Crash Tackle: Could Heals, Sally and Steph save the Broncos?
There’s plenty wrong with the Broncos at the moment, but mental weakness and an inability to tough it out is costing the club big time. ROBERT CRADDOCK has an idea to fix it.
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THE Broncos should look outside their suffocating bubble to find the single most important ingredient lacking in their tortured season … resilience.
Darius Boyd complained the Broncos are doing the same thing week after week for the same results.
Well, what about this for a bubble-bursting change of scenery and strategy?
Organise a Zoom conference each week with a famously tough Queensland sportsperson to talk about how they became a mental master of their sport.
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Get Ian Healy to talk about the day when a doctor told him he could not make the 1991 West Indian tour due to a multiple finger fracture he ignored the advice and played every Test of the series.
Ask Stephanie Rice – the swimmer Michael Bohl rates as the toughest he coached – about how she would train so hard sometime she would get out of the pool to vomit, before resuming her training.
Get Sally Pearson to talk about how she used to catch two buses to training as a teenager and be so physically exhausted at training she almost had to be assisted off the track.
The Broncos are a better team than they are showing but they need to learn how to handle adversity. The secrets of the greats may help find that spark ... and break a routine which is not getting results.
THE GREEN LIGHT
COULD the Broncos be Blake Green’s seventh NRL club next season?
We hear whispers the 33-year-old journeyman has at least been talked about as an inside back option for Brisbane who desperately need an experienced playmaker.
STRAIGHT SHOOTER
DARIUS Boyd’s candid post-match interview after the loss to the Sharks gave a vivid insight into two of the Broncos soft spots.
Boyd said some of his young teammates were “just happy to be playing first grade’’ and that “we weren’t talking’’ when the team conceded two late tries.
The first statement is a damning condemnation of the mental toughness and motivation levels of some of the side’s junior players.
The second was confirmation that, for all of their promising forward talent, if they don’t recruit a playmaking general next season the side could be doomed again.
ON THE RISE
SOMETHING is brewing at the Gold Coast Titans.
No, the Gold Coasters are not vaulting up the ladder but on successive weeks they have displayed a flintiness lacking for many year with honourable losses to Penrith and the Roosters.
The player feedback on coach Justin Holbrook is most encouraging. With David Fifita joining them next season there might just be blue sky ahead.
CROWING ROOSTER
GIVEN the major rule-bending that had taken place to allow Sonny Bill Williams to return for the Roosters you would think that club would be throwing rose petals at the feet of every NRL official.
Yet to watch Roosters captain Jake Friend question decision after decision against the Titans on Saturday was to get the impression that club was the victim of some sort of savage injustice.
Dear, oh dear.
LOOK AWAY NOW
The faltering form of the three Queensland based teams is sabotaging television ratings for the entire NRL competition.
It has been reported the season’s NRL figures are about one million down on the corresponding round last season.
One theory is that Queensland fans are not only struggling to watch their own teams but are becoming so dispirited they are not bothering to tune in for rival teams in the way fans do when their favourite sides are up and about.
GOOD AND BAD
THAT Phil Gould has applied to be a player manager as well as a commentator and possible boss of the NRL bunker officially makes him the man who moves in so many directions he could hide behind a cork screw.
Every law of common sense suggests it is a major conflict of interest yet such stories actually make rugby league the wonderfully combustible news making juggernaut that it is.
Can you imagine the scrutiny Gould will face if he takes all three roles? It will be relentless yet something tells me he will thrive on it.
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