It was the drop heard around the rugby league world. A historically great grand final was entering its final and most dramatic act as the Cowboys kicked off in golden-point extra time.
What should have been a routine set of six for the Broncos to possibly set up a game-winning field goal was over before it started, as young halfback Ben Hunt dropped the ball under the brightest lights.
On the ensuing set of six, future Immortal Johnathan Thurston had his crowning moment in club football, and delivered North Queensland their maiden title.
We are now well and truly into 2016 but still the reverberations of that October night in 2015 are being felt at Red Hill.
The year started with the Broncos as presumptive favourite for the premiership – after all, they were a young, upstart team that wasn’t meant to win it in 2015. You know the tried and true sporting cliché ‘you’ve got to lose one to win one’, this heartbreaking defeat was going to be the making of Brisbane, not the breaking.
The Broncos raced out of the blocks and amassed a 7-1 record, including an incredible one-point victory over the Cowboys in a barn-burner of a grand final replay. 2015 demons be damned, the Broncos were making 2016 their own.
However, since then, Brisbane have hit the wall, losing four of their last five games, with ghosts of poor late-game management past coming back to haunt them in tight losses to the Cowboys, Tigers, and Sharks.
Yes, some of these losses came with the Origin period asterisk, however placing the blame solely on the toll of rep footy overlooks a pattern of not closing out games that was brutally exposed on that fateful night in October.
Which brings me to the man who stood under that towering kickoff in golden point, not knowing the brutal ending that awaited his season.
The 2015 season was the Ben Hunt coming-out party, finally the player who had promised so much in the under-20s was strutting his stuff on the big stage for the competition’s biggest club. With his new running buddy Antony Milford by his side, Hunt was in career-best form and the pair were playing enterprising and exciting football that was taking the competition by storm.
Talk in Brisbane was this was a return to the glory days of Allan Langer and Kevin Walters, and regular premiership parades in Queen Street Mall.
Hunt was living up to the heavy burden that comes with wearing the famous Broncos No.7 that the little magician from Ipswich had made famous. Wearing 7 also bestows the responsibility of game manager upon you – you’re the man who steers the boys home in a tight game and seals the deal. In this department, Hunt has been found wanting, not only on grand final day 2015, but also in those tight games in recent weeks.
His lack of a kicking game – both attacking, to gain repeat sets, and defensively, to get his team out of trouble – exposes his team to greater defensive workload and gifts attacking field position to opposition teams.
As the grand final showed, keep giving teams like the Cowboys excellent field position and you will pay the ultimate price.
Hunt is a shadow of the player he was last year, devoid of confidence and trying too hard to appease for last year’s shortcomings. He looks like a man who is carrying the burden of last year’s defeat solely on his shoulders, and the weight is crushing him when the game gets to crunch time.
The poor kicking game is still evident, but now it’s coupled with failure to direct his teammates into field goal position, and uncharacteristic handling errors trying to push that hero pass.
Opposition teams have figured this out, and are taking Milford and the much-vaunted left-side attack out of the game. They are comfortable making Hunt the man to beat them, something he has yet to do.
If 2016 is to be the year of the Bronco, as it was touted in the preseason, their halfback must unburden himself of the unfair blame he has put upon himself and rediscover the free-flowing, attacking player he was last year, with the addition of a more mature game manager’s hat.
At the end of the day, a single dropped ball on an October night wasn’t the reason the Broncoss lost the grand final, it was their inability to manage the game in its most pressurised moments.
If Hunt and his teammates can master their late-game demons, the glory days of Langer and Walters may not seem so far-fetched after all.
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