Campo’s Classics: The brief and fleeting glory of the Gold Coast Titans
The Titans are the most wretched club in the league, but even they have had some banner days — including the time they came within touching distance of the grand final.
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The footy is gone, we don’t know when it’ll come back and that absolutely sucks.
But until it comes back, we can always think back to great games from the past.
Every week until the NRL comes back, we’ll dive into a classic game from the archives and dissect how it was won and lost, and what it meant.
Campo’s Corner might be on ice for a while — welcome to Campo’s Classics.
The Roosters were supposed to take on the Titans this week, and at the request of one our readers, we’re diving into a night that promised so much, Gold Coast’s 32-6 loss to the Bondi boys in the 2010 preliminary final.
Not many people care about the Titans.
I don’t say that to be harsh, or dismissive. I care about the Titans, and it would be better for rugby league if more people did. But I say it, because it’s the truth.
There’s a reason the Titans are always struggling to attract top class players, there’s a reason they always get the worst time slots, there’s a reason you don’t know that many Titans fans.
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It’s not just because they aren’t successful, plenty of teams are unsuccessful, it’s because they have never been successful.
There is no collective memory of Gold Coast’s banner days, because they never happened, and as such, nobody cares about them because the Titans have never given them a reason to.
The Titans don’t have pockets of fans all over the place who took up the colours cause Gold Coast were flying high back when they were young, like Brisbane or Parramatta or Canterbury or the Roosters do, because the Titans never flew all that high to begin with.
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They say winning makes you handsome, but it’s bigger than that - winning makes people care.
It makes people like you. It makes people hate you. It makes people admire you. It makes people fear you. It makes them feel something, because winners can’t be ignored, and the importance of inspiring those reactions is impossible to understate, because in rugby league apathy is worse than death.
The Titans rarely inspire intense feelings of any kind. Not many people like them. Hardly anybody hates them. They’re just there, up on the Goldie, kicking back in the sun and struggling to another bottom four finish, waiting for a future that never seems to come and dwelling on a history that never got started.
They’re in the same place North Queensland used to be before Matt Bowen and Johnathan Thurston saved them, but even when the Cowboys were ignored everywhere else they always had plenty of fans come through the gates, who never lost faith and never turned away. In their darkest days the Cowboys had each other, and right now it feels like the Titans don’t even have that.
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They seem to be perpetually battling with the kind of existential crisis other clubs never have to face, and if they disappeared tomorrow there wouldn’t be many who mourned them.
The Gold Coast just isn’t designed to have a footy team, they’d say, and then they’d all move on and never think about the Titans again.
But it wasn’t always that way.
There was a time when the Titans, by God, were close to the hottest thing going. The Titans were a top four team, and a popular one at that, with premiership aspirations and big dreams and they looked up to nobody because they couldn’t lift their heads any higher. You had to care about them, because they did not give you a choice.
In 2009-10, after just three years in the competition, Gold Coast became a powerhouse. They spent every week of those two seasons in the top eight and only 10 of 52 regular season rounds outside the top four.
The first year they finished third, and got bounced out in straight sets, losing a shootout to Brisbane before falling under the weight of Parramatta and Jarryd Hayne’s golden run, a disappointing end to an excellent season.
After all, it took the Warriors seven years to make the finals for the first time. It took North Queensland 10 years. The Titans made it after just three - which is exactly how long it took Brisbane to get there after they entered the competition in 1988. That must have been taken as a good omen.
They were already among the premiership contenders in 2010 when everything got thrown open by Melbourne’s disqualification - which came a week after the Titans beat the Storm, by the way, making them the first team to do so that season before the salary cap scandal came to light.
Melbourne were the best team in the competition and it wasn’t particularly close, so their removal created a power vacuum at the top of the league that was begging to be filled.
Cameron Smith, Billy Slater and Greg Inglis couldn’t accrue a competition point, and North Queensland were trapped in one of their horrific spirals that seemed to come along every couple of years before Paul Green arrived, so Johnathan Thurston was out of finals contention early. Darren Lockyer was still around, but close to the end, and his talented Broncos side missed the playoffs entirely.
So if you were looking for the best player in the competition among the teams in the premiership race, there were really only a few answers.
Benji Marshall was at his absolute apex, the convergence point of his career where his breathtaking skill and fast feet were as close to each other as they ever would be. The Tigers returned to the finals for the first time since 2005, and this was as close as they ever got to recapturing that magic.
The Roosters had Todd Carney, who came in from the wild long enough to win the Dally M, and Wayne Bennett had done incredible things with Jamie Soward at the Dragons.
But Gold Coast had Scott Prince, and they wouldn’t have traded him for anybody.
Prince exists in a strange space - in any other era, he would have been a Test and Origin regular for years at a time, but because he existed alongside Thurston, Cronk and Lockyer, he was relegated to secondary status.
If 2010 Scott Prince was around in 2020, he would be the best halfback in the league by a length or two. High praise, but Prince was one of those few halfbacks who had the full tool kit - he could take a team around the park, he could challenge a team with his running game, his kicking was absolutely sublime, and he could do all these things at the same time.
Prince is better known for captaining the Tigers to their premiership in 2005, but he was a better overall player in 2010 - he managed more try assists (28, a career high) and more line break assists (20) than he did in 2005, as well as less errors and fewer missed tackles per match.
He wasn’t as deadly a running threat, but he was still dangerous enough, and besides, he didn’t have to run them all ragged any more - the Titans had plenty of players who could do that for him.
The Titans dusted off Clinton Toopi, once the best centre in the world, and brought him back to the NRL after four years in the cold. They gave Mat Rogers the extra responsibility he craved, and he proved a terrific halves partner for Prince. They still had Preston Campbell, the pinball wizard, at fullback, and they filled out the rest of the backline with Will Zillman and Kevin Gordon and David Mead, and that might not sound like much now but there was a time when those three were the fastest guns in the west.
Gordon in particular had mythical speed, terrifying speed, where the crowd would rise every time he got near a loose ball because he could take it to the house without even hitting top gear. Think about what Josh Addo-Carr is like now, that’s kind of what Kevin Gordon was like then.
Luke Bailey and Mark Minichiello were still up front, and so were rep players like Ashley Harrison and Anthony Laffranchi, but the big difference from the year before was Greg Bird. Capable of playing lock, second row and five-eighth, and doing all three equally well, Bird was the best overall player the Titans had signed since their foundation year. He made his return to Origin with the Blues, and helped take the Titans from the fringes of premiership contention to the very thick of it.
He was also coming off a very high-profile departure from the Sharks two years before, when he was convicted of allegedly maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm on his girlfriend, before being acquitted on appeal.
He was exceptional on the field and controversial off it, and whatever it might have cost the Titans in goodwill, they were glad to pay it. Who knows when a premiership chance would hit the coast again?
After the Storm’s exit, the Dragons were the best team in the competition. The Titans beat them in their only meeting that year, an 11-10 classic courtesy of a Roger field goal from dummy half in golden point.
They beat the Roosters and Tigers within two weeks of each other just before the finals, and they beat the Panthers, Raiders, Sea Eagles and Warriors over the course of the season, meaning they knocked off all seven of the other top eight teams at one point of the year, the only finals team to do so.
They finished fourth, beat the Warriors handily at Skilled Park, the first finals victory in their history, and moved on to the prelim.
Instead of playing it at home, the Titans moved it up the road to Suncorp Stadium. Skilled Park wouldn’t have been big enough to hold all the fans. Gold Coast were averaging the fourth highest crowds per game in the league, and a tick over 27,000 had crammed into the ground for their finals win over New Zealand.
Some of the Titans players and officials must have imagined what it would be like, to make the grand final. How could they not have when it was so close, and so soon?
They must have imagined what it could do for the club, how it could forge an identity and a link to the community that would be unbreakable. Plenty of sports have tried to start up teams on the Gold Coast, but none of them ever won, and you can do all the school visits you like, winning is the strongest bond that can bring a town and a team together.
Look what an early premiership did for Melbourne, they might have said, why couldn’t that be us? It gave the Storm something they have never really lost - a status as one of the game’s big clubs, a perpetual heavyweight, a club that mattered.
The Broncos had missed the finals for the first time in nearly 20 years, and North Queensland were trapped down the bottom of the ladder. This was a chance for the Titans to be Queensland’s team in a way they might never get again. If Prince hoisted the trophy at ANZ Stadium there’d be no more little brother bullshit, and the Titans future would be whatever they wanted it to be. Why couldn’t it happen to them?
It would have been nice to think about. It still is now. None of it ever happened, of course, but it’s still nice.
The 2010 Roosters weren’t a great side, but they hit form at the right time and their confidence was unshakable after their extra time win over the Tigers in the first week of the finals, which was less of a football game than a life experience.
If Braith Anasta misses that field goal and all other results stayed the same, they would have been gone in the very first week. They feared nothing, because they had nothing to lose.
The Titans had an entire identity on the line, and the stakes were incredibly high, even if they didn’t know it at the time, and the history they had yet to make was in the balance. It’s not often we know when a club’s foundation myth is unfurling in front of our eyes, but that’s how it was for Gold Coast.
The Roosters didn’t have to worry about any of that - they were the Roosters after all, they had won in the past and, surely, they would win again in the future. This was one of many peaks for them. The Titans had never seen the summit before.
Sam Perrett flew over Gordon to claim a Pearce kick for the first try, then Zillman replied as he chased down a Prince kick to get in behind Joey Leilua. Perrett grabbed another shortly thereafter, and a shootout looked likely before Prince tried to slice through from close range and got smacked in the face by Carney. Prince played on, but wasn’t himself, and would have gone for an HIA had they existed at the time.
From there the Titans self-destructed and the Roosters surged. Poor Will Zillman, man of the match against the Warriors two weeks before, had one of the worst nights of his footballing life, making five errors as the merciless Tricolours went at him again and again and again.
Daniel Conn, a former Titan himself, brushed through some feeble defense in the middle of the field and scored from 20 out. That stretched the lead to 18-6 but it seemed like 180-6.
Later tries to Braith Anasta and Frank-Paul Nu’uausala blew the final score out to 32-6, a fair thumping in a preliminary final in anybody’s language.
It was the best team in the history of the Gold Coast, Giant or Seagull or Charger or Titan, and of the eight Roosters teams to make the grand final since 2000, this one was comfortably the worst. The Titans were the better team that year, but the Roosters were better on the day it counted most, and that’s all that really matters.
The Roosters went on to the grand final and they got manhandled by a Dragons team who was several classes above them. Once Melbourne went out, it was always St George-Illawarra’s premiership to lose.
Bennett’s Dragons were designed to put down the clamps, grind down the middle of the field and kick their opposition to death, starving them of their points field position until there was nothing left to keep them going.
They were well-designed to take down Carney and the rest of the flashy Roosters, as white-hot as they were, and all the Roosters confidence and belief and attacking panache was rendered useless as the Dragons choked them out in the rain. It was not the sort of game the Roosters were made for - but the Titans sure were.
Things have never been that good for Gold Coast again. In 2011 it all fell apart, and they finished with the wooden spoon for the first time.
Gordon did his knee and was never the same, losing a good deal of the speed that made him such a terror. Rogers was supposed to retire after 2010, came back midway through 2011 only to break his foot and retire again.
Bailey fought on for four more years and his effort never waned, nor did Zillman’s, who hung them up as one of the few things the Titans have to a club legend, which says a lot about Zillman and even more about the club itself.
Prince did all he could, but 2010 was the final year of his peak, and at the end of 2012 he left to finish his career with Brisbane. The Titans have yet to find another player of his class.
There’s been false dawns since - the Albert Kelly-Aidan Sezer days, for example, and the 12 months Ash Taylor looked worth more a whole lot more than $1 million a season, and even a return to the finals in 2016, when the Titans scrapped their way into eighth spot despite a losing record and a huge injury toll, and they gave Brisbane a mighty scare before it all went the way these things always seem to go for the competition’s youngest club.
Bird played that night as well, so did Nathan Friend, and they were the last two from the prelim team to leave.
But for the most part, the Titans have been flat out surviving. There was the cocaine scandal and numerous financial crisis, and big-money recruits who never seemed to kick on, and a big bet on Jarryd Hayne that backfired so badly, and a steady slide from the early relevance they once enjoyed.
In 2019, the Titans attracted an average crowd of 11,587, the lowest in their history, - down from 21,618 in 2008. They came last, winning just four games, and were as wretched a side as any in NRL history.
If the first two games of the season were anything to go by, Justin Holbrook has such a long way to go before the Titans are even mentioned among finals contenders, let alone those teams with premiership aspirations.
They are currently on a 13-match losing streak which stretches back to last June. They are once again a stopping point, a place where a player can get a start, or a big payday, but not a place where winning is done.
There’s a reason Jai Arrow doesn’t want to stick around.
The only way for the Titans to change these things is to start winning. That’s an easy thing to say, and getting there is so much harder. But they have to find a way, because they need people to care.
Last year, the Courier-Mail released teams of the decade for all 16 NRL clubs.
With most teams there were, at least, half a dozen walk up starts. But the Titans were much harder to fill out. Plenty of honest performers made it in, but few stars.
With due respect, would Josh Hoffman have made another club’s team of the decade? Would Zillman? Would James Roberts and Aidan Sezer, considering they had better days once they left? Would Jai Arrow, who was a sure selection after just 38 NRL games?
Prince made it, of course, and so did Bailey and Bird. All told, nine of the players selected played in 2010. It’s the closest thing to glory days they ever had.
Every other club in the league, bar the poor old Warriors, have a glorious premiership victory they can retreat back to when things get tough, but even the Warriors have 2002 and 2008 and 2011.
The Titans have a straight sets exit, a loss in a preliminary final they really should have won, and scraping into eighth with a losing record.
That’s it.
That’s it, after 13 years. It’s a long time to be running on empty.
But a season is about the journey as much as it’s about the destination, and as badly as 2010 might have ended it was still as good as it ever got for the Titans and their fans, which makes it important in itself, and worthy of remembrance.
It’s not much of a golden era, and it could have been so much more, but it’s all they’ve got, and they should be proud of it.