Kevin Walters put a positive spin on Tyson Gamble’s bone-headed podcast comments but it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Brisbane coach.
With the Broncos set to miss the finals after being in fourth spot five weeks ago, it’s strike two for Walters in his three-year mission to get the league’s former powerhouse back into the playoffs.
Such is the brutal nature of coaching in the NRL, particularly at a club like the Broncos with the highest of expectations, the heat will be on Walters from the get-go in 2023 unless they can somehow jag eighth spot by thrashing the Dragons by a cricket score at Kogarah on Saturday or getting in the back door via an unlikely Wests Tigers upset over Canberra on Sunday.
Walters was not surprisingly asked at his captain’s run media conference on Friday about Gamble’s recent podcast comments in which he claimed halfback Adam Reynolds was the tactical “mastermind” behind the team’s resurgence this year.
“Kevvie’s the coach but Reyno is the go-to guy for everybody. If you’ve got a question about the team or footy, you go to him,’ Gamble said.
(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
‘It’s not a knock on Kev, but Reyno has just been around for so long.”
Um, yes, Tyson. That is a “knock on Kev”, who has actually been around elite rugby league for a couple of decades longer and was a rather handy playmaker himself, winning no less than five premierships at the club you are representing this weekend, likely for the last time.
‘Kevvie understands footy and he’s a good bloke at getting the team up and about, but the modern day is so different to the way Kevvie played footy. There’s some similarities with how you have to be with attitude and stuff, but Reyno is the mastermind around our attack at the moment.”
Walters claimed it was “a real positive” that Gamble, who will join the Knights next season, had praised Reynolds in such a way.
The five-eighth has apologised to Walters by saying he did not intend to be disparaging towards him.
“I think it is a real positive because one of the reasons we brought Adam Reynolds here (from Souths) was to share his knowledge amongst players, staff and everybody. He’s doing that,” Walters told reporters in his media scrum. “I got coached by Wayne Bennett for 10 years and it wasn’t just him I got information from.”
He said he wasn’t frustrated by the comments because he is “all about the Broncos and getting our team moving in the right direction and Tyson is a part of that”.
Tyson Gamble. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
“We need him at his best. It is a great opportunity for us to head to Sydney and finish the season off well.”
Reynolds told Triple M on Thursday that he had spoken with Gamble who had admitted he had stuffed up. “He admits he got the words wrong and worded it wrong.”
Walters delivered a withering dressing-room dressing-down to his team after last Thursday’s 53-6 capitulation at the hands of Parramatta which effectively all but ended their finals chances on the back of the previous week’s 60-12 thumping, also at home, to Melbourne.
A little over a month ago they were riding high in fourth with a 12-6 record and on track to avoid the sudden-death section of the finals bracket.
But a solitary win over the struggling Knights is all Brisbane have to show for the past five rounds in an untimely form slump which also includes an 18-point thumping at the hands of the Roosters and a 14-point loss at Suncorp Stadium to the last-placed Tigers.
If they miss the finals it will be the first time in club history that the Broncos have gone three straight years without a playoff appearance – for a club that made the finals 18 straight years from when Walters was part of the first premiership-winning team in 1992, mediocrity will not be tolerated.
To be fair to Walters, he inherited a team that was a basket case after the controversial Anthony Seibold experiment yielded a first-round finals exit via a 58-0 pounding from Parramatta and a wooden spoon.
After finishing 14th in the first year of the rebuild, a finals berth would be seen as a success but their likely ninth-placed finish will be a pass mark at best.
They face the possibility of missing the finals despite racking up a 14-10 record which would have been enough to finish seventh last year or fifth in 2019.
(Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
In the NRL era, the only other teams to win more games than they lost and miss the finals were the 1999 Raiders who had 13 wins, a draw and 10 losses and the ‘98 Sharks, who finished 11th in a 10-team playoff format for the 20-club competition with a 12-1-11 record.
They are set to finish with the best results for a non-finals team since North Sydney missed the final five in 1993 with 14 wins, a draw and seven losses.
Brisbane’s addition of Reece Walsh at fullback will give them much more creativity in their spine next year, relieving the pressure on Reynolds to always be their “go-to guy”, as Gamble put it.
Apart from a few fringe first-graders departing in the off-season, Walters will largely have the same roster in what will likely be the defining year of his coaching career.
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