hits:
Getting on with the Gabba demolition in the first instance would have been better and cheaper for everyone. Prevarication is wasted money.
Vic Park seems fine, although it’s a bit far from either Roma Street (it’ll be interesting to see how it goes on dual Broncos/Lions gamedays) or Exhibition stations and there’s no adjacent nightlife precinct other than the Normanby or maybe King Street. A train and a metro station would do wonders and be much easier than doing an accessibility upgrade from either of those stations.
Extremely wary of private sector funded Brisbane Arena “at a fraction of the cost” but the location seems fine once Cross River Rail finishes.
Intrigued by the upgrade to the Showgrounds, reviving idle thoughts of QCup Magic/Heritage Round.
At least we don’t have to go to QEII.
Then, six hours after the announcement, Peter V'Landys opened his big mouth:
ARLC boss Peter V’landys urged the Queensland government not to forget rugby league, saying the future of Magic Round and a possible NRL grand final hinged on an upgrade of Olympic outcast Suncorp Stadium…
By contrast, the NRL’s key rival, AFL, have been given the supreme prize of a new 63,000 seat stadium at Victoria Park which they will use post Games…
“We will be welcoming an announcement as surely the Queensland government won’t forget the most watched sport in Australia,” V’landys said.
“One of Queensland’s major events is Magic Round.
“For Queensland to retain Magic Round, and have any chance of having a grand final, that is all contingent on Suncorp Stadium also getting a major upgrade.
“We have no problem with other sports receiving funding for stadiums but don’t forget the No. 1 sport in Australia.
“Rugby league has to be given the same opportunity.”
Oh my fucking god, you giant embarrassment. You had your chance. There were TWO reviews. They let this run for a hundred days. All you had to do was pick up a copy of the Courier Mail and then pick up the phone to Crisafulli. You were too busy with McDonalds ads, playing Pacific Cold Warrior and Western Bears whisperer, you forgot to vest your interest in the fucking OLYMPIC GAMES.
Notwithstanding that there are upgrades to Barlow Park in Cairns and Sunshine Coast Stadium, both of which will benefit rugby league and their communities, but other than the occasional game, there’s nothing in that for the NRL. To the extent that V'Landys even knows where those places are or the names of the teams that play there, if it's not the NRL, evidently it's not rugby league.
I really could not write a neater summation of the man’s ignorance or the game’s Sydney-centrism. By the way, how's the attempts going to get rugby league into the Olympics? They must be on track based on the nothing that’s been heard in the four years since and the total collapse of GAISF.
If PVL had any smarts, and either he doesn't or he is so enamoured with his personal profile that he tried to make this about him - not sure which is worse, he would suggest that Brisbane has enough mixed use, half occupied developments around town but the land the Gabba is currently occupying would make a great location for a 25k rectangular stadium. We must RETVRN.
Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer
If you’d like to receive future issues of The Maroon Observer in your inbox, put your email in the box below and hit subscribe.
Really like this newsletter? Consider an upgrade to a paid subscription or chuck us a tip on Ko-Fi.
Thank you to all of my subscribers, you’re keeping this thing going.
Mea culpa
Last week, I wrote a brief thing about how the short drop out rule was changing the game again, reminiscient of the change in 2021. I had the vibe right but the cause wrong. Courtesy of Rugby League Eye Test, we discover it’s set restarts, again:
It's not just that scoring is up overall either, it’s happening at specific segments of a match. Looking at the above chart, 2025 starts to veer away from other seasons around the 25 minute mark, and again after about 10 minutes of the second half…
So why is this happening? I alluded to it earlier, but the issue seems to be the volume of repeat sets teams are getting, and where they’re getting them. If you weren't a fan of the 2021 season you probably won't like where this is going.
To bring you behind the curtain, I finished last week’s essay and thought it read well enough to publish but I didn’t wholly buy the thesis I was advancing. If you read it at all, you will have noted the equivocation. This happens from time to time. In this specific case, it was partly because I think that blaming the set restart is surely this time too facile an explanation and partly because I don’t track them closely because I think they’re stupid. Turns out it’s exactly the problem I thought it was in 2020 and always will be.
Anyway, read this from someone who doesn’t have my specific blindspots and judge for yourself: The reason for high scoring NRL matches is clear
Around the grounds
Storm 30 defeated Panthers 24. Boy, this got ugly quick. Not the game but the Fox call was worse than the Storm’s ability to slide to the edge or the Panthers’ capacity for stopping a pretty simple red zone attack. I’m not listening to praise for Penrith’s REFOOSAL TO GO AWAY or their BRAVERY AND RESILIENCE when this is a club that’s won four premierships in a row that is the middle of (at that point in the game) a streak of one and a half losses. I don’t care if Salford’s second team is out there in pink jerseys. Don’t give me that no one believed in us shit. The Storm were crap by their own standards and still got home. More useful and better anlaysis in Read This below.
Broncos 26 defeated and Cowboys 16. Two observations from attending this game. The first is that I sat in front of a row of Cowboys fans that I would described as being stereotypical to the point of being on the nose; so stereotypical as to be atypical, even. One was blaming Tom Gilbert for his poor play (they were confusing him and Griffith [sic] Neame), another questioning how Reece Walsh got away with not being called for tackled in goal (he wasn't) and why a six again for called (the Cowboys had three markers). Perhaps this says more about me but I did not realise people like this actually existed and that it was possible to tick so many boxes of obliviousness and still manage to complete the series of tasks required to get into the stadium. To be fair to them, the humidity may have cooked their brains and they accepted the Cowboys were going to lose. I hope they enjoyed their drive back to Burpengary, which is where I assume they are from after they referred to Townsville as “up there”.
The second is that limiting the Living End (they've still got it) to two songs at halftime so you can cram in a three minute Jim Beam ad, complete with a participatory rendition of Sweet Caroline and high intensity LED ad hoarding blasting the white logo straight into 45,000 cerebral cortices was dizzyingly dystopian. This is neither community nor fun. More to come in the next Pony Picayune and Bovine Bulletin.
Blackhawks 28 defeated Pride 14. I didn’t watch this game, so don’t have much in the way of observations other than looking at the score sheet. Townsville’s try scorers being Jack Campagnolo, Dudley Dotoi and Josh Stuckey is a real line up of Guys. Off back-to-back wins in the Savannah Soiree and the Tropical Tango, it cannot be denied that the vibes are high in the Ville under Terry Campese.
Wests Tigers 30 defeated Dolphins 18. Kodi Nikorima stormed past the greatest player in the NRL, Jarome Luai, to score the Dolphins third try after 25 minutes and it was looking extremely promising. Redcliffe held firm for a while but inevitably broke and spent the last quarter hour looking exhausted on defence, unable to execute in attack and giving away penalties. None of this bodes well for Woolf. His team lacks fitness, lacks skill and lacks smarts, which you will recognise as all areas that are the coach’s remit. The Tigers should get excited after beating two of the four worst teams in the comp. Having Kevin “We're Brisbane, they're Redcliffe” Walters call a Dolphins game was (unironically) pretty funny - well done to Fox for that decision. Ironic that Kev probably had to fly from Brisbane to Sydney to call the game from the studio though.
Clydesdales 24 defeated Falcons 14. A truly courageous and resilient performance by the wooden spoon favourites to pick up a win against a Storm-free Sunshine Coast. Watch the national media ignore Toowoomba for the umpteenth time. I am interested in some equity in Joel Hughes, an energetic Clydesdales headgear merchant, with a future option on additional stock.
Devils 30 defeated Magpies 22. Marsden Park High has had some sort of upgrade and looks as good as most other grounds. One wonders that if Logan is going to be more accommodating than Brisbane if the Magpies won't finally move south?
Titans 26 defeated Knights 6. Gold Coast ended up favourites after several key outs for Newcastle. Nonetheless, the Titans put together something resembling a consummate performance or at least, by their standards. Was it wild and loose? Sure. Sami and Jojo butchered a bunch of chances. What did you expect? The Titans still did enough at the right times and the Knights offered so little in return that you feel almost impressed. Beau Fermor played a tidy game. I am not getting sucked in because undoubtedly, we'll resume normal transmission next week. However, unlike the Dolphins and Cowboys, the Titans are off the mark in 2025. I definitely heard a seven year old voice on the broadcast yell, “Whack him in the head!” twice.
Bears 30 defeated Tweed 28. Burleigh nearly blew a sizeable early lead for the second week running. Once they were into the game, Tweed more ran out of time than anything else. That is a strange trend to pile on points early and then just slowly watch that get whittled away over the remaining hour of the game. Pacing? Fitness?
Love potion #9
Bold piece of V’Landys lore dropped in THIS MASTHEAD in an otherwise boring peice of mythologising:
As he drove home that night, wondering what the immediate future looked like for the game and for the world, V’landys started to think back to the day he visited a fortune-teller as a child.
“The fortune-teller told me, ‘You’re a cat’,” V’landys recalled. “And I remember asking her, ‘What do you mean I’m a cat?’
“She told me, ‘People are going to throw you in the air, and you’ll be thinking, how the hell will I land? But you will always land on your feet, like a cat’. That conversation always stuck with me. And for whatever reason, I thought of it in that moment.”
Add this to the canon of very normal things about Peter the Great the Short.
Upcoming Slate
Roosters versus Titans, Friday 5pm, New SFS
With the only other Q4 choice being the Cowboys being turned into beef patties by the Raiders (unless the referees turn up), I will lean towards being intrigued slightly by the prospect here. Gold Coast do not traditionally run well against Sydney but the Roosters are on the downswing. I don’t expect the Titans to be on the up but let’s not rule it out until we’ve given them at least 20 minutes. Tip: Roosters
Dolphins versus Broncos, Friday 7pm, Suncorp Stadium
Ah, Conflict on Caxton III. The Battle of/for/in/around Brisbane. Jihad in Brislamabad. Whatever you call it, the Dolphins have almost too much narrative power to lose this. The Broncos have only won this by six, by eight and by 14, even when they were obviously the better team. The Dolphins won theirs, when the gap was much closer, by 34. As North Queensland did against Brisbane last Friday, the Phins will turn up and big their whole asses into this, making it much more difficult than necessary. Tip: Broncos
Hunters versus Tigers, Sunday 3pm, NFS PNG
Half the competition is on bye this weekend, so we’re not left with much to pick apart (if the Pride are as asleep as they’ve played, that five star is a mirage and I almost wrote about Jets-Gulls). Most of the appeal of this game is the home commentary that I hope is available through Qplus. I haven’t seen much of Easts this year and have no particular desire to watch Tahj Wood but maybe we should be keeping an eye on Storm academy product, Keagan Russell-Smith. The halfback played in the 2022 Panthers SG Ball team, which was the all four grades year, and has seemingly graduated to playing alongside (Canadian) international Ryley Jacks. Best of luck to him. Tip: Hunters
(Tips 4 / 9 in 2025; 48 / 92 in 2024)
Intermission
Let’s vote on this week’s intermission.
Call 0055 123 456 and press 1 for the Western Clydesdales’ boilover win against the Falcons.
Press 2 if your choice is Israel Leota volleyball setting himself a try.
Or press 3 for referee nearly getting his head taken off during the Capras’ try celebration in the Friends of Coal Bowl.
Polls close midnight AEST.
Read this
Rugby league Writers with Jason Oliver: 3 Takeaways from Storm v Panthers
Storm Machine: Game 716 – S28E03 Review
John Davidson on the RFL coup: Appeal to government made over rugby league governance and Will we see the end of IMG and the Trumpian paradox
Or as summarised by Aaron Bower: From one crisis to another: rugby league in dire need of real leadership
Mascord: NRL will refuse to deal with Wood's RFL over investment, says Shane Richardson. It's unclear to what extent Richardson actually speaks for the NRL but if Super League duffs their only opportunity to get out of this situation (an injection of NRL cash) because the dipshits that run the sport thought they knew better, that will be very funny. Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own decisions, etc etc.
The Sportress: Six, again: Myopia and Hypocrisy
Campo: For the first time in a generation, Manly and Daly Cherry-Evans will face the unknown
Beyond the Goalpost: Maury Sea Eagles
Nick Tedeschi: Daly Cherry-Evans is leaving Manly. His exit will haunt the NRL club for a long time
Notes
DCE is going to see out his contract and is seeking a better offer than Manly reportedly put forward, and this is bad? I thought people breaking their contracts was the thing everyone was upset about? I also thought players were meant to get the bag and fans wanted transparency? Facetiousness aside, I don’t really care how “badly” DCE treats various clubs or where he ends up or how he gets there. Hate the game, not the player, and the game is what it is. If you get outsmarted, and I use that term extremely loosely, by Cherry-Evans or his agent, that’s on you.
The Classic claimed a sell-out and then an attendance of about 45,000, 7k short of capacity. Noticing this occurring more and more. Considering attendance numbers have traditionally been optimistic to say the least, not sure what's led them to selling tickets numbers that don't even correspond with that.
The Reggie the Rabbit incident has many layers to it, some of which will age well over time even if the immediate memetic potential is exhausted, but I’m afraid of making any jokes in case I come across as ageist, which I am. It should be the only legal form of discrimination.
Three in four Australians support a total ban on gambling advertising – Four in five want total online and social media ban. The NRL will oppose this because they and most of their members have two or three gambling-related sponsors and will want to keep that revenue but what is the point of the rivers of gold if not to take the moral high ground from time to time? Oh. Right.
RLPA threat forced NRL to remove player contract information from its website. Weak. Lame. Weak and lame.
Super League: Saints Chairman Supports Nigel Wood. Not particularly informative but pretty funny though: “The final international debacle was the recent public execution and national humiliation of our gallant England girls at the hands of the long-time professionalised Australian Jillaroos on the high-profile stage of Vegas. Unsurprisingly, no one assumed responsibility for the insane decision to hold this fixture and thereby destroy the hard-earned confidence and exuberance of our girls.” Chef’s kiss.
Internationals: Three-tier Men’s European League Championships announced and Canada to host historic IRL Women's World Series featuring Canada, Fiji, Ireland and Nigeria. My money’s on Fiji romping home, Jillaroos-style. Wonder if we’ll see a men’s World Series after all?
SEQ’s defect-riddled stadiums need major repairs ahead of Olympics. I am shocked, shocked! I tell you, to discover that 40 year old facilities need some work done to their rooves. Having been involved in preparing, and reading, reports just like this, I can tell you from experience not a lot of thought goes into them and this would be a good use for LLMs. Think Buzz had a go at a similar article before the old SFS came down.
A stronger neck can help young athletes reduce their risk of concussion. Sure.
Brisbane council fails to evict a single homeless person as police say they won't enforce ban. When the QPS looks more warm hearted and charitable than you are, that's a sign you're off course.
Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer.
Sharing posts is an excellent way for the newsletter to find new readers. After paid subscribers, finding new free subscribers is what keeps the lights on.
Feel free to hit forward and send it on to your too-Online-but-in-the-wrong-way friends and relatives or use the button below.
You can also follow on Bluesky or Instagram.
Book club
I recently finished two rugby league books. The first was Dave Trodden’s The Commission We Had to Have. I picked this up after writing about the Controlling Body’s finances because I didn’t have a good grip on how the Commission came about and I like to be informed for your sake and mine. Its purpose, as a history of the governance frameworks of NSW rugby league, is achieved. I can’t say that I was particularly rivetted but the book was mercifully short and I had some questions that only someone with the complete derangement that I suffer from, would need answering (e.g. when and why did the residential system fall apart?).
Written in 2019, Trodden’s overlay of institutionalism seems naive at best and I wonder if this would be revised in light of the NSWRL having to sue the ARLC over governance issues in 2022. Perhaps the Commission is not all it cracked up to be, especially if you are on the outside looking in? I think treating governance models as a stage on which the play of exercising real power is carried out provides a better conceptual grip on general history but that’s ancillary to the book’s specific thesis.
I wrote a whole treatise that I will spare you but suffice to say that if you’ve ever read the sentence, “It is as if rugby league springs forth fully formed in Brisbane in 1988,” then you have the gist. Wally Lewis captained Australia before he played an elite club game in Australia, at least as defined by Trodden, should make it more concrete. That Trodden is the current CEO of the NSWRL will complete your understanding. Similiarities in perspective to Phil Gould’s 2020 love letter to Peter V’Landys (that I have remarked upon previously) are evident and I think a partial mischaracterisation of Super League (more on this train of thought here) is present. Any history of Australian rugby league that focuses exclusively on the NSWRL as the “elite” is doomed to miss big parts of the overall picture.
The second was Mike Rylance’s The Struggle and the Daring, a sequel to the better known Forbidden Game. The latter charts the history of rugby league in France from inception in the 1930s to the Vichy regime’s deletion of rugby a treize from French life. The Struggle and the Daring relates the post-War history of the game through the resurrection in the late 1940s and heady successes of Puig-Aubert and the national team in the early 1950s and then the long, slow structural decline of rugby league into the background, ending with the briefest glimmer of hope provided by the triumph of Catalans in the Challenge Cup in 2018.
Outside of the coup currently taking place to decide the future of the English game, you could hardly do better than this as a detailed look at the structural forces that shape rugby league and the successes and failures of expansion opportunities. The high water mark of France’s success over Britain and Australia in the early 50s, translating into hosting the first World Cup in 1956, didn’t have the national cut through of the quinzistes’ success in the Five Nations later that decade, and that was as good as it got. Then we see all the impacts of the Vichy deletion and struggle to return to the mainstream (repeatedly undercut by pre-professional union-friendly forces), wrongheaded investment of limited resources, poor and violent on-field product signalling a death knell and the absence of meaningful international competition play out over half a century to bring us to the present state of French rugby league. There are plenty of lessons to be learned. I have a feeling they won’t be.