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There’s games of two halves, and then there’s this.
For 40 minutes, the Dolphins were dreadful, with the new club unable to hold the footy, make simple tackles or organise their defence. The Titans were 26-0 up after half an hour.
Then, the roles totally reversed. After the break, it was the Gold Coast who looked like they’d met that morning, conceding borderline unforgivable tries and allowing the new boys to take the score back to 26-28 at the end.
“I always think it is possible. I never doubted that,” said Wayne Bennett after the match.
“They showed some wonderful qualities. They had to. They put themselves in that place. I was obviously pleased with that.”
Not since May 1998 has a team come back from 26 points down to win an NRL game, when the Cowboys rose to defeat Penrith having trailed by the same margin.
Such was the drama of the comeback that one of the most bizarre incidents of this season or indeed, any season, is but an afterthought: at one point: Redcliffe winger Robert Jennings stumbled, untouched, with the line in front of him and then simply stopped. Had he scored, the Dolphins might have won by more.
“He was worried about a double movement but he hadn’t even reached the tryline,” explained Bennett.
Seasoned Titans watchers must wonder how this happens so frequently. In 2022, they threw away a 24-4 lead on this same ground against the Broncos as well as a 22-4 to the Raiders and in 2021, they chucked a 24-10 to Souths.
But this takes the cake. Justin Holbrook has presided over all of those comebacks, but one wonders what he can do. he doesn’t miss the tackles. He doesn’t forget how to pass. He can only sit in the coaches box and wonder.
“I am extremely disappointed,” said the Titans coach. “We can’t have that continue. We have to be able to change momentum when things aren’t going our way.”
It’s hard to think that a team with just eight games of NRL football have much of an identity – the Wests Tigers have nearly 600 – but the Dolphins have managed that across their short existence.
It’s knowing that they can do it that makes today’s showing so disappointing. Redcliffe were caught, repeatedly, around the ruck in clear effort areas plays.
The thinking prior to this was that the Dolphins will make you work hard to beat them and the Titans are always liable to do the opposite.
Yet it was the other way around. The Titans went 16 from 16 through the first half hour, utterly starving the Dolphins of possession. They had just eight sets, two of which were ended by dummy half forward passes.
The defensive frailties stem from that possession imbalance, but even so, the ease with which the Gold Coast went straight down Main Street has to be worrying for Wayne Bennett.
As the Titans showed in the second half, it really doesn’t take much to throw them off their game. It’s like they’re waiting around to collapse at the slightest push.
Given how easy it was to make the Titans wobble, it will infuriate Bennett that his side gave them a 26-point head start before playing anything like sensible football.
When they did come back, it was because they played Dolphins-style footy, high on effort and execution. It’s a bit bash and barge, but against the Titans, that will be plenty. They already lost badly to the Dragons this year, who did exactly that and looked like world beaters.
For the first half hour of the second half, it was a mirror image. The Titans had seven sets and the Dolphins 16. With that weight of possession, against a team so brittle, that was always going to pay off.
There’s plenty of credit to go around in that resolve. Plenty of other sides would have chased the game, but Bennett’s philosophy was just to revert to first principles. Amazingly, that worked.
Let’s get to the good stuff for the Gold Coast, which starts with AJ Brimson. The fullback returned to the side and was immediately back among their best players, chiming well with Kieran Foran in the halves and constantly threatening around the ruck.
Granted, he was given enormous licence by the lacklustre Dolphins’ defence, but Brimson ruthlessly exploited the space he was given.
The ball movement in the forwards was exceptional too, with Isaac Liu and Tino Fa’asuamaleaui crafting space between Dolphins middles that lead to easy tries for both of them.
That was the good. Here’s the bad. The Titans have long possessed the softest underbelly in the NRL and it was on full display here. It’s as if they believe their own hype mid-game, losing all defensive intensity to allow the Dolphins back in, then their attacking resolve too.
The sight of Foran trying a kick from inside his own 20 early in the tackle count, seemingly without ever telling anyone else that it was happening, was emblematic. They signed Foran specifically to try and stop that kind of silliness, but the Gold Coast changes everyone.
It’s shameful stuff for the Titans, utterly avoidable yet also entirely predictable. They do this sort of thing all the time. Holbrook has to look around at this gorup and wonder what more he can say to them. Perhaps the Titans board need to look at Holbrook, too.