Adam Reynolds and the Return of Hope

It’s been a tough few years to be a Broncos fan. The turn of disappointment began after the board decided to divorce from Wayne Bennett and burn all the family photo albums. As it turns out, much like there’s always money in the banana stand, there was a complete guide on how to make the Broncos work in those photo albums. 

So the Broncos board, heartbroken and bickering with their ex, decided that if Wayne wanted to go to South Sydney, they may as well swap for South Sydney’s shiny new toy, Anthony Seibold. What’s more, they’d double down and sign him to a 5 year, multi-million dollar contract, that’d show Wayne.  

The Seibold experience went probably about as poorly  as it could have gone, with the Broncos throwing their coach out a moving car 13 rounds into what became the worst season in the club’s history. Seibold is now licking his wounds overseas as an assistant for English Rugby under Eddie Jones, but thankfully he still had time to front up to the Senate the other week to talk about a Bill that, by his own admission, he hadn’t read. 

The problem for NRL fans is, when it comes to divorce, the team gets full custody. For Broncos fans, Wayne kept the house and we had to move out to a crummy apartment with five flights of stairs and no lift. 2019 and 2020 were dark years that I’ve attempted to remove from my memory and now feel more like a shapeless blob of despair than a rugby league season. 

Like many of the current generation of Broncos fans, I grew up watching the greatest player of all time lead the team around the park, Darren Lockyer and I’ve come to expect an unrealistic level of constant achievement from my team. Lockyer was the safety blanket warming my young rugby league life and I couldn’t properly appreciate him until that safety was ripped away. There was never a need to worry when the team was down by 2 with 10 minutes remaining because Lockyer wasn’t worried, it was nothing he hadn’t handled before. Nowadays, I’m nervous when the Broncos have a lead, because that just gives them the opportunity to blow it. 

Since Lockyer retired in 2011, the closest the Broncos have had to a lead playmaker was Ben Hunt, who has been hard done by in his career but also single-handedly lost the 2015 Grand Final. Nonetheless, the controlling hand of the Broncos attack has been jittering since Darren’s been gone. 

In 2021, there were signs that the Broncos were starting to get their shit back together, naming Kevin Walters as coach, who was a warm touch of familiarity, someone we’d seen in Broncos gear before. It took us a while to feel out our new relationship, but at least we were getting into bed with someone we knew, even if it still felt weird that Wayne wasn’t around. 

What was wrong with the Broncos the last two years? Basically everything: the team couldn’t score, they couldn’t defend, they gave up on the game at the first sign of adversity, everything they did seemed predictable and they made me sad.

That’s not to say the team was without hope. Payne Haas has been one of the best forwards in the league for the last three years, Kotoni Staggs showed enough in his few games back before getting injured again to inspire confidence that he’s the strike weapon the attack can call upin, while Selwyn Cobbo looks to have unlimited potential. In the middle of running out about 465 different 6-7 combinations, the Broncos stumbled their way into rediscovering Albert Kelly, it just took an attempt to re-animate Karmichael Hunt to figure it out. 

Now, in the early days of the 2022 season we’re starting to see the full glow-up from the club and from Kevvie. The team shed plenty of weight saying goodbye to Matt Lodge, Tevita Pangai Jr., Brodie Croft, Anthony Milford and Joe Ofahengaue (and Reece Walsh, oops). As it turns out, stealing from Souths was the right answer all along, the Broncos just stole the wrong guy. 

Enter Adam Reynolds, one of the coolest heads in the league, a guy who’s played 232 NRL games, won a premiership and has appeared in two Origin losses. The leadership he brings is equal to his own skill, and, putting it lightly, he’s fucking skilled. NRL stats are pretty lacking, so there’s no stat I can point to that shows how much Reynolds impacts a game, but he has spent his entire career standing up in the clutch and winning games for his team. But, in an effort to find something proving his skill, Reynolds kicked for over 500 metres last week, hows that?

As well as Reynolds the Broncos added Kurt Capewell from Penrith during the off-season. Capewell does everything right but he’s best at covering up the mistakes of others and doing the little things that help win games. He’s like bone marrow – you’re pretty sure you need it and you’ve been told it’s important and, as it turns out, your entire skeleton would fall apart without it. Capewell holds the backline together, pushes everyone else where they need to go and pressures the opposition into situations beneficial to him. 

Throw in equal parts of Reynolds leadership and Capewell’s mongrel and suddenly the players give a shit what happens on the weekend. They look more like a football team and less like a bunch of blokes that all happened to rock up wearing the same jersey. This year, I’ve committed the team’s entire schedule to memory and I’m planning my weekend around sitting on the couch screaming for two hours while the boys run in try after try.

A good barometer of fans’ confidence in the Broncos is the amount of merch you see in public. This is especially obvious when they play on a Friday and you see people heading to work in the CBD already wearing their jersey; the truly dedicated fans that really want you to know that they’re going to the game, or don’t own a backpack. Public merch appearances fell to an all-time low in 2021, not at all related to COVID, but they’re picking back up already.

In the darkest parts of last season, I was at the park with my one-year old son, who I’d forced to wear a Broncos cap. Some 10 year old sneered at us‘he’s not really a Broncos fan is he?’ The Broncos have been so bad the past two years that I have been publicly bullied by children because of them.  

The only thing the Broncos need to do this season is win enough games to convince the fans they are a legitimate team again.  Already, Broncos fans are beginning to find hope in the team again. Come week 4 and you’ll find that one in every 3 people in Brisbane is wearing some form of Broncos merch, with complete adoption coming by week 6. 

We’re two games into the NRL season and Reynolds has only played one of them, but it’s a large enough sample size for me to declare that the Broncos are back, baby!