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Message: [QUOTE="Big Pete, post: 2780443, member: 1899"] Let's face it... Anything less than a premiership and this year was always going to suck as a Broncos supporter. Constant reminders of the club's biggest heart-break, unrealistic expectations each and every week followed by the inevitable slump that haunts every top flight side. It was a rough year that turned really ugly at the end leading to another heart-breaking exit that served only to re-open old wounds. It made a difficult season unbearable. Brisbane have endured tougher seasons, but they were usually supplemented with good action. 2003 comes to mind, Brisbane finished 8th that year, couldn't win a game to save themselves and yet there was a lot of positives to draw from that season. On the other hand, I just see so many negatives. Newcastle were the worst team I've ever had the displeasure of watching on a weekly basis, Sydney & Souths lost the plot, Canterbury & St George played the most boring brand of football I've watched, Wests Tigers were a soap opera, the Warriors a disgrace and on top of that you had the Eels fiasco. Who am I forgetting? Oh yeah, Manly, probably the biggest non-entity in the game provided little joy. For me, it isn't so much Cronulla that summed the year up. I actually thought they played some enterprising footy and took a bunch of players like Ennis, Barba, Lewis, Townsend, Bukuya, Heighington, Prior etc who were supposedly washed up and turned them into a champion side. For me it was Melbourne who played the exact same brand of footy last year and yet were rarely bothered on top of the table. Last year it was a real fight for them to even make the Top 4, this year they made it with relative ease. I thought the prelim final between Canberra and Melbourne summed up the year in a lot of ways. Both teams completed their sets and defended their lines well but the match was lacking in terms of creativity and ball-play. The critics all called it an instant classic, but I saw it as anything but as both sides rarely played any footy. It was robotic, it was boring and it seemed like whenever any player had the cajones to play what was infront of them we actually got a game of football. I think the game is in a lull at the moment. We've got this generation of great players like Slater, Smith, Cronk, Thurston, Inglis etc. at the tail end of their careers and we're just waiting for the next generation to step up and take over. So far it's been the same song and dance for 11 years and the excitement just isn't there. On top of that, it just doesn't seem like the code is growing. While business analytics suggest otherwise, crowd figures have stagnated, there's little talk of expansion and we're still trying to figure out how to develop talent. As it stands, we have 400 players signed onto Top 25 deals. To think the game can't find an extra 50 is a sad indictment on the code. There's other issues as well. The games we choose to represent the code, the media coverage, the judiciary, the refereeing, representative duties, gambling so on and so forth. It's all had a dramatic effect and has prevented the NRL from being anything more than a mediocre organisation. Let's face facts, it's uncool to be an NRL fan. It's a great sport. But it's a shitty code we follow. [/QUOTE]

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