The impossible Challenge for the Brisbane Broncos

Quick question for you rugby league fans: Who won last year’s world club challenge? The answer is the Bradford Bulls, who beat the Wests Tigers 30 to 10. Remember? What about the year before? Leeds over the Bulldogs. Struggling? The point is, these games are similar to one day cricket. Nice contests but completely forgettable. The trend has always been for the Australian side to lose to a lesser opponent. No big deal. However a new, much more dangerous trend has emerged for teams kicking off their campaigns on the other side of the world.

The late season fade out.

The pre season challenge format is with us for an eighth year. Teams traveling to Britain have had varying degrees of desire. Ricky Stuart put his Roosters on sleeping tablets and grinding training runs, culminating in a monster win, while others have treated it as nothing more than a glorified trial.

It started in 2000. The Melbourne Storm romped to a February win over St.Helens on the way to becoming the entertainers of the premiership, cracking the 40 mark six times in a twelve week period. Then it happened. The Storm scored just one win over a finals team in the next three months. Dumped out of the playoffs in week 1. The following year saw the Brisbane Broncos do the honours. A thrilling loss to St.Helens at the start of the season, two wins in ten games at the end of it. The Broncos would become the standard bearers of the late season collapse.

The Newcastle Knights were next on the conveyer belt, but at least they had an excuse. They lost Andrew Johns. Forward to 2005, where the Bulldogs were the premiership favourites after Round 20. Six weeks later, the season was over thanks to six losses, including the two biggest hidings the club copped in seventy years. To last year and it was the Wests Tigers turn. Their run never got going, with round sixteen’s season ending injury to Benji Marshall the death knell. Just to be sure, the Tigs only won on three more occasions.

Are these co-incidents? Maybe. It would however seem ambitious to think all of these champion teams could suddenly fall in a hole at the business end of the season, without the English trip having something to do with it.

There have been exceptions. In 2003, The Roosters embarrassed St.Helens before making the grand final. Next season, their conquerors, the Penrith Panthers, fell one match short of the big dance. Terrific feats, although the fact remains it’s been nine years since a team has defended its title, equaling the longest back-to-back drought in the 99 year history of the competition.

This year it’s the Broncos once again flying the flag. The task is big enough already, yet Brisbane’s challenge is staggering. The men who can drive them to a title defense, names such as Lockyer, Civoniceva, Hodges, Tate, Berrigan and Hunt, all played in the tri-nations final. November 25. Now they’re on a mid-February flight to England. To follow is a couple of trials, twenty six premiership rounds, perhaps finals, plus the small matter of three origins for all of the above. Good luck.

It has taken the Broncos years to shake off the tag of faders. To keep it off, they’ll get no greater challenge.

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