Pre-season is a magical time of year in the land of rugby league. The boys are training the house down and everyone is looking fitter, faster and stronger.
It evokes images of a pack of sweaty blokes running up sand hills under the blistering summer sun as the Hoodoo Gurus blare from an invisible loudspeaker.
Optimism is surging and potential seems limitless. This is going to be our year!
Over the next four weeks, we will provide a fair-weather fan’s guide to how each team really stands heading into the 2016 NRL season, counting down from the unhappy winners of last year’s wooden spoon.
16. Newcastle Knights
Novocastrians are a funny lot. Having grown up in the Steel City, consumed by its love and adoration for a scruffy bogan from Cessnock, you discover the people who call Newcastle home exhibit a unique constitution.
They balance a healthy dose of tall poppy syndrome and town pride, bleed blue denim and can often have more teeth than brain cells. But their love of sport and, in particular, rugby league, can never be questioned.
With this in mind, it is such a shame the Nathan Tinkler experiment went completely balls up. Local boy makes good, buys his hometown football team, hires the best coach in the game and watches a sea of premierships flow down Darby Street.
It sounded like such an easy formula for success. But alas, Tinkler’s fortune went the way of his waistline, and his stake in the Knights evaporated faster than new coach Nathan Brown’s flowing golden locks.
So gone are the likes of Tinkler, Rick Stone, Wayne Bennett and Rick Stone (again), and enter Nathan Brown. NRL fans will remember Brown’s sideline slapping of Trent Barrett, which many a NSW Origin fan has hungered to do at one point or another, but can he coach?
Newcastle’s first bit of business for the off-season was a good one. Locking up incumbent NSW Origin half Trent Hodkinson to take some heat off Jarrod Mullen instantly gives Newcastle one of the better scrumbase tandems in the NRL.
The signing of Brown, while fraught with uncertainty, is unquestionably an upgrade over Stone’s dual coaching calamities. The Knights also signed Micky Paea, who sounds more like a Hillsong pastor than a second-row forward, but who should strengthen a fairly soft forward pack.
Possibly the smartest move Newcastle made was to finally let go of a collection of high-priced, ageing liabilities such as Kurt Gidley and Beau Scott, and redistribute these finances into securing a host of boom youngsters.
Like many NRL sides in 2016, Newcastle will be betting on these inexperienced yet prodigiously talented rookies making the leap into rugby league stardom and helping them avoid consecutive wooden spoons.
Predicted finish: 14th
15. Wests Tigers
Potential is such a powerful word in the NRL. The tantalising prospect that your team is loaded with young stars of the future can allow even the most one-eyed supporter to overlook season after season of mediocrity.
But at some point, potential must translate into performance. This is where the Tigers find themselves today. The Tigers have the talent – James Tedesco, Luke Brooks, Mitchell Moses, Curtis Sironen, Aaron Woods – the list goes on.
Enter Jason Taylor. Only 12 months earlier, the former North Sydney Bears halfback was heralded as the right man to transform potential into silverware. And then the 2015 season happened.
Injury again robbed the Tigers of the opportunity to put their best 13 on the park. Moses and Brooks appeared to regress. The forward pack did unearth a new superstar in Martin Taupau, but he promptly pressed the eject button on his stint at Concord and landed safely on the Northern Beaches.
Boardroom drama led to pressure on Taylor before his first season in charge of the Tigers had even reached its miserable conclusion. So with his coaching career slipping through his fingers, Taylor reacted by attempting to force out club captain Robbie Farah.
A power struggle ensued, which Taylor predictably lost. Apologies were issued, mateship was rekindled, and the two have agreed to play nice in 2016. So the big question for the Tigers leading into this season is whether Jason Taylor is the answer.
Unfortunately, the answer is no. The only remarkable event of Taylor’s largely unsuccessful coaching career was that David Fa’alogo failed to cause further damage to his already distorted visage when he towelled him up during a Mad Monday stoush in Surry Hills.
Players don’t seem to like him and fans are already starting to think that maybe Mick Potter wasn’t so bad after all. It has been widely rumoured that Taylor has less than six weeks of the 2016 season to show he deserves to remain as coach of the team.
The spectre of Ivan Cleary already hangs over the club, so Taylor needs a hot start to keep the wolves at bay. Unfortunately, with the recent departures of Taupau, Pat Richards and Keith Galloway, coupled with the recruitment of a collection of talentless journeymen headlined by Joel Edwards, Taylor may as well start filling out his Centrelink application.
Predicted finish: 15th
14. Gold Coast Titans
You almost have to feel sorry for the Titans. Their quest for glory in 2016 and beyond began earlier than most, with the marquee signing and subsequent reneging of Daly Cherry-Evans. During this two-month mid-season courtship between the Titans and DCE, the quality halfback already on the Gold Coast roster (Aidan Sezer) was quietly snaffled up by Ricky Stuart.
And then in a scene reminiscent of my primary school barn dance lessons, the Titans watched on helplessly as all other available halfbacks partnered up with their new teams, forcing them to gingerly offer their hand to the lone remaining ugly duckling in the form of ex-Newcastle pivot Tyrone Roberts.
And just when things could not get any worse, Kane Elgey blows out his ACL during the first training session of the new year. So instead of the Gold Coast trotting out their dream duo of Cherry-Evans and Elgey, they will open 2016 with the terrifying tandem of Ashley Taylor and Roberts. Ouch.
Compounding the misery for the Titans was the James Roberts debacle. A change was made to Roberts’ contract, providing him with a bonus upon NSW Origin selection. Only problem was, the signature under Roberts’ name on the contract was not his, but rather a forgery perpetrated by Titans football manager Scott Clark.
This NRL equivalent of forging your mother’s signature on a school permission slip cost the Titans staffer his job, and cost Gold Coast their best player, with Roberts opting out of his contract and signing with Brisbane. Outside of Sezer and Roberts, the Gold Coast watched as many of their senior players left Robina for greener and less humid pastures.
The signings of David Shillington and Nathan Friend will somewhat offset the losses of Nate Myles and Dave Taylor in the forward pack, and stealing Queensland forward Chris McQueen from Souths was a handy bit of business. But a quick scan of the Titans’ roster is a painful and almost comical experience.
Barring Johnathan Thurston suddenly succumbing to a secret craving for Cavel Avenue, a wooden spoon in 2016 seems highly likely.
Predicted finish: 16th
13. New Zealand Warriors
Much like the Newcastle sides of the early 2000s, the plight of the Warriors’ season now rests on the handsome shoulders of Shaun Johnson. So when Johnson’s ankle snapped like a stale French baguette on a cold July evening at Mt Smart Stadium, the sickening noise reverberated across the country like a clap of thunder.
The absence of the talented No.7 seemed to suck the fight out of the Warriors’ season, and by the final few rounds they would have struggled to knock the froth off a schooner.
The misery of another failed campaign was offset by the shocking announcement that the Warriors had lured superstar fullback Roger Tuivasa-Sheck away from the Roosters. Combined with the signing of the nuggetty Issac Luke and annual Encouragement Award recipient Jeff Robson, the Warriors will field a formidable side in 2016.
But this sounds all too familiar. Each season the Warriors sign a superstar or two, blood a bunch of hulking giants from their perennially successful Under-20s side, and sprinkle in a few Todd Lowries to keep the young blokes in check.
And despite a couple of grand final appearances over the last decade or so, the Warriors are widely viewed as routine underachievers.
New signing Ali Lauitiiti perfectly symbolises the struggles of the boys from across the ditch. Back in 2002, Lauitiiti took the NRL by storm with his impossible combination of size, speed and ability to off-load the ball at will. His emergence as the best second rower in the game paved the way for a flood of Polynesian talent which has since saturated the modern game.
At the age of 25 and with the NRL at his feet, Ali departed a highly talented yet maddeningly inconsistent Warriors side for the English Super League. Twelve years, 290 first-grade games and four English Super League titles later, Lauitiiti returns to a highly talented Warriors side which remains maddeningly inconsistent.
Much has changed in the NRL during the last decade. The New Zealand Warriors have not. If inexperienced coach Andrew McFadden is unable to guide his side into the finals, he will be searching for other sources of income to pay his bills.
Predicted finish: eighth
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the pre-season review. Next week we look at the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles, Canberra Raiders, Penrith Panthers and Parramatta Eels.
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