It will be interesting.
Bellamy has been flogging his squads for like 20yr now and it keeps sustaining success, and I think that has to come down to the leadership group and culture of the playing group.
It seems like the players were all in with Madge this year and had great things to say about him... it also seems like he listened to the leadership group and lessened his intensity through the year.
So he may have upped his man management, whilst still being able to train them to be hard as ****, which I think was the issue with him at Souths... getting fogged by the coach, but him being a hard ass 24/7 probably starts to wear the squad down and lose the motivation to keep playing for him.
Bellamy gets away with it, because he's still a good man manager with his players.... but there's been so many in the media talking up how good a coach Madge has been... mostly from his NSW coaching. The broncos squad are now talking him up.
At Souths he probably didn't cycle through the squad as much either... potentially because they didn't have enough young talent coming through all the time to replace the older guys.
At panthers Ivan has a new crop coming through just about every year because of their conveyor belt of talent, but also losing top 17 guys each year that then have to be replaced.
Broncos may not be too dissimilar to that... we've continually got these young studs coming through and they just need the coaching.
They've now seen that what Madge coaches gets premierships, so as long as the leadership group and Top 30/17 keep driving those standards and culture, then the young guys coming through will want to be apart of it to get their own ring (same as penrith).
www.broncos.com.au
