What those puds in Canberra are up to

A lot of observations this week

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The Lazy Mr Fifita

David Fifita opens a new chapter in an eventful career. An extremely prodigious young talent, he left the Broncos for the Titans and more money and less Anthony Seibold after 2020. He then threatened to leave the Titans when they fired Justin Holbrook to secure more money again in 2023. He threatened to leave for the Roosters at the end of his contract and backflipped on them at the last moment last year, which was very funny.

He’s now had a falling out with Des Hasler and got dropped to Queensland Cup, apparently over a request to play the left side of the field. Doing his best impression of small town Facebook drama and/or Phil Gould, he hinted that there was more to the story and soon everyone would know what was really going on, which it turned out yesterday was that the rehab from his offseason ankle surgery has either not gone well, and he needs time to get right, or at least is sufficient excuse to get away from the Titans, presumably because they’re a bunch of losers destined to suck the life out of everything they touch.

In the meantime, Fifita had a game to play for the Ipswich Jets against the then-winless Northern Pride, for which the Jets seemed genuinely excited to have him. Unlike almost every person commenting on this story, I took the radical step of actually watching the game and decided he was fine.

Dropped stars are supposed to blow the opposition off the park for at least 20 of those minutes before punching in the clutch and rolling to a graceful finish. Fifita did not do this. One of the Pride’s tries came from an attempted early kick from the Jets halfback, Dion Teaupa, at the scrum base that was charged down and returned to the house by his opposite number, Zac Herdegen. What are you meant to do with that sequence of events? With 20 minutes to go and the Jets still scoreless, Fifita pressures Pride fullback, Jarrett Subloo, on the kick chase and forces the error, which is then promptly dropped by Jets hooker Oliver Pascoe with an open goal line. What are you going to do?

Fifita didn’t take it particularly seriously, as he said he wouldn’t. Evidently his teammates didn’t either, despite ostensibly having more at stake. He could’ve put more ass into it but the Jets returned a completion rate of 62% and possession of 42%. As they say, you’re not going to win a lot of footy playing like that. If you can’t engineer a Dave Fifita crash ball try in Cup, the results are going to be the results.

But because no one actually watches footy properly, let alone watching Cup at all, but everyone thinks they know stats because of Supercoach, all this does is feed into the narrative provided to us by some of the stupidest people on earth that David Fifita is lazy. They said it when he was flashy, they said it when he did the hard stuff, they’ll say it now when he is actually half-assing it and they’ll say it forever. His 12 teammates apparently lack agency and will escape any blame. I have no understanding of their motivations but they have finally worn him down and brought it into existence. Congratulations, you absolute wastes of space.

There are two very foreseeable consequences. The first is that we have probably seen the apex of David Fifita’s career. His card will now be marked by the Maroons as unselectable by brain genious, Billy Slater. He is also on the outer with the worst franchise in the NRL, which is somehow not the team that finished last over the previous three years, and their dead-man-walking coach.

Fifita will not struggle to find a new job once the breakup with the Titans is confirmed, as that feels all but inevitable now, but it will be at greatly reduced salary (which is his problem) and unless he is phenomenally lucky, he will not be able to string together enough good performances to ever right the narrative.

That will eat away at his confidence and his motivation. Why bother when any time you do anything - as recently as three weeks ago, he single-handedly set up a try off a short kickoff against the Dragons because his useless teammates couldn’t get anything going - people bring out the same stuff? None of it matters. He can never satisfy his critics because they aren’t actually watching the game.

Hotseat

The second consequence is that this is the beginning of the end for Des Hasler. For Hotseat sickos like me, Magic Round serves as the earliest likely dumping ground for recently unalived coaching careers. Down the Coast, given the Titans’ performance to date, I don't think giving up on watching their games will cost me much in entertainment or informational value but weekly temperature gauges on Hasler's hotseat might provide more interesting content.

Pre-season, I thought Hasler would be gone this year and have seen nothing to contradict that view. In this situation, it often just becomes a matter of when it becomes untenable, and therefore palatable, to do what will have needed doing for some time. See also: O'Brien, Adam, and the temporary release of pressure this week.

If it's not clear to you why this plays out as it does, remember that the hiring and firing reflects on the people above the coach: the CEO and the board. If they cycle through what are seen as repeated poor decisions (irrespective of their actual merits) for coaching hires, then they come under pressure too. It all has to be handled a certain way to minimise any potential blowback on their sinecures.

Des Hasler has not covered himself in glory since arriving at the Titans. After deciding to play Fifita from the bench, and then apparently placing the team’s absolute dogshit attitude and play at Fifita’s feet, is a sign of a man out of ideas. Hasler’s cooked.

In metrics, Hasler is currently down 12 Thompsons on his starting class Elo rating, which is about a quarter of the way to an unsalvageable position. He might hit the half century danger zone with another nine or ten losses. There’s 16 games left on Gold Coast’s schedule. While Hasler has already plumbed lower depths and recovered, his team is unlikely to even finish 6-10 down the stretch so pulling out of this tailspin seems almost impossible. Considering how low the Titans were when he started, it is a serious indictment to make that worse.

On the other measure, Hasler is currently third last in the NRL in Baxes per appearance, ahead of only Ryles at Parramatta and Bennett at South Sydney (!). These three names represent the only teams in the NRLM with rosters underperforming their pre-season expectations. Even the Knights, the other obvious hotseat candidate, are running slightly above that zero on that metric.

If none of that made any sense, the summary is that it doesn’t look good. Since Hasler arrived at Parkwood, Hasler has made baffling decisions, a bad team got worse and the roster isn’t statistically performing to its own expectation. It’s only a matter of time until everyone else catches up.

The necessary follow-up question becomes who is available to be tapped up as a replacement. There’s always someone available. Coaching depth charts are incredibly poorly reported on. This is why you’re never sure of who’s who until the Courier Mail farts out a list, which is a mix of nominees via text message from unreliable sources and whoever recently coached but is not currently employed as a head coach. Anthony Griffin, Trent Barrett and Nathan Brown will almost certainly get named as realistic candidates, despite their respective histories. You don’t have to fall for that, and that goes double for Titans HQ.

Of the Titans current assistants, the only one I can reliably identify as being there at all is Jim Lenihan. The former Burleigh coach seems an unlikely permanent appointment, given his interim stint post-Holbrook and that he hasn’t landed a Super League job. Ben Te’o and Matt Ballin, both up the M1 at Red Hill, are clearly ambitious and waiting for the right opportunity. Is this it? Ballin was supposed to be leaving for the Titans in the off-season.

Rohan Smith is the leading light in the Queensland Cup but will be unlikely to go direct to the big job after failing at Leeds and may need to prove himself via a non-nepo assistant gig. Karmichael Hunt has had mixed results at Souths Logan but might be enough of a brand name to bypass the queue. Terry Campese at the Blackhawks is another in that category but with a more solid resume and a bit of success so far this year. I’d like to see Lionel Harbin get some chat after turning around the Capras program but he may not be inclined.

Or it could be some random guy I’ve never heard out of a Sydney club. Like the Titans themselves, it’s all a big shrug.

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Around the grounds

Roosters 36 defeated Dolphins 26. Dreams of a golden grand slam were almost instantly shattered. The Dolphins have strike but don't have forwards and until either they do, or the sport changes so much that forwards cease to matter, they're going to play one good half a week but that's it. That was the first half, and really only the last five minutes of it. The Phins were then overpowered by a mediocre team like the Roosters, found themselves out of gas and that was it. I guess on to 2026 to do it all again. Is Hugo Savala better than Sam Walker? If so, that's funny but Walker will find a job at either PNG, Perth or the West Brisbane Wombles.

Falcons 36 defeated Blackhawks 30. The early exchanges looked like a shootout but, despite the final score, the Blackhawks spent most of the match two scores adrift so it didn’t have quite the tension you’d expect. Who’d have thought a NAS crash ball would work? And then again from about ten out with four guys on his back the better part of an hour later? James Tamou, Dudley Dotoi, Jack Campagnolo, they’re all here! This one had a bit of spice with several scuffles, but none worth setting to music and one happened because Thallon Peters was being a meathead again. Cody Hunter kicked a 45 metre penalty goal. I’d like to have included Robbie Storey’s first try for the Blackhawks or Denver Ford’s (incredible name) for the Falcons in the Intermission but I spent too much time defending David Fifita for some reason.

Warriors 30 defeated Cowboys 26. Luke Metcalfe good. Warriors pretty good and look sustainably good, and not fake good like the Cowboys or Sharks. NQC do look reasonably good as well and in a comp where the old Panthers are dead, that might be good enough to contend into week three and try your luck. Both teams had weaker phases, obviously the Warriors towards the end who looked shattered for no discernible reason, and, I don't like this characterisation, the Warriors ‘hung on’ to win. Four points is an accurate reflection of the gap between these two teams, which is to say its nothing but a dumb Jake Clifford intercept. More to come in the next Bovine Bulletin.

Bulldogs 38 defeated Titans 18. I didn't invest anywhere near a full 80 minutes in this - probably closer to a sporadic 40 - and I still want my time back.

Pride 32 defeated Jets 0. The Pride have had good stretches in their games and have not really been blown off the park, other than maybe against the Devils. Their winless record was not reflective of their quality when Northern are, it should be remembered, fielding at least half a dozen Cowboys and a few more ex-NRL players. As a result, it’s not surprising that they got themselves fired up enough to put together a decent 80 minutes and cleaned up one of the middle class teams. The Jets were their own worst enemy, with plenty of errors giving away the ball and the game. It was also clear that the Pride were going to throw a lot of resources at Fifita to stop him from doing whatever he wanted with the ball and then avoid him like the plague whenever possible (or at least go around his edge). Having a player of that calibre just results in his isolation; it's a good strategy. A late game shift in the weather did not help but the Pride were already up by 26, it didn’t make a difference. Nick Lui-Toso took it all personally, as he is wont to do.

Panthers 32 defeated Broncos 8. Speaking of giving up and hotseats, it might be time to turn on Maguire's. If you come in presenting yourself as a hardass, then serving up this undisciplined, heartless rabble seems at odds. Four tries conceded in 17 minutes of game time and the result was a chaseable game until it wasn't. Normally the defence is better but you saw what it was like out there. The attack was extremely concerning. The Broncos can usually cover a few Reynolds kicking errors or some hot headedness but they looked really out of ideas. Hunt is a hindrance rather than a help. Cobbo might need some time in Cup. Carrigan needs to watch some Haas tape. The rest of the pack (with an exception for Willison) can get in the bin. After a hot start, they're 5-4, which I think Kevvie could have delivered. More to come in the next Pony Picayune.

Do we need to talk about Origin? Or anything really?

A return of zero wins from five games is not the ideal Magic Round. It was less a golden grand slam than a golden misere, with an Origin loss heaped on top like a rancid cherry on a shit sundae. Only the Cowboys even looked close to winning their game and the rest were hopelessly outclassed by their opposition.

Having been recently deeply immersed in Fitzgerald Inquiry era history, it turns out you can have a Royal Commission into anything, e.g. whether the National Hotel is operating past its bedtime. If this level of performance continues, I will be forced to agitate for a commission into why the Crisafulli government is spending good, honest Queensland taxpayer dollars providing a platform for the NSWRL clubs to achieve success over our own boys and girls. Even the Storm lost! We cannot continue like this. Something has to be done.

Back in the real world, we saw a similar shellacking in game 1 of women's Origin last year, leading media outlets to start forecasting a women's whitewash. We know how that turned out. I don’t expect a series win from here, unless it rains in both Townsville and Newcastle, but there's still plenty of room for improvement:

• The Maroons got bashed in the middle. Put Lenarduzzi out there. Ellie Johnston was getting a barge over try as soon as she was named. That's her calling card so put some beef in front of her.

• Defence couldn't slide to the right anywhere near fast enough. Upton was often the last woman standing on that side. Peters and Owen on that edge with Brigginshaw is apparently not a great combo with a lack of experience and lack of mobility. Fix it.

• We're going to have another season of Ali Brigginshaw discourse and how much runway she has left on her career. She did not look agile or quick, not that she ever has, in this one.

• Not enough ball to Tarryn Aiken. Seems easy to fix by giving the ball to your best playmaker.

• The Blues have started both this and the last series looking more energetic and fitter. That should not be a gap that exists.

• Head knocks did not help. Stop getting concussed.

On the upside, the Maroons basically had two shots in the red zone and returned with two tries. Against six conceded, that's not great but more ball in better field position and the rest might take care of itself.

Finally, Sienna Lofipo is good. I've been saying it for a while now. There's a fun future sliding doors exercise with her and Chantay Kiria-Ratu (now at the Sharks) from when both filled in the Titans halves in 2023.

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Intermission

Jesus, alright, settle down. A bit too much, don't you think?

I have to commend Fox/Nine for what I thought was a pretty polished looking product from Magic Round. The extra camera available did a lot to make it look like a bigger deal than rugby league, even the grand final, usually is. If growth continues and the suburban dumps are dumped, could we expect this level of production week-to-week? One can dream.

Ah well, at least we're all having fun out there. The crowd noise was audible through the broadcast.

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Sunshine State-wide

Redcliffe and Burleigh have punched their tickets to the Mal Meninga Cup grand final. This year's Dolphins pod finished second, behind Tweed, on a 7-2 record, and comprehensively destroyed the Mackay Cutters, 42-14, in the preliminary final. Tweed were run out of town by their fellow Gold Coast club, 30-14, after the Burleigh Bears finished the season in fourth place, 6-2-1.

Up north, the Foley Shield was won by Townsville in both the men’s and women’s competitions. In the absence of a well resourced QRL media team, the results are very hard to find written down anywhere, so here are the scores that I pulled from Qplus:

Women’s

• Townsville 48 defeated Cairns 14

• Cairns 40 defeated Mackay 0

• Townsville 51 defeated Mackay 4

Men’s

• Townsville 40 defeated Cairns 16

• Mackay 58 defeated Cairns 6

• Townsville 40 defeated Mackay 10

Not exactly the most competitive Foley Shield you’ve ever seen. Townsville women have won three in a row and Townsville men are the defending state champions, so perhaps not surprising. There was a brief moment of remembering some guys for Kane Linnett and Mackay versus Kyle Laybutt and Townsville. Meanwhile, the second women’s game ended with a send off, which I am on the fence of putting on Instagram because it got a little bit vicious.

Corrections to follow (thanks to Kyle P in the comments)

It’s not clear if there will be a XXXX League State Championship later this year (I don’t see why there wouldn’t be, it’s just that no one has mentioned it). There will be no State League Championship this year and the fact that I missed that it didn’t happen last year is probably telling about the value proposition it was bringing. If so, Townsville will take on the winner of The 47th Battalion (Central) and the SEQ Chair’s Challenge (Southeast) carnivals will be played in July and players will be vying for selection for the City-Country curtain raisers on QCup grand final day.

A brief discussion of the federal election

We had a federal election and like most Australians, this is my once every three year check in on what those puds in Canberra are up to. That Peter Dutton lost in embarrassing fashion was exactly the outcome I would have predicted when he was made leader three years ago, confirming that I was right to not pay any attention to anything in the interim, other than the only issue that matters: the PNG NRL team.

To the extent this was a landslide and crushing victory, note that what happened was we had a 100 people in a room and after three years, at most a half dozen of them changed their minds, some of whom will almost certainly flip back by the next election. To paraphrase Phil Gould, you have to look through the scoreboard on this one, which sounded dumb until Penrith won the next four grand finals.

The LNP’s collapse with urban professionals has been on the cards since Turnbull, if not much earlier. The deliberate swing away from reality has finally pushed the last of them into the lovingly diverse embrace of the managerialist arms of a technocratic Labor. Your average accountant and optometrist would rather be on the side of the unions than Facebook brainrot. The federal LNP is now hollowed out, comprised entirely of sludge-brains, and will get the rest of the decade to work out what relevance, if any, they will have nationally in the Thirties.

For the Greens, after the press gallery insisted that Greensland was just a variation on Teal independents, and declined to put any effort in finding out what exactly is a Teal (I remained unconvinced that this isn't a rebrand for wet tories and that fiscal ‘responsibility’ will never allow for meaningful climate action) or if conditions might be different in Brisbane than Sydney or Melbourne (it was plane NIMBYism), they are now loudly insisting that the loss of seats is a rebuke from the Australian people but to quote John Birmingham:

There’s been a lot of consolation wanking on the right about The Greens doing themselves a whoopsie by linking arms with Hamas and the CFMEU. Almost as if their vote collapsed or something. But it didn’t. They’ve lost seats, and coud yet lose Adam Bandt, but their national vote didn’t collapse. It went down a tick [it was 0.45% of the primary vote], but that’s all. They lost their Brisbane seats because the Liberal vote collapsed and Liberal preferences got distributed to Labor. This will be a pattern repeated over and over again in future: inner-city seats unpredictably changing hands in three-way contests.

It remains to be seen if this is as far as the Greens go, which turns every inner city seat into a battlefield between them on the left and Labor on the right, as every country seat becomes a battle between the LNP on the left and One Nation on the right (the polling booth at my primary school returned nearly 20% primary votes for the One Nation candidate - they're still there), or if they drift off into the night like the Democrats, arm in arm with any propsect of a two state solution. I suspect that they’d be disappointed the increase in profile from having four seats didn't translate into any primary vote growth but that's not the same as Australia turning away from the “extremist” left en masse.

Personally, I'm disappointed that Max Chandler-Whatever didn't roll tanks down the Parliamentary Triangle to inaugurate the Union of Australian Soviet States (UASS for short). Then again, I am famously very pro-CCP and pro-journalists stop being scared to say the big-I is doing the g-word in P-stine (I don’t want to get bombed by the IDF).

Which leaves Labor, the embodiment of the “the problem are bad but the causes are very good” tweet, who won't learn any useful lessons from this. Instead of acknowledging that this was largely an own goal by the LNP that they managed to not fuck up, Labor will almost certainly arrive at some other bullshit. They certainly will not recognise the increasing dissatisfaction with the two party system.

At home, Queensland remains the last bastion of conservatism. Of the ten largest cities in the country, the only ones currently voting LNP are the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. This is a fact I find fascinating and hard to attribute to, other than rusted on Nats voters became rusted on LNP suburbanites when the family farm got subdivided and neither place having much in the way of diversity or historic manufacturing. The construction of Aura in Caloundra South is going to tip that part of the map towards Labor, with Fairfax already starting to wobble and Fisher a foregone conclusion in a decade or so, and the electorate just over the border from Coolangatta almost went Green. The times are a-changing.

Some other notes:

• You'll notice I didn't talk policy. I'm not into that. Good praxis is good process and I prefer the grand sweeping arc of history (Australian suburban sprawl) and ideology (turning Parliament House into Tiananmen Square) to minutiae if I’m going to fire off 400 words every three years.

• I don't have the space to elaborate on how bad an idea nuclear is for Australia. I'm not opposed to the technology - on the contrary, if I were born in Europe or America, that would have been my chosen career path - but it's not open to Australia. Nuclear requires an in-house expertise we don't have, massive subsidies and lead times, safety features that need a reliable sources of water in a country prone to drought and by the time you'd finally decide where to build one, let alone actually construct it, we'll be running on almost entirely on solar with gas and batteries managing peak periods. Trust me, I actually read AEMO reports. Don't proponents hand wave this stuff away.

• The problems we have in rugby league coverage are identical to those in political coverage. In fact, I internalised a lot of press gallery criticism (mostly via Andrew Elder) and reapplied it here. Wonder if there's some sort of root cause? Hint: it's not just News Corp.

• People just really didn't like Bill Shorten, huh?

• Former Origin great, Kangaroo and 1985 Wynnum Seagull, Greg Dowling, only polled 2.23% of the vote on behalf of Trumpet of Patriots in Leichhardt (h/t Ryan Dufty). One suspects that if ToP just hadn’t been a vehicle to force us to look at Clive Palmer for what one assumes are his personal erotic reasons and instead Palmer assembled an all-rugby league line up of candidates, there’d be no stopping him. Instead Leichhardt, the electorate of Cairns and the Far North, went back to Labor. That leaves only Townsville, Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast as the only cities in Australia's top 15 represented by the LNP.

• Congratulations to Dickson for finally turning on Peter Dutton, an evil man they should have dumped two decades ago.

• The consolation wanking on the right evidently includes ABC commentators that equate losing seats with a rebuke to “grievance politics”. You'd expect experienced political commentators to be able to distinguish between an actual backlash and the vagaries of the Westminster system and preferential voting but evidently not. Ah well, lucky that’s not important.

Upcoming Slate

Dolphins versus Devils, Saturday 5pm, Dolphins Oval

A rematch of last year’s grand final? For the second time this season?! Wow. I wonder what happened last time? With temperatures dropping across the Southeast, with the Dolphins at home and with a couple weeks to think about it, Redcliffe might land a flipper on the Devils this time but Norths are in serious form. Tip: Devils

Cowboys versus Panthers, Saturday 7.35pm, QCB Stadium

This is one of the games of the round, which is surprising considering the Panthers were very recently in last place and the Cowboys are the Cowboys. North Queensland have at least earned themselves the position of being the best in Queensland, for now and for whatever that is worth. The Panthers stomped the Broncos to snap their losing streak, which should put a bit more confidence into the team. How much is anyone’s guess but if they stop dropping the ball, it’ll be up to the Cowboys’ pack. Oh and Brian To’o’s back. A shiver just ran through Townsville and it ain’t cold up there. Tip: Panthers

Jets versus Blackhawks, Sunday 2pm, North Ipswich Reserve

I would actually recommend hugging your mum or the mother of your children or any other feminine parental figure in your life on Sunday, instead of trying to find a good rugby league game featuring a Queensland team in a relatively high level of the sport. But if you simply must and like me, cannot countenance watching NSW Cup, Jets vs Blackhawks won’t be as bad as the stars suggest, unless Ipswich play like they did this week, which we’ve spent enough time talking about already. Tip: Blackhawks

(Tips 10 / 25 in 2025; 48 / 92 in 2024)

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Read this

• The Guardian: Brisbane is Magic Round’s beating heart but risks becoming a victim of its own success

• The Guardian: Magic Weekend brings a divided sport together – for 48 hours at least (did you know they do it in England too????)

• Rugby League Eye Test: Bootwatch 2025: triple the boots (additional important sock-based journalism)

• The Sportress: Six, again; Magic!

• Storm Machine: Game 722 – S28E09 Review

• Rugby League Writers: Breaking Down The Hammer Try, Knights Kick Return & Raiders Chaos

• Mary K has joined the Rugby League Perverts Substack Network

Notes

• Lol, lmao even:

  Another CEO said: “Stop playing at stadiums like Brookvale and Shark Park. It defeats the purpose of having a conversation about putting more bums on seats and then playing in stadiums that only fit 14,000 people. Shark Park isn’t fit to host regular-season NRL matches, let alone a finals game.”

  A third CEO added: “Those suburban grounds aren’t up to standard. If you want to create a great atmosphere in the finals then you have to play in the biggest and best stadiums.

• There was the usual scuttlebutt about the future of Magic Round, because its reliable annual content from PVL and Abdo. It’s locked in to Queensland for two more years and then the NRL will send it wherever will generate the most revenue because this administration is all about you opening your wallet to fling more money at the clubs.

• Some people are wondering if the magic is waning but I think, for some personality types (including maybe me), there’s a huge rush the first time you go but the novelty wears off in successive visits and the slog of multiple games weighs against the money it will cost. Other people don’t feel this way. It frankly doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’d like to enjoy an Easter free of people commenting on the turf at Suncorp. There are other things going on in the world.

• Entirely unsurprisingly, Ezra Mam is returning to footy via QCup, starting this weekend with Souths Logan.

Nickelware