The plight of the Broncos this year has been annoying for me personally – especially on social media – but the Broncos’ now inevitable (probably long overdue) transformation into a western Sydney-style football club has been infuriating, as well as completely avoidable.

A western Sydney-style football club is a club that hasn’t won a premiership in a year starting with 201x. Their main traits can include:

1. promoting grossly unqualified people into positions of administrative power
2. paying unnecessarily large salaries to players who haven’t or cannot justify it
3. appointing ex-players who have shown no managerial nous to coaching positions
4. an impossible-to-justify track record of raising talented juniors up and then discarding them at 21
5. allowing politics of the board/leagues club to suffocate any focus on actually winning games and premierships

See: Wests Tigers, Parramatta Eels, Penrith Panthers, Canterbury Bulldogs, Brisbane Broncos, Gold Coast Titans, New Zealand Warriors, Newcastle Knights and Canberra Raiders. All of those clubs will tick at least three boxes and most will tick all five.

There are two clearly dominant teams of the 2010s, the Melbourne Storm and the Sydney Roosters. How the other fourteen clubs haven’t seen fit to mould themselves into fourteen clones of of them is a mystery up there with “What the hell did Robbie Farah do to piss off the LRLF?” and “How the hell is Mitchell Pearce/Darius Boyd getting selected for Origin/first grade?”

It seems so obvious and, yet, rugby league.

Here are the tips for this weekend’s action:

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