In his first Battle for Brisbane as a Dolphin, Herbie Farnworth put in arguably his best performance for his club and credited some creative coaching from Wayne Bennett for orchestrating their 40-6 triumph.
The England international was a man on a mission on his way to winning the 'Battle Medal' as player of the match, making 287 metres, scoring two tries and setting up two more and was a standout in a team of strong performers, including Trai Fuller whose inclusion at fullback moved Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow into the centres and Jake Averillo who started in the halves.
While the raft of late changes to the lineup were only confirmed publicly on Friday, the team had been training in their new configuration behind closed doors as the “super coach” plotted the ambush that has seen the Dolphins return to the top eight with one round left to play.
“Obviously, it was a massive game for us, if we didn't win that, we're out of finals contention,” Farnworth said.
“A huge effort from the boys, I think it is probably the best we've played this year.
“(Bennett) made a couple of changes there, put little Trai at the back who was very, very good tonight and Jake at six, who played unreal too, so all the boys were very impressive as well.
“(Hiding the team changes), obviously, that's a stroke on Wayne, Woolfy [Kristian Woolf] and Fieny’s [Nathan Fien] part there.
“Even the first session of the week, we didn't even train in the right spots there to try and trick the media a little bit, but I think it got leaked anyway.
“Obviously, it worked today.
"You didn't know about (Wednesday's session either), but we trained in our (real) spots then, so that was good. We enjoyed it."
Herbie goes full throttle
The players also revealed post-match that Bennett had “fired up” his charges and set the tone for their relentless performance with a speech outlining the rivalry between the two clubs.
“Can't go into too much detail, but he touched on a couple of things that's happened in the past between the two clubs so it fired all the boys up.”
Another former Bronco Tevita Pangai Jnr was impressive in his two stints in the field and has played under Bennett before and said the side had benefited from hearing him speak.
“He was pretty animated and pretty fired up," Pangai Jnr said of the speech.
“Wayne has been in this situation before. It takes me back to 2020 when he led Queensland (to a 2-1 series victory) with a bunch of players that weren't wanted at other clubs, so it is pretty crazy what we did tonight.
“I don't want to go into detail, but he was pretty fired up, I have never seen him like that before.
“He played some pretty crazy videos. I am not going to say any names ... but just look in the away sheds (where the Broncos were).
“We were missing troops … we were missing six starters, some key players in our team and had our backs against the wall and that is just the way we like it.”
While the win has the Dolphins in the eight for now, next week they face the Knights in the final match of the round which could decide the final standings and their finals fate.
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