Already, curious fans have clustered along the fence line on the Ithaca Creek side of the field – men, women, small children – staring into this complex, busy petri dish of sprints and kicks and simulated match scenarios, of sweat and cussing and a gruel of testosterone that, for a moment, is carried on the breeze like the malt from the XXXX beer factory at the height of a brewing cycle.

OUT OF SHAPE BRONCO BANISHED FROM RED HILL

WELCOME TO SUPERCOACH NRL 2019

BENNETT LURES COWBOYS PREMIERSHIP STAR TO BUNNIES

They come, these avid fans, to witness at the start of yet another season. To look into this multifaceted, mercurial, pre-season puzzle that is the 2019 Brisbane Broncos, and try to see … what? Signs. Indicators. Flashes of individual genius, of team unity. Anything that might point to another premiership for their beloved team.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that each time the Broncos get beaten, it’s the fans that need time to recover. And this time around, in 2019, it’s even more of a vexing algorithm because out in the centre of the field on this day, festooned in Broncos gear, is the new head coach, Anthony Seibold, 44.

He stands with his hands behind his back, surveying the session, purveying the drills, a football gripped in one hand. Or he’ll shift slightly, and tuck the ball under one arm. The skin of the ball, always at hand.

This is something Broncos fans rarely had to consider, the coach. For most of the past three decades, that person has been Wayne Bennett, a face straight out of the Mount Rushmore school of sculpting, the lopsided grin that could indicate both mirth and menace, the rangy figure of him so ubiquitous around this precinct that you almost didn’t see him.

You just knew he was, and had always been, there. Broncos. Buck the horse. Bennett. But what of this Seibold, or Seibs, as he’s known?

He was last year’s Dally M coach of the year, after a stellar debut season as head coach of the South Sydney Rabbitohs. But who is he?

How might the early morning fans at training, and not an inconsiderable few truckies and tradies who pull into the carpark at Fulcher Rd for a quick gander at their treasured Broncos, see him in this PW (post-Wayne) era?

Seibold is being watched with as much rapt attention as the team, a combination of familiar names from recent seasons, and a raft of youngsters champing for glory in the National Rugby League. Today, though, if they’re looking for a bit of Wayne, post-Wayne, they’ll walk away disappointed.

Suddenly the ground trembles with booming, thudding contemporary music from large speakers, to accompany the team’s cardio training.

It is 21st century stuff. High-octane. Rhythmic. Blood-rushing to modern ears, a wall of noise to an older generation.

But the decibels underline to the hopefuls lining the fence, and anyone within a kilometre of the field, that whatever your taste in music, the new century has arrived at Red Hill.

And if you could see beneath Anthony Seibold’s cap, what is going on in that busy, self-admitted obsessive compulsive, disordered brain?

You might discover his neurons working through a research paper he contributed to not that long ago, as an academic attached to the Australian Catholic University in Brisbane, titled “The Influence of Physical Contact on Pacing Strategies During Game-Based Activities”, co-authored by Richard Johnston, Tim Gabbett and David Jenkins.

It reads in part: “Pacing has been described as the efficient use of energy resources during exercise so that all available energy is utilised without compromising performance before the cessation of the event … while it is well documented that athletes from individual sports adopt pacing strategies in order to manage fatigue, recent evidence has shown that different pacing strategies might be adopted in high-intensity, intermittent team sports.”

Drones. Statistics. Metrics. Integrated systems. Precise moments of game simulation. Lectures. Note-taking. Communication. The study of skills and techniques from rugby, AFL, soccer, basketball.

Seibold is still in the centre of the field, the hands clasped behind his back again. Holding a ball. Watching all. Welcome to the Brisbane Broncos, PW-style.

FROM THE FIELD TO COACH’S CORNER

A few hours later Seibold is sitting in the restaurant of the Broncos Leagues Club, across Fulcher Rd from the club’s new Clive Berghofer Centre, a $27.2 million state-of-the-art training facility, administration centre and community space that opened at the beginning of last season.

To get to the dining room in the leagues club you have to negotiate an alleyway of poker machines, busy on this morning, pinging and singing away to mesmerised punters, Brisbane diehards with the Broncos in their veins.

The table overlooks the old playing field. It escapes nobody that the clubhouse, as well-appointed as it is, seems to belong to another era now with the gleaming Berghofer Centre just across the road. That it has been a little left behind.

It still stages the “iconic” Broncos all-you-can-eat buffet, and there’s Alfie’s Sports Bar and the 88 Restaurant. All beloved features of the club. The memories are thick in here, but with memories come ghosts.

Seibold carries a natural air of confidence and assuredness. He is polite and articulate. And most importantly it appears he means business, and that he takes the role of coaching the Broncos very, very seriously.

He doesn’t need to look at the lunch menu. “I’m having the pork belly,” he says, matter-of-factly, in his gravelly voice.

But who is he, this seeming prodigy who emerged from the ether last year and took the Rabbitohs within a game of the grand final?

“During my first press conference [as an NRL coach last year], I got asked if I was a bit of an overnight story, but I’d been working for 12 years in coaching as my full-time profession,” Seibold says. “If you look at a carpentry apprenticeship, it’s four years, so I’d done three times that.

“That’s the way I look at it.”

PLEASE SEND ME TO BOARDING SCHOO L

Seibold was born in Rockhampton in October 1974 and excelled at junior cricket and rugby league. But he always had an eye on his studies.

He asked his parents, Jeff and Janelle Seibold, both 62, to send him to boarding school for his senior years, 40km away at St Brendan’s College at Mary’s Mount, Yeppoon, about 700km north of Brisbane – which has a reputation for producing top-level rugby league players.

“I come from a strong family [younger brother Damien coaches rugby league team CQ Capras Under 20s in Rockhampton and younger sister Emma lives on the Gold Coast] and my parents made a lot of sacrifices for me,” Seibold says.

“I went to boarding school at my request. I thought it would give me a better opportunity and would give me a lot of structure in my life. I wanted the best opportunity to get a good education and opportunities throughout life.”

It worked. Seibold did well academically and won a scholarship to the Australian Catholic University at Banyo, near Brisbane Airport, where he completed a teaching degree while playing in lower grades for the Brisbane Broncos from 1992 to 1995 alongside lifelong friend Wendell Sailor.

Seibold has had stints teaching at Catholic schools in Brisbane and Rockhampton and after completing a Masters of Education in 2005 from the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba, he worked there as a lecturer.

Even before Seibold entered the Broncos fold as a teenager, he carefully observed the coaching methods of the great Wayne Bennett.

“I fell in love watching the Broncos in [their foundation year] 1988, watching Alfie [Langer] and Wally Lewis and Gene Miles and those guys in those early years,” he recalls.

“By the time I was 17, the first year the club won a premiership [1992], I was playing in the under-21s here, and to see guys like Kevvie [Walters] and Glenn Lazarus and Steve Renouf and others excel, I looked up to those guys and put them on a pedestal in a lot of ways, as a young bloke.

“I’d take notes of what we did at training when I was here as a teenager. Notes on Wayne’s coaching. It made sense to keep some journals and stuff like that.”

(As a footnote, Seibold adds: “There’s a lot of research around learning retention and best practice in those areas. A couple of things really stand out … and one of them is asking questions of others to get a perception of understanding. The other thing is note-taking.”)

ON THE THRONE OF THE MASTER

There is little need to point out the irony, as lunch arrives, that the studious apprentice that was Seibold now sits on the throne of the master. But he is a man who, while recognising the importance of history and ritual, is equally comfortable in moving forward. At pace.

He described himself as a “journeyman” player, and after the Broncos juniors he winged his way to Europe, both for the football and the life experience.

In 1996, he scored a contract with French rugby league team Saint-Estève, based in Perpignan in the south of the country.

“It was an opportunity to learn a bit of French for five months and to expose myself to a different culture,” he recalls. “In some ways I was probably a bit insular before that; we’re quite isolated out here in Australia.”

His ambition, though, was to play in the English Super League competition. But before that, he returned to Australia and signed a contract with the Canberra Raiders, alongside the likes of Brad Clyde, Laurie Daley, Ricky Stuart and David Furner. It was 1997.

Still, he had been captured by Europe, and in 1999 he hooked up with the London Broncos, then owned by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Seibold played 55 games for the London club – his most consistent stint as a player in professional rugby league.

“They offered me a two-year deal to go over there and I thought it’d be a good opportunity to go and live in London and get paid well to play in the English league,” he says.

Seibold went on to captain the Hull Kingston Rovers in 2003-04 before returning home to play for the Toowoomba Clydesdales in 2005, but as his on-field career came to an end, he began his unique dance between academia and coaching in Australia and Europe.

He coached in Wales before hooking up as assistant coach at the Melbourne Storm under Craig Bellamy and completing two seasons as assistant coach to Kevin Walters with the Queensland State of Origin team.

Seibold had served a decent apprenticeship, but it was at the Storm that his ideas began to consolidate.

He wanted more responsibility. He sensed he could make it as a coach in the big league.

Then in October 2017, he was announced as the new South Sydney coach.

A year later, he was being touted as the man to unseat Bennett at the Broncos.

BRISBANE CALLING

After his stellar debut season with the Bunnies, Seibold could have named his future terms down at Redfern. But the Broncos came calling.

“Yeah, it was a really tough decision,” he says with hindsight. “I don’t know whether I’ll ever be put into a situation like that … that was such an emotional decision. In some ways it’s like breaking up with a girlfriend you still like, does that make sense?

“I just knew that the opportunity to come home was too good to refuse. If I had knocked back the opportunity to come back to the Broncos on this occasion, I’d very much doubt I’d have another opportunity in the future.”

The plan was to sign Seibold on an extended contract from 2020, to allow Bennett to see out his own contract through the 2019 season.

“I knew when I agreed to sign with the Broncos [for 2020] that there would be fallout from the wider rugby league community, I knew that,” he says. “It had never been done before, there hadn’t been a coach in rugby league where they’d agreed to join a club more than a year ahead. Did I like it? No way in the world.”

He recalls the moment of his decision last October. “Souths gave me 24 hours to make up my mind,” Seibold says.

“I was in Scotland at St Andrews golf resort, in camp with the Scottish rugby team. It was really challenging. The time difference. I wasn’t getting much sleep.

“I was getting a lot of phone calls from people associated with both clubs.

“I was by myself. I spent a lot of time on the phone with family. It was quite funny. It even made the news over there. The England versus New Zealand series was about to start and Wayne was over there as the coach of England, so it was sort of big news. It was a very bizarre time.”

Then, with the deal as good as done, an equally peculiar month followed, with Bennett shifting positions, and tilting the entire scenario off balance.

Seibold understood his coaching arrangement with Brisbane had been brought forward to begin in the 2019 season, with Bennett swapping straight to the Rabbitohs as coach.

But Bennett dug his heels in.

Then there were allegations that Bennett was even communicating with Rabbitohs players while technically still coach of the Broncos.

Seibold didn’t know if he was coming or going. He erupted. “I’ve had a gutful,” he told News Corp in December. “I’ve been sitting here for four weeks and feeling like a punching bag. It’s not acceptable and it’s not fair.”

In the end, Bennett was sacked and moved on.

Seibold reflects on that period: “I sort of exploded in the end. I suppose in some ways when you get backed into a corner, at some stage you come out swinging. I’ve left a lot of that behind. I didn’t like that at all … it was very uncomfortable and thankfully I was overseas for two and a bit weeks of it.

“Some of the things being said were certainly not true, some things said had elements of truth; I stopped reading the paper, that’s essentially what I did. The decision brings me home. It gives me some stability. I made the right decision.”

He concedes that his peripatetic rugby league life has been tough on his wife, Hollie, and three daughters, Isabella, 16, Ava, 12, and Siena, 9.

“It’s like having a dad who’s in the army or a dad who’s a regional schoolteacher or something like that,” Seibold says.

“Every couple of years you’ve got to pick up and make new friends. It’s very challenging and it makes me sad in a lot of ways that you’ve got to keep doing that to the kids.

“My kids are really supportive of me, but I have to prioritise them. I had to make the tough decision to leave them down south for the year [to allow his oldest daughter to complete high school in familiar surrounds].”

Will he and they commute to be together through the year?

“It’s challenging,” he says. “I don’t want to make too much of a deal about that.” On the day we speak, he points out that it is Isabella’s 16th birthday, and she is in Sydney. There is disappointment writ large on his face.

The life of a modern coach.

THE OLD WAYS ARE WANING

A few hours earlier, during their brutal training session, the Broncos squad splits into two teams to play out some game simulations.

It is no place for the faint-hearted. Bodies clap loudly against each other. Skipper Darius Boyd is fended off at one point and goes flying into the turf. Hooker Andrew McCullough is sucking serious air.

Brisbane’s young forwards – Payne Haas, 19 (194cm, 119kg), David Fifita, 18 (186cm, 107kg) and Tevita Pangai Jnr, 22 (190cm, 113kg) – cast chillingly long shadows on this hot morning.

They’re training at a pace that would be respectable in a semi-final match.

Winger James “Jimmy the Jet” Roberts is lurking at the edges. Is he limping?

One of the spectators remarks: “He’s like that racehorse you own that’s always got a limp. Until you put a football in his hand … ”

At 11.07am things are winding down. The bulk of the players are sapped.

McCullough shakes his head, hands on hips, as he walks slowly off the field.

The doof doof is over. If the grass isn’t wet with sweat, it should be.

Some onlookers behind the fence remain, staring quietly into the emptying field. Looking again for that sign. Searching for promise. Peering into the distance for a piece of silverware, or even just a glint of light off the handle of the trophy, such is life after a 13-year premiership drought for the mighty Brisbane Broncos.

Fifita was five years old when the Broncos last lifted the NRL championship trophy. Haas was six. But there’s a buzz around Fulcher Rd and the punters may be sensing that.

With Seibold has come inclusiveness. Walls are coming down.

Everyone from chief executive Paul White through to the front-desk personnel are welcomed to regular Tuesday morning breakfast barbecues.

(Seibold will later say at lunch: “It’s the people. The administration. The board. The playing group, the performance staff, the auxiliary staff, everybody’s got a part to play from top to bottom, and if someone doesn’t do their job it has an impact across the organisation. That’s the way I think. We need to be integrated, we need to be a club, we can’t be a silo of just a football department and everybody else looks after the rest, in my opinion.”)

A staff member says that various “Wayneisms” are disappearing, or are set to go, including the huge wall quote in the players’ gym that reads: WE LIVE ABOVE THE LINE.

Many of the young players have recently had babies with their wives or partners. They’re bonding, in the game and in life.

And every week, on his day off, Broncos fullback Jamayne Isaako, 22, is practising his goal-kicking on the new football field that backs onto the Clive Berghofer Centre.

Kick after kick, up to 100 in a session, strikes the wall of the centre, with the coach and administration and media staff inside. Bang. Bang. Over and over.

It is the type of ritual that coach Seibold relishes. Bang. This beat might, just might, be the music of success for the Broncos in 2019. Bang.

“I think there are 19 or 20 young kids here at the moment who I worked with previously through emerging Kangaroos or Origin programs,” says Seibold, towards the end of lunch. “I’ve got a good read on the squad. It wasn’t as though I’ve come in, knew no one and had to start from scratch.

“But everyone has a different way of doing things. I have an integrated approach to how I coach. That is, the physical, tactical, and technical and mental sides of things are all integrated and have a purpose. We don’t train in silos.

“There’s a lot of potential in the group here. Sometimes people can live in the past but the group has an opportunity to make their own memories and, you know, I just want to provide the framework for them to be the best version of themselves.”

What did he see in the Broncos last year whenever the South Sydney Rabbitohs were up against them?

Seibold says he noticed some inconsistency, that one week they were a nine out of 10 team, and the next a four out of 10 team. But you always had to be at your best against the Broncos.

“There is potential in the group,” he says, matter-of-factly.

“I keep saying that word because potential and performance are two really different things, you know? I’m trying to put the guys in situations that have context to games. I’m big on situation-based training, and I’m big on training above game speed.

“It’s very unusual for these guys if they haven’t trained like that previously. It’s very challenging for them and difficult for them and they’re probably in an uncomfortable place at the moment, but it’s how I believe we should train. It’s my job to try to get that potential out of the group.”

He acknowledges that the morning session was rigorous.

“The players will do three sessions today. They’ve had a team meeting this morning, an educational meeting, and they trained for 90 minutes. Certain segments of that were way above game speed so they’re put under pressure physically, we had tactical situations under fatigue where they have to come up with the right answers.

“We often do scenario-based training where we put a score up and a certain time up on the clock and they have to go and play that segment of the game. That’s got great transfer to game day.

“As you saw today, it’s very physically taxing for the players. At the moment their bodies are sore, at the moment they’re challenged mentally and physically … it’s a tough time out there.

“People think being a rugby league player is an easy life and lots of money, but it’s tough, it’s really tough, and it’s not for everyone, you know? You’ve got to dive all the way in … you get some players who just dip their toe in, and they will get found out … ”

Lunch is over, and we make our way out of the restaurant through the back of the banks of poker machines.

An elderly woman is moving slowly in front of us, and Seibold politely trails behind her until he can comfortably move past.

He says whenever he’s back in Canberra (where Hollie is from), he always tries to sit in on Question Time in Federal Parliament. He finds the human interaction and communication fascinating.

And he loves the Australian War Memorial. “The sacrifice that others made for us,” Seibold says.

“I hate using war analogies in a lot of ways, but the legacy of the ANZACs is something special, just as the players and coaches who have come before us here at the club, they’ve created a legacy and handed on the baton, and I know the last change of that baton was quite emotional and emotive.

“I have a really strong belief in upholding what’s come before us, does that make sense? But essentially, it’s our turn in the jersey, it’s my turn in the coach’s seat, and you’ll be judged on results at the end of the day.”

Seibold shakes hands and bids farewell out the front of the old Broncos Leagues Club. And strides confidently across to the new side of Fulcher Rd. ■

Don’t miss your chance to grill new coach Anthony Seibold about his plans for the Broncos at the 2019 NRL Season Launch in Brisbane.

Royal Internationa Convention Centre at Bowen Hills

Monday March 4 from 12noon

Tickets: couriermail.com.au/NRL