This is Wayne’s world and we are just living in it, writes Robert Craddock
Mark it down as the sporting earthquake that not only shook up the NRL but rocked the foundations of cross-town rival the Broncos, Robert Craddock writes.
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Mark it down as the sporting earthquake that didn’t simply shake up the NRL but changed the fabric of Queensland sport.
The afternoon when a team taunted for not being able to sign a star player, suddenly appeared to have a galaxy of them.
The afternoon when a team that had never played an official game beat a club that is 115 years old.
There was no logical way of predicting it would happen – but it did.
The Dolphins performance to up-end the Sydney Roosters 28-18 in their debut game in the NRL after being given around 450 days to assemble a team ranks as a red letter day in Queensland sporting history.
The Dolphins are so new and raw that coach Wayne Bennett admitted to the ABC he still didn’t know a note of the team song but planned to urgently learn it.
The fallout is even bigger than the game itself.
Suddenly the Broncos have a genuine rival for their turf, their fans, their sponsors and their heartland.
They play each other in round four – it will stop the city and the state and the rivalry will rumble on and surely get bigger by the year and the decade.
One team was panic-stricken, clunky, error prone and rattled at Suncorp – the other team was the Dolphins.
The Dolphins are just one match old yet somehow we feel we know them.
The brutal sledge-hammer tackles of Felise Kaufusi, the impish brilliance of new five-eighth Isaiya Katoa, the crafty running of hooker Jeremy Marshall-King, the steady guiding hand of Sean O’Sullivan.
It was all there as a team who had never played an official game together combined like the old sweats many of them are.
They even stuck up for each other late in the game when there was a blue.
The late Artie Beetson, the spiritual godfather of both clubs and the reason, they played each other in round one, would have loved it.
Bennett has won seven premierships and State of Origin series against enormous odds but, at age 73 when he could be spending his days talking to his cows on his Darling Downs farm, this triumph is one of his best.
With arms crossed and looking as relaxed as if he was leaning on a farm fence, Bennett’s first line when asked how good the win was at the post match press conference was “not too bad.’’
Eventually he opened up and compared it to the Broncos epic first round win against Many in 1988 and how “the first win just settles everything down.’’
True, but it will also stir things up.
Bennett promised a team who would play in the Bennett mould and they duly did.
Quite weirdly, the Dolphins lack of Flash Harry poster boys – seen as a conspicuous weakness – almost becomes their strength and selling point.
Fans love teams that have a red hot go. Grit and guts sells in rugby league. If this is what they are truly made of they will become crowd magnets.
Kaufusi’s big hits and the brilliance of fullback Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow will gain their own cult followings.
Defending like tigers, keeping things simple, keeping errors low, outlasting his rivals with supreme fitness … it worked for Bennett in the 80s. It works now.
There were no funky game plans or trick shots. Just pure effort, particularly from the five forwards of 30-plus years who are nearing the end of celebrated careers.
Roosters coach Trent Robinson was not the first coach to say he knew pretty much precisely what Bennett would throw at him – but he lost anyway.
In some ways 19-year-old debutant five-eighth Katoa embodied the spirit of the team.
He made a couple of errors, got smashed a couple of times and wobbled off at halftime looking as if he had just been to war.
But he just kept fronting up. Soon after the break he put two centimetre-perfect kicks that were taken on the goal-line, proving his toughness and ability to recover from a setback.
When the doors closed in lifts behind corporate guests heading to the fifth floor at Suncorp Stadium they revealed a giant shot of Dolphins star recruit Anthony Milford looking their way, square jawed and ready for battle.
But Milford is so out of condition he cannot make their team and young gun Katoa is in his place.
INSIDE STORY: HOW THE DOLPHINS CAME TO LIFE
- Travis Meyn and Peter Badel
Wayne Bennett has vowed the Dolphins won’t be embarrassed in the NRL following a 76-year journey to become Queensland’s fourth top-flight club.
The Dolphins will officially enter the National Rugby League at Suncorp Stadium on Sunday afternoon when they face the Sydney Roosters in round 1 of the 2023 Premiership.
It has been a long road to the top grade for the Redcliffe club, which was founded in 1947 and has spent nearly four decades planning for this day.
A powerhouse of the Brisbane Rugby League in its glory days, the Dolphins were relegated to second-tier status in 1988 when the Brisbane Broncos were formed to enter the NSWRL.
Since then, Redcliffe has been working towards a return to the top and will celebrate that moment when the Dolphins grace the old Lang Park and become the River City’s rival for the Broncos.
Bennett, a seven-time premiership-winning mentor, has seen it all in 44 years of professional coaching and insists the Dolphins won’t fail in the NRL.
“It’s a very special day,” Bennett said.
“It’s the dawn of the Dolphins and it’s about to come to reality.
“I don’t have a lot of regrets about what we’ve done. You do look back on your pre-season and I think we did it really well.
“Yes, we have (the ability to win), but I’m not focusing on winning at the moment. It’s a case of coming together as a team.”
PENINSULA TO PENTHOUSE
It has been 16 years since the NRL’s last expansion side – the Gold Coast Titans – entered the league in 2007.
In that time, the Titans have struggled on and off the field, winning only one finals match and collapsing under crippling financial debts in 2015, forcing the NRL to take ownership to save the club.
So you can understand the NRL’s hesitance to launch a 17th team, with the idea regularly floated before fizzling in the years since the Titans joined.
That was until Peter V’landys was appointed chairman of the Australian Rugby League Commission.
In one of his first interviews as ARLC boss, V’landys told The Sunday Mail on December 1, 2019, that he wanted to bring a second club to Brisbane to rival the Broncos.
“Queensland is our market – we need a game every week in Brisbane,” V’landys said at the time.
“I can see 17 teams in the next broadcast deal working. I am not going to pre-empt the ARL Commission’s decision, but having a second team in Brisbane is 100 per cent an option.
“This is only my view, but Brisbane can sustain a second team, no question.
“The NRL is a billion-dollar business and I will be doing everything possible to make Queensland even stronger.”
What rugby league fans have learnt in the years since is what V’landys wants, he gets.
And Redcliffe’s bosses acted almost immediately following that statement, hatching plans to bring the Moreton Bay peninsula club to the NRL.
“V’landys made a statement that there’d be a new team 2023 and it would be in Brisbane, so Redcliffe got moving,” said Dolphins CEO and bid chief Terry Reader.
“Tony Murphy (Dolphins Group CEO) called me one day and left a voicemail asking me to come in and see them because they wanted me to run their bid.
“I had a meeting and looked behind the curtains of their operation. The next day I met Bob Jones (Dolphins chairman) and Steve Beakley (board member) and we did a deal on the footpath outside the Leagues Club to start running the bid.
“One of the first conversations I had with the guys about running their bid was we had to tell everyone what they had.
“It was a wonderful story that no-one knew about. It wasn’t about showing off, it was about telling people we were better set-up than many NRL sides already.
“We unveiled our blueprint about the club and its financial power. We went six lengths in front that day and no-one caught us from that point.
“The front page of the paper said ‘Bigger than the Broncos’ with $100 million in assets. We put our marker in the ground about the foundation the club had.”
OVERCOMING COVID
The NRL’s broadcast deal was due to expire at the end of the 2022 season, making a 2023 launch the most logical time for a new club to enter the competition.
It was early in 2020 when expansion started to gather momentum, with the Dolphins, Brisbane Firehawks (Easts Tigers), and Brisbane Bombers/Jets bids showing interest.
But then emerged a global pandemic – Covid-19 – which shut the world down for the best part of 2020, with the NRL season put on ice for months after just one round.
Expansion looked destined to be shelved once again. But V’landys had other ideas.
“You have to dip your toe in the water at some point,” V’landys said.
“We need to turn casual fans into engaged fans and for us it was important they were new fans. We didn’t want someone that followed the Brisbane Broncos to go for the Dolphins.
“The Dolphins did an independent study that showed they could get up to 200,000 new viewers. They showed us they could get new people that will become engaged fans.
“That was important because we needed to sell that to the broadcasters, because they needed to see they’d get additional revenues out of expansion.
“That was the main sale point of the Dolphins – they did the study and research to prove they could attract a new audience to the game.”
But with the struggles of the Titans and other cash-strapped NRL clubs a concern, the Dolphins emerged a clear frontrunner thanks to their asset base consisting of a successful leagues club, shopping centre and other property ventures.
“It was very important to us that we didn’t have to subsidise a club moving forward or one that could fall over after a couple of years. That would have been a disaster,” V’landys said.
“The Dolphins having $100 million in assets was a compelling part of the criteria.
“It was important they were financially strong and didn’t come back to the NRL looking for subsidisation. They had to stand on their own two feet.”
CONSTANT REJECTIONS
As Covid, and the reaction of Australian governments, tossed up continual hurdles for the NRL, it looked as though expansion could be put on the backburner again.
The entire competition was relocated to Queensland midway through the 2021 season and after the historic Suncorp Stadium grand final between the Panthers and Rabbitohs, the NRL made a decision.
On October 13, 2021, the Dolphins were granted the game’s 17th licence for entry in 2023, giving them 17 months to prepare for this day.
Bennett, mastermind of the Broncos’ six premierships, was appointed coach and Peter O’Sullivan came on as recruitment manager as the Dolphins attempted to convince 36 players to join the unknown.
They were given no concessions or leg ups from the NRL and continually hit roadblocks and rejections in the player market, missing the likes of star players Cameron Munster, Brandon Smith, Tino Fa’asuamaleaui and Kalyn Ponga.
With their $16 million NRL grant not kicking in until 2023, the Dolphins spent $7 million on operating costs alone last year but have done tremendously well to generate the second-highest sponsorship revenue in the NRL, behind the Broncos, and secure 20,000 members.
“They’ve done exceptionally well,” V’landys said.
“It’s always going to be hard, but the management and professionalism has been outstanding.
“One of the requirements we had was that Wayne Bennett was the coach.
“One, because he’s a walking marketing machine for rugby league. Two, we had confidence he’d put a good team together.”
DAWN OF THE DOLPHINS
The Dolphins were always facing an uphill battle in the recruitment space and there’s no doubt their 2023 squad is lacking star power.
The likes of Jesse and Kenny Bromwich, Felise Kaufusi and Tom Gilbert have given Bennett a solid base to work with and he has snared prized signings for 2024 in Broncos duo Herbie Farnworth and Tom Flegler.
Bennett, 73, was adamant he would set the Dolphins up for long-term success, rather than a short-term premiership pursuit, and he is confident the club is taking shape.
“We have a plan in place about how we want to be perceived and the young men will buy into that,” he said.
“It will be a process. Whether it takes five years or 10 years (to win a premiership) who knows? If you get the process right, you are a lot closer to success.
“I don‘t fear us not being competitive. We won’t be easy beats. It’s vital we are competitive from day one and I am confident we will be.
“No-one will want to see a new club getting flogged by 30 or 40 points. That won‘t be good for anybody in the NRL.
“I’m not allowed to bet on rugby league, but if I was, I wouldn’t be betting on the Dolphins getting the wooden spoon.
“If you look at the players we have recruited, particularly the older players and their background, it gives you a pretty good idea of what we are chasing in regards to how we want to be seen.”
For the Redcliffe faithful, it will be a special moment when the first Dolphins NRL team runs out at Suncorp Stadium just after 3pm.
It’s been nearly 40 years since the Dolphins were at the top and they believe they’re finally back where they belong.
“We’ve often joked that we’ve never had the time to enjoy winning the bid because the real work started straight away,” Reader said.
“The bit we’ll look forward to the most is when the team runs out in front of a bumper crowd in the red kit for the first time. We will be able to stop for a moment and enjoy it before we start thinking about the result.
“The Dolphins will be in the NRL officially for the first time.”
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