Dragons preview, no excuses

Good morning folks. How about the weather? Wonderful isn't it. Forgive me; I'd rather talk about anything but the Broncos at the moment.

So we've all woken up to reports today suggesting that our club is in turmoil, spiralling out of control to which it may never recover. Some guy who gets paid far too much money for what he does had a tantrum and quit. Who in their right mind cares? All of a sudden he’s been accredited for our 2006 premiership. Funny, never heard the guys’ name mentioned once at the time. Dean Benton, farewell sir. I’m not sure if we can blame the 3 years of horrific injuries this club has had on you, but either way, don’t be under some false impression that your absence will be felt in any way. There’s the door mate.

I’m under no false illusions; it hasn’t been a great week for Broncos fans. 3 losses on the trot, staff troubles, player troubles, and a few injuries to boot. But there are some serious over reactions in the press at the moment, and I hope people aren’t buying in to it. People want Henjak to resign, people want Cullen to resign, but none of this is going to happen. As Waldo touched on, every club has their ups and downs. Our early season form is not the end of the world. We’re 2 points outside of the top-8 and the season is far from over.

Speaking of injuries, Nick Kenny has pulled out of tonight’s match because of back spasms. Let’s hope he can overcome this latest setback quickly. He’s one of those players that ooze consistency, and while he may never be a superstar he just keeps improving every game. We’ll miss him tonight.

Oh yes, tonight. Almost forgot we had a game tonight, it seems to have been pushed aside. We’re forgetting that we are coming up against a side coached by Wayne Bennet. Wasn’t he that guy that coached us for 20 years? There might be a story there Mr. Media. Anyhow, let’s focus on tonight’s game for a moment shall we.

I don't care about the winning and the losing of the footy match this week. I want to see good attitude, I want to see some toughness and grit and I want to see us having a good old fashioned crack.

I’m yet to make up my mind on Coach Henjak, I feel he has a lot to do to win me over. When he says things like this, he takes 3 steps back. There are a couple hundred thousand people who DO care about the winning and losing of this footy match. When you say something like that, you’re already excusing a loss. It’s fine for fans to expect a loss, that’s our nature! But it’s certainly not okay for a coach to be expecting a loss. There’s no reason why we can’t win this game, the side we’re fielding tonight would be similar to one we would have around Origin time. No one makes excuses for them then, and I’m certainly not making excuses for them now.

Is it likely that we will win? Of course not. I'm tipping a 20-16 loss for us. The Dragons are the form team of the competition, coached by a master of the sport. But this doesn’t mean that we give-up, and put anything that goes wrong this season down to a “Rebuilding Phase”. We’re a team of professionals, and if we don’t win the next twenty-odd games left in the season, then we better break backs doing it. No excuses. If we fix our issues with missed tackles and completion rates, then we'll be right in the game.

But I'm starting to sound like a broken record on those two points...