With the finals window (essentially) closed, I was thinking about the fundamental causes for the 2024 season going off the rails, and why 2025 can be different.
1. The Coach
Get the obvious out of the way early. JD (as the guy ultimately responsible for the playing squad, and the coaching and performance team) failed miserably at prepping this side for the season and ensuring we were in the right frame of mind to succeed in 2024. It’s been talked about extensively so I’ll leave it there.
2025: Wayne Bennett, enough said there too. Welcome home Super Coach.
2. Centre
Having Graham and Tass combine for a total of 8 games is just cruel. Graham never makes it on the field and your responsibly resourced backup also gets a season-ender.
2025: This is one where hopefully it’s just bad luck. It wasn’t poor planning from a roster situation, sometimes guys just go down in the same position.
3. Halfback
It doesn’t really matter why or how, but Ilias played 2 games and Hawkins played 6. Again, brutally unlucky from an injury point of view (form or skill aside). Unlike centre though, you could argue our process for filling the 7 spot on the roster was flawed.
In addition, this had a massive effect on the 5/8 and centre positions, as Wighton was forced to move to 6, and Walker to 7. So that centre spot that was already fragile was absolutely annihilated.
2025: Dodd and Humphreys loom as key additions. Not only do you get a win if injury is a little kinder, but your starting 7 is now 2nd or 3rd choice depth, and your backup option has been replaced completely. A lot still rests on Dodd finding his feet and succeeding, but there is reason for optimism.
4. Edge Backrow
This has been a problem for a while. In a perfect world (and considering where our prop stocks were to start the season), Arrow should probably be a middle. Meaning 2 of the top 3 genuine edges in the squad were Host and Chee Kam.
Not helping this were Lovett being injured all season once more, and Fletcher missing out on a tonne of development, also injured. To cover, you end up weakening your middle. Which adds insult to injury.
2025: The Koloamatangi middle revelation opens up some options on the edge. The plan looks to be for him to start in 13 and for Murray to transition after 20 minutes for a bench edge replacement. The talk of Aitken joining the squad gives you 2 genuinely good edges when you’re fully fit. And hopefully, Lovett and Fletcher are more available to help Host out in depth. You add in possible versatility in Duncan and Le Blanc, but also have Arrow and Koloamatangi to fall back on. Fingers crossed things look a little better here in 2025. Another depth piece given Lovett and Fletcher’s fragility would still be good to see before kick-off.
5. Prop
Carrying Tom Burgess hurt this team in 2024. It probably hurt in 2023 too. People don’t want to hear that, but the reality is Tom is earning the same money as some of the better props in the competition, and he can’t do anything but play off the bench. When you then lose Tatola early and can’t start your other highest paid front rower due to his inability to keep pace with the early game and play bigger minutes, that hurts (regardless of how honest an impact he has off the bench). You can blame Keppie or Moale, but from a process point of view when building the squad for 2024, Tom was a problem.
2025: We don’t know what they’re doing here yet, but we do hear they are looking for a solution. Whether they go all in on a genuine starter, or use some of the money elsewhere and go solid here, the redistribution of funds should help. Freeing up Koloamatangi and Arrow to play middle certainly helps this. Again, an additional depth piece with upside would help.
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That’s the pretty clear top 5 in my opinion. Everything else stems from there.
I’ll leave right wing as an honourable mention, as Gagai has done tremendously (he’s a roster spot we got 100% right at that dev level). So less a catalyst for failure, and maybe more one for down the road when we are back vying for a premiership.