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Message: [QUOTE="Super Freak, post: 2707335, member: 8536"] [B]YOU can officially call Adam Blair the Broncos’ 238 pound and two ounce miracle.[/B] That’s Wayne Bennett’s words, not ours. The master coach and his long time right hand recruitment man Peter Nolan couldn’t believe their luck when the veteran Kiwi prop pretty much fell in their lap at the end of 2014 due to the Wests Tigers crippling salary cap woes. Plenty questioned the Broncos acquisition of the 29-year-old after three underwhelming years at Concord saw him tagged as one of the game’s most overrated players, a significant rebranding considering he was a contender for NRL’s best prop during his pomp at Melbourne. Since returning to Brisbane, where he attended Wavell High School as a teenager, Blair has proven a vital cog in the Broncos engine room and will be front and centre of their forward battle with the Cowboys in Sunday’s grand final. “By some miracle we got him, I was so pleased that we did get him,” Wayne Bennett said of bringing Blair to Brisbane on Wednesday’s edition of NRL360. “In 2008 when I worked with the New Zealand team, he was outstanding. “Then he went to the Wests Tigers and I couldn’t believe it was the same player. I felt for him. “I knew he hadn’t lost it, I knew something must have been impacting on him.” For recruitment guru Nolan, the three-year deal negotiated with Blair’s wife Jess while the big man was on tour with the New Zealand national side was a chance to finally get his man. Nolan revealed he has had eyes for Blair ever since he was a teenager coming through the schoolboy ranks, but had never been able to lure him away from the Storm during his original decade-long stint with the Broncos in the 2000s. Only when the Tigers’ highly publicised and thinly stretched salary cap saw Blair shopped around — with the battling Sydneysiders willing to subsidise his 2014 wage — did Nolan move and move fast. “We couldn’t have done it without the assistance from a salary cap point of view,” Nolan told the Fox NRL [I]Market Watch[/I] podcast. “And I’m not having a shot at the Tigers, we’ve had to pay players to leave here as well and it’s never a good thing when you’ve got to do that. “We couldn’t believe that we could actually get him. “We were that excited when we picked him up, it was amazing. “It was a quick signing it happened while he was overseas and how it all transpired was something that we knew we were going to reap the rewards down the track with him. “Sometimes players come ... under different coaches and different boards and those sorts of things and they just don’t work out. “We’ve always been very strong on (systems) here. “We just knew that Adam would thrive in the right environment. He’s been educated in Melbourne which is probably the best system in the competition. “He’s a guy we tried to sign as a young kid and you couldn’t just get players out of Melbourne which again is a credit to their system.” [url=http://www.news.com.au/sport/nrl/brisbane-and-wayne-bennett-grateful-for-miracle-signing-of-adam-blair-from-tigers/story-fndv2w3r-1227552326477]Wayne Bennett declares Adam Blairâ€™s signing for Brisbane Broncos â€˜a miracleâ€™[/url] [/QUOTE]

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