Any doubts about the Broncos premiership credentials have been swept aside by their performance on Saturday. The Panthers and Rabbitohs are still favourites to fight out the grand final on October 1, and rightly so, but the Broncos showed with the win over the Warriors that they deserve to be there or thereabouts at the end of the season.
It wasn’t particularly pretty, and it was a lot closer at the end than their coach Kevin Walters would have liked, but no-one should under-estimate the importance of what the team achieved. There was a time when the Broncos received special treatment at Origin time, with the split round draw reflecting the fact that they would be providing the majority of the Queensland team, and usually a few Blues as well.
There were certainly no favours coming their way last weekend as they ran out without their piledriving forwards Payne Haas, Patrick Carrigan and Tom Flegler, and backline maestros Selwyn Cobbo and Reece Walsh. You would think that the people working out the draw would take into account that the Broncos would be missing around a third of their top side for Origin I and select their opponent accordingly, but no.
Not only didn’t they put them up against another side that would almost certainly be hard hit by Origin duties, they pitted them against the Warriors – the one team in the competition virtually guaranteed to be at full strength. The very least they could have done was give them home ground advantage and play the match at Suncorp Stadium which was not being used for one of the few times all year but again, no.
They chose to play the game in New Zealand – and not at Mt Smart Stadium in Auckland, a ground and city that the Broncos are used to, but at McLean Park, Napier a place most of them had never heard of. All of which adds up to making the 26-22 win one of the best in Broncos’ recent history. It also shines yet another spotlight on the insanity of Origin scheduling.
No-one is saying that Origin shouldn’t be played mid-season, but surely there must be a way that it can be fitted in without totally disrupting the NRL competition. Especially now that with the arrival of the Dolphins, every team is getting two byes during the season. I don’t know about you, but I find the byes annoying.
You have to go through the table each week working out who has had their bye and who hasn’t and add two points here and subtract two there so you can get an accurate feel for the real picture. Surely the geniuses who work out the draw (and I believe it is done by a group of IT nerds in Canada) could come up with a way to use all the byes at once through the Origin period to ensure minimum disruption to the NRL competition. Then again, probably not. If they were that smart, they wouldn’t have had the Broncos playing the Warriors in Napier on Saturday.