Broncos wages confirm the club is too top heavy with talent
Brisbane Broncos fans have been screaming about all season and the numbers show that they’ve been right all along about one crucial thing at Red Hill. Read Crash Craddock’s analysis.
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The statistics have confirmed what Broncos fans already sensed was true – Brisbane had become an upside down football club.
The club was battling a form of rugby league vertigo where the players highest up the pay scale were wobbling, and the ones lower down the food chain were keeping the show on the road.
Now Brisbane enters the marketplace chasing a new playmaker to learn exactly what the rest of the rugby league world thinks of them.
Are the Broncos still a club which players want to run to? Is Anthony Seibold a coach with pulling power?
Can a new playmaker be comfortable with being the face of the club’s revival? What if there is no revival?
Many questions are hanging in the air. The answers will be laid bare over the next month.
The statistics, as revealed by Peter Badel in Friday’s The Courier-Mail, show the senior players – the ones with the pay cheques ranging from $500,000 to $1 million – were the ones off the boil and a group of youngsters on much smaller wages like Jake Turpin, Payne Haas and David Fifita were carrying the club.
Suddenly the Broncos’ future has become a complicated game of chess where the club must realign itself to the market.
But here’s the challenge.
Upgrading a future star like Haas is easy.
Downgrading or overseeing the exit of a senior player like Darius Boyd can be a managerial nightmare.
Long-term contracts like Boyd’s are generally signed when the players are riding high in the saddle and looking as if they could play forever.
The dark storm clouds of fading speed an ageing reflexes are too far off in the distance to be given as much consideration as they should.
Seibold may well decide the club’s fate next season even before the team assembles for pre-season training.
This is a rare season where the coach’s accounting skills could mean as much as his coaching ability.
If Brisbane cannot offload Jack Bird and find a decent playmaker, and are left with their halves pairing of Tom Dearden and a yet to be identified partner, they cannot win the 2020 title.
Even Dearden, as promising as he is, must be looking at the scenario and feeling a bit like the deck hand asked to bail out the Titanic.
He is just 18 and played five games, yet suddenly he has to learn and lead at the same time.
It’s a huge ask.
The search for a halfback is an interesting affair. It has been written many times but it’s true – Brisbane have never been truly able to find a replacement for Allan Langer, who retired way back in 2002.
And the unofficial factory called backyard football which produced the likes of Langer and Walters is not what it was.
Recently I encountered a coach of an AFL academy who said “the skills of kids are not what they were because an obsession with games on phones has taken the place of backyard games of football’’.
Rugby league scouts tell similar stories. The game was like touch typing for Langer and the Walters family, just as it is for the likes of Daly Cherry-Evans and Luke Keary.
Instinct told them which keys to hit because they had the muscle memory of hitting all those keys thousands of times or more in the backyard.
It’s tough to find those sorts of players today.
Which is why the Broncos have some serious spending to do to land a big fish in the off-season.
THE GOOD
Marnus Labuschagne returning from England, doing an 11pm press conference, then declaring himself ready for action for the Queensland Bulls this weekend.
THE BAD
The Broncos defence against Parramatta. As bad as it was, at least it has spurred the club into action to make tough calls which may have been delayed by a passable performance.
THE UGLY
The blind stupidity of Greater Western Sydney star Toby Greene to go looking for trouble with a facial massage that cost him a preliminary final, the week after he escaped a suspicion for a similar offence the week before – by a fingernail.
Baby Broncos blitz Bears as Madge era starts with shutout
Brisbane’s Michael Maguire era has started with a bang, with a rising star impressing as the Broncos proved too strong for the Burleigh Bears in their first pre-season trial.
‘I dug my heels in’: The Bronco who refused to walk away
On the outer with former coach Kevin Walters, Cory Paix was told he was free to leave the Broncos, but the nuggety rake refused to walk, and now under a new coach his 526-day NRL exile looks set to end.