I’m not going to weigh into the blame game and say it’s Wayne’s fault, or Paul White’s fault or anyone else’s specifically because I think no one from outside the club necessarily knows exactly who’s fault it really is at the end of the day, but the reality is that we came into this season missing several vital parts that are required to field a competitive football side with a genuine chance to take out the competition, and someone ultimately does have to take the blame and responsibility for that.
The blunt truth is our 2018 season chances didn’t end today, they probably ended some time last year when we so badly mishandled the offloading of Hunt and subsuequently securing a proper replacement to fill that gap. We released our only genuine proven Halfback, and that’s fine to make a huge call like that if you believe he can’t get you a result when it counts, but you damn well better deliver a suitable replacement who will improve that result, and we abjectly, categorically failed in doing that.
We also gambled on a young and largely unproven forward pack with a few older veterans to pad it out and sure, on occasions we did simply blow other sides off the park with the physicality and with enthusiasm that comes with youthful forwards, but on balance, they were mostly far too inconsistent or had bodies that were unable to withstand the toll of carrying a side week to week in the NRL.
I could understand us gambling on such and young and inexperienced pack perhaps if we had the likes of a Lockyer or Thurston or Cronk to steer them around the park and kick them out of trouble when they were unable to win an arm wrestle with other sides, but we simply don’t have anyone at the club capable of that, not even close, and so anytime our Forwards were unable to simply blow other sides off the park physically, we simply had no discipline or structure to get ourselves back in the game and seemingly no Plan B.
We also continued to press on with playing at Fullback a guy who being totally honest has already long since played his best football. The decline of Boyd has been fairly abrupt and that probably hasn’t helped, but our unwillingness to do something about this has just seen him more often than not this season be something of a liability than the huge asset he’s been in previous seasons. I actually loved Boyd in his prime, but sadly at this stage I don’t think a single other NRL club would take him as their first choice Fullback over their other options, and in a position that’s become such a huge weapon for other sides, the Broncos have continued to play a guy who has mostly been a passenger in 2018.
I actually dread to think what our results would have looked like had we not had the likes or Roberts and Oates amongst a handful of others who were able to pull off tries that other outside backs simply couldn’t, or if we hadn’t had some absolutely clutch goal kicking from Jamayne Isaako at times (can’t help but think we got extremely lucky here as he wasn’t our first choice kicker to start the year and yet again we showed a lack of planning by expecting Kahu to shoulder that duty this season despite mediocre results in the past)
When you look at the calibre of players released:
Hunt, Marshall, Moga, Arrow, Blair and Ese’ese
and then you consider who we replaced them with:
Jack Bird and Andrew Savelio
I think that should just about paint a picture of where it all went wrong for the Broncos in 2018
Having said all that, I could get over 2018 like I have every other year since 2006 with a degree of hope, but at this stage that’s just so hard to do when it appears almost certain at this stage that we won’t be doing any further recruiting for 2019. That means at this stage the grand total of our recruitment for next season sits at 1 - Sean O’Sullivan. An unproven rookie with virtually no experience and no actual idea of whether he’ll even be up to First Grade next season.
I honestly don’t know if it’s fair to blame this all on Wayne, but honestly this stubborn refusal to address glaring shortcomings in the squad year after year just screams of the last days of Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, and anyone who follows EPL will tell you how that finished up.
So I’ll sum up 2018 as a year we just made up the numbers because we conclusively failed to recruit or produce a genuine Halfback and playmaker to control our football aide, and I’ll sum up my hopes for 2019 by saying that unless something drastically changed in our 2019 recruitment, we’ll be simply offering up more of the same next year as well.
It’s simple, sides with mediocre Halfbacks/Playmakers can win games and even competitions occasionally, but teams with established, gun Halves/Playmakers win competitions all the time. This is not a position where we should be watching our pennies or seeking out cheap pickups or handy value. It’s a premium position and we need to be prepared to either go to market and pay market rate to get one or pull one out of our ranks, I don’t care which option the club pursues, but another year where we fail to do either of those two things will simply be another year of failure for the club overall.
