'If you're a Bronco you're a winner': Inside rise from spoon to decider

Brisbane coach Kevin Walters called his players to a meeting at the start of Grand Final week and delivered a brief message about overcoming Penrith.

“The Broncos don’t lose grand finals,” Walters told the players shortly before they were exposed to their first taste of Broncos mania at the club’s fan day on Monday.

Walters is a proven winner, and he has convinced a team who had previously only won a wooden spoon in 2020 that they will be taking the Provan-Summons Trophy back to Brisbane for the first time in 17 years after Sunday night’s grand final.

In 12 seasons with the Broncos as a player, from 1990 to 2001, Walters played in five grand finals (1992, 1993, 1997, 1998 and 2000) and won them all.

The Broncos also triumphed in the 2006 grand final against the Storm and only lost the 2015 decider against the Cowboys after an extra time field goal by Johnathan Thurston.

“Kevvie is a legend of this club; he’s won five premierships and is one of the first people you think about when you think about the Broncos,” former Brisbane captain Darius Boyd said.

“He wears his heart on his sleeve and you could see the passion from the day he came in.

“It wasn’t easy to turn things around, but Kevvie brought the fun back, he brought ex-players back into the group and he made the boys realise what it’s like to wear a Broncos jersey, and what a winning culture looks like.”

Prop Payne Haas is one of eight players in the grand final side who were members of the squad that had to endure the sight of the club’s training ground being littered with wooden spoons after finishing last just three years ago.

Other disgruntled fans dumped their jersey and club merchandise at the door to Broncos Leagues Club.

“Obviously that was a bit heart-breaking at the time, but we have moved on from that,” Haas said. “It wasn't a great year that year, but we knew we had a good side here. It was just a matter of when we were going to click.”

Enter Walters, who was determined to re-establish the Broncos as the NRL’s top club and one that rivals measure themselves against.

“He's really put into us that if you're a Bronco, you're a winner,” Haas said. “You have to be a winner at training, a winner off the field and especially a winner on the field.

“The Broncos are built on success, but we haven't had that here for a while now. We haven't won since 2006 but Kevvie got us in a meeting and he said Broncos teams don't lose grand finals.

“Kevvie has really built this club back up to where it should be and we want the type of success that Penrith have had in the last three or four years.”

Yet it took 20 years for Walters to get the coaching job he coveted in Brisbane.

During that period, he served a long apprenticeship under Wayne Bennett at the Broncos (2003-05, 2015, 2018) and Knights (2014) and Craig Bellamy at the Storm (2011-13).

Walters also coached Toowoomba Clydesdales (2001-02), Ipswich Jets (2007-08) and French Super League club Catalans Dragons (2009-10), as well as the Queensland Origin team from 2016 to 2019.

However, he was overlooked by Wests Tigers in 2013 and the Broncos in 2019, after Bennett’s bitter exit, before finally being given his first chance to coach in the NRL when the club was at its lowest ebb.

Boyd, who works part-time for the Broncos in wellbeing and coaching after retiring at the end of the 2019 season, noted that Walters was the only coach to achieve success at the club besides Bennett.

“There haven't been many successful coaches, apart from Wayne, at this club, so I think having someone that knows the DNA of the Broncos is important,” Boyd said.

“Kevvie’s had his critics over the years, with different people not believing in him, but he obviously has a lot of mental strength to just know where he wanted to get this team and what he knew would work.

“It's obviously paid dividends and it's really exciting to be a part of it because this club has probably been spoilt through years and years of success, but we hadn't had that for the last three or four years before Kevvie came.”

Walters, who had the backing of his former team-mates - led by Chris Johns and Steve Renouf - to take over from Bennett, said the wait for the job may have better prepared him.

“I've certainly got more experience as a coach by not getting the job a couple of years ago,” Walters said.

“But I was looking forward to, when I actually got the job, to get in there and start trying to reshape the club as I knew it as a player coming through.

“I feel we're not there just quite yet, but we're in a really good space - certainly a lot better than where we were three years ago.

“It feels like yesterday when that happened but here we are lining up for a grand final.

“When you win a title, as the Panthers have the last couple of years, it's the greatest feeling in the world and I just want our guys to experience that as well.

“A couple of them already have but we want all of our players to experience what that feeling is actually like, and from a selfish point of view I want to experience that myself as a coach.”

The key to the turnaround was the recruitment of veteran halfback Adam Reynolds from South Sydney and Queensland Origin second-rower Kurt Capewell from Penrith in 2022, along with Reece Walsh’s return from the Warriors this season.

However, the majority of the squad were already at the Broncos and had either been blooded by Anthony Seibold in 2019 and 2020, or developed under Walters.

“I think it was always going to take time, but we knew these kids like Herbie Farnworth, Patty Carrigan, Tom Flegler, Payne Haas and Kotoni Staggs were good,” Boyd said.

“We knew they were quality kids but they were just kids, and there was probably too many kids at the one time.

“They had to go through that and be resilient and I genuinely believe that the earlier you can be resilient and learn from some challenging things, that's going to set yourself moving forward. That's not just on the field, that's off it too.

“We can see things finally coming to fruition now and you put Adam Reynolds in there, along with Kurt Capewell, Marty Taupau and we had Ryan James come in – guys with some leadership qualities and some experience around these guys.

“These guys are playing 100 games now, and they've played representative football and  finals now, so they’re on their own journeys and their own path to Bronco's greatness. It's just one job left to go.”