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Not about winning? You can be OK with that… for now

10th April, 2018
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Sam Thaiday of the Broncos. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
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10th April, 2018
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“Tonight wasn’t about winning for us, it was about getting better than last week.”

So said veteran Broncos forward Sam Thaiday, barely three minutes after his side had gone down 10-15 on Saturday night at Newcastle.

Brisbane coach Wayne Bennett produced a variation on the theme in his post match press conference, leaving mouths agape as he confidently announced, “Tonight was a big step forward for us. We’ve been clunky, we haven’t been able to consistently put it together. I thought tonight was a step in the right direction.”

With the Broncos sitting in 12h position with two very, very fortunate wins and three abject losses, surely these delusional outbursts were a sign that not all was well at the Clive Berghofer Centre?

Never one to miss the opportunity to pile on in, the rugby league world promptly piled on in.

Depending on who you read, watched or heard, ‘Uncle Wayne’ had finally lost it. Thaiday was taking the mickey with no appreciation for the seriousness of his situation and Brisbane were frantically arse-covering for highly ordinary performances against teams you’d expect them to roll straight through.

My personal favourite was Greg Alexander’s blunt assessment of Thaiday’s comments: “What codswallop is that?”

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Social media gleefully shredded them as social media does, bemused and outraged that Brisbane dared to carry such a sunny outlook after losing to a Knights team on the rise, but not yet risen.

Not about winning? What’s wrong with them? Winning is what it’s all about!

Lost in all the noise though was one major point: Bennett and Thaiday were spot on.

Right now, Brisbane aren’t about winning. Right now they’re about getting season 2018 back to basics and on track before things spin too far away from their control.

The ‘better than last week’ comments come on the back of their amateurish Week 4 home performance against the Gold Coast, beaten 26-14 by the perennially unfancied Titans.

That game seems to have been the canary in the coal mine for Bennett. He sees that he’s got problems, that they’re not going away, and that he and his leadership team need to urgently pull everything back into line.

It’s rugby league 101: respect the ball, get the go-forward, give the halves space to work. The Broncos are taking the squad back to school, but the classroom is regular season games and they’re using a different grading system to the rest of us.

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Bennett despises poor ball control. His team are making almost 12 errors a game, good for fourth in the NRL and a big contributor to their having to make over 350 tackles each week.

That 350-odd tackles each week is the highest average in the NRL and works out to around 14 extra defensive sets per game compared to competition leaders St George Illawarra (they average 269 tackles each game).

All this defending inevitably saps energy from the attack and on that front, things are looking grim. Brisbane’s for and against of -33 is most uncharacteristic, but they have enough proven attacking talent to bring that back.

Wayne Bennett

Broncos coach Wayne Bennett (Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)

Probably the best indication of Brisbane’s attacking woes is that Melbourne Storm prop Nelson Asofa-Solomona has more try assists in season 2018 than Anthony Milford and Kodi Nikorima, combined.

How many try assists does big Nelson have? He has one.

Milford and Nikorima are a halves combination capable of producing magic, given the chance. But behind a forward pack which is gassed from defending all game, there’s not much time and space for them to get down to business and bring others into the game.

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Bennett has challenged his forwards publicly and you can guarantee he would have done so with even more vigour behind closed doors. Alex Glenn’s return this week should add more starch to the pack and, more importantly, some strong on-field leadership.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to get a tour of a premiership winning AFL club’s training facility. Around the walls of the rooms were whiteboards full of in-game key performance indicators for the players.

Almost none of these targets had anything to do with scoring, technique or executing set plays. It was all about repeat efforts, pressure acts and the like, their ‘team basics’, as it were.

When these targets were reached, our guide explained, more often than not the team won.

All Brisbane are doing is taking a moment to refocus on carrying out their team basics, hopefully righting their heavily listing ship. If they can reorient themselves, the payoff can be worth much more than two competition points from a Round 5 game at Newcastle.

Matt Lodge

Photo by Matt King/Getty Images

It’s a big call to reset and refocus your squad during regular season games but if Brisbane want to achieve anything this year, they need to be doing it now.

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There’s 20 rounds left in season 2018. That’s plenty of time to make adjustments and relaunch.

Don’t forget – after Round 5 last season, Brisbane were ninth in the standings with two wins and three losses. They went on to reach the preliminary final.

A small help is that their ladder situation isn’t as dire as it sounds. Believe it or not, if results go their way this week, Brisbane can be sixth – that’s how tight things are this year.

The Broncos face up to the streaking New Zealand across the ditch, then they’ve got the Storm in Brisbane. There won’t be a better test of their progress than the next fortnight.

As a club, they are aware enough to take a deep breath, assess their situation and take action to turn it around.

They just need to make sure they don’t hold that breath for too long.

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