Nobody likes it when players and coaches spout cliches after matches. They make the eyes glaze over and forces the mind to wander.
We’ve all heard them all so many times they’re easy to tick off in your mind. It was a real team effort. We stuck to our systems. We’re taking it one week at a time.
Brisbane coach Kevin Walters is not, and never has been, a man for cliches — he laughs too loud and feels too much to hide behind those same old platitudes.
But his team and their 36-14 win over Parramatta on Thursday night is living proof of the value of living those old adages about working hard, playing for each other and defence winning premierships.
That’s what Walters, drenched in beer and Powerade, highlighted after one of Brisbane’s most impressive performances of the year.
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“We’re coming from a long way back, so we’d be fools to get too far in front of where we actually are,” Walters said.
“We’re a long way from where we’ve been, but we’re not comfortable. Certainly I’m not, and I know Adam (Reynolds) and the rest of the group aren’t comfortable just going on this little journey.
“We need to make something of it.
“They’re working hard and have great respect for each other.
“There’s a great unity amongst them, and while there’s a lot of strategy that goes into defence at the end of the day if you want to stop the other team from scoring you find a way.
“That’s what good teams have been doing for 100 years, and we want to get into that mould ourselves, just to work hard for each other and do our best.”
This victory, which keeps Brisbane in the top four hunt, was a study in cliches coming true. That’s not an insult, because the secret of rugby league cliches is they work if you really mean them.
In this win, Brisbane really meant them. The only thing they worry about is exactly what’s in front of them, they are really taking this one step at a time.
Brisbane teams of the past would have been overwhelmed by the task in front of them if Parramatta scored first on a cold, wet night in Sydney’s west after a listless opener and a couple of errors by the Broncos.
But these guys don’t think that way. They have found the joy in the struggle. These new Broncos have won enough games this season to know what they have to do to get there, so that’s what they did.
They upped their physicality in the middle on the back of brutal performances from Payne Haas and Pat Carrigan, while Carrigan and Reynolds’ passing ensured they kept the kind of width to their attack which allowed the creation of one-on-one match ups all over the park.
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