The pre-season 2026 thread

If we run with Sharpe, Brown, Smith 9, ponga. In the long run could be better? But, it will take longer for that combo to gel. Smith in the halves, Brown will feel more comfortable, and that combination should gel quicker.
 
Junior said:
Sharpes played a whopping 15 games in the halves and Crossy is at 50 starting hooker games and 41 on the bench... Think Crossy is great but he didn't take to it in 15 games, bit wrong on this point Harv

And as for him not being our best player in 2025, we were tied on wins with 8th pos when he got injured in round 16... He definitely was our best for that first 16 rounds and still won our Marathon voted player of the year having played 10 less games than gags, 4 less than Best, and 1 more than both Ponga and Lucas who rounded out our top 5 players of the year.

So in simple, YES he was our best player!
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There’s no objective measure of who was our best and worst. He would have benefited from a fair bit of shiny object syndrome on here. He also would have benefited from a voting system which rewards scoring a hat trick in one game then playing badly for the next four more than it rewards consistently being at an 8/10. And even in those bad games, because he’s newer to his position rather than as experienced as Ponga, he’d get graded on a curve - probably pick up a few votes just for visibly trying hard.

In my opinion, no, he wasn’t our best player. Dylan Lucas was. I don’t think I would have had Fletch as our second best either. Everyone on here who says he was our best is dead wrong. In my opinion. And I think he played a lot better in 2024.

Phoenix didn’t get his first start at 9 in the NRL till 2023, and I don’t think he properly trained there full time over the pre-season. He took to it very quickly. In my opinion. I don’t understand where the revisionary stance on this comes from, that he didn’t look like a better player straight away when he started playing hooker.

Likewise Sharpe took to playing on the wing like a duck to water with his first game there and training session there happening in the same week. I know in a lot of ways playing in the halves is a lot harder, but he was a better winger without training there than he was as a half after a whole pre-season.

If you want to point to our 6-9 record when he got hurt as evidence of how good he was going, go nuts, the rest of the time when we’re in our feelings about this season though we’ve been saying the wins over Penrith and Souths don’t count and the opening round wins over the Tigers and Dolphins barely count. Also still think his best performances by an absolute mile this year came at fullback, even in the game where the team as a whole played ****ing ****.

I don’t mean to single out Fletcher because the problem was just as much Ponga not taking to the system we wasted the entire pre-season on where he was a “hybrid half”. Ponga looked terrible playing more like a half. Sharpe did not look at all comfortable or good when he tried to play like a half. The vision for bringing Brown to the club to play with them was built on an assumption that they’d be great in those roles and Brown could slide right in as another “not really a halfback”, but they weren’t. By the time Sharpe got injured any pretence of him genuinely playing like a half was gone and Phoenix was doing a lot of that stuff for him wearing 13, with Cogger playing as a true 7, and those are the only games people still feel good about where the attack didn’t look like the worst in the NRL era…

Brown was signed to be the third wheel in a “good footy players” hybrid playmaker system, in a season where 2/3 guys who’d operate in that system in 2026 looked very, very, VERY uncomfortable playing in it. Playing Phoenix at 13 isn’t the thing that proves that system works, it’s a band-aid solution to patch together a bad system so a lot of the brains trust at the club don’t have to admit they were wrong.

So in simple, YES we need an actual halfback playing halfback.
 
Newygirl said:
beat the Cowboys for a change
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I'm convinced we will never win in Townsville again.

HarVeeGee13 said:
The vision for bringing Brown to the club to play with them was built on an assumption that they’d be great in those roles
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I reckon POS thinks he's the second coming of Jesus and has wanted to sign him for almost ten years, so when an opportunity came to make a godfather offer fit didn't really matter.
 
I don't think we'll come last next season but I don't think we'll play finals footy either at this stage.

Think 7-17 positions are a real shoot out and a team can make the 8 with just 12 wins.

Forward pack depth is concerning and while we have some promising guys there I don't know if they ready for consistent week to week first grade just yet.
 
Newygirl said:
That’s one thing they shouldn’t have to worry about. The Knights pretty much always get an easy draw, they just generally fail to make the most of it by losing games to the likes of the Cowboys, Titans and Dragons

It would be nice if they could actually start the season off with a few wins, beat the Cowboys for a change and actually beat the Titans twice. Actually winning the games they should win would be a nice change of pace
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I can't even remember the last time we beat the Cowboys.

At least we'll play them somewhere other than Townsville next year.
 

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Thing about juniors is they can surprise out of nowhere.

Examples being go back and watch Foketi at the Roosters he was good in reserve grade and you knew he was going to play NRL but he didn’t really look ready when they called him in and bang he has killed it since.

Remember when McCarthy was going to make his debut here and people were saying he wasn’t ready since his defence was pretty poor and then in three games he missed like 1 tackle.

People said Hopwood wasn’t ready at all for his debut against the Eels and he showed he is ready right now and honestly if he had a bit more time he probably would have overshadowed our actual props

The thing is no one can actually see if someone is ready or not, it’s a feeling, you can make educated guesses but they are still guesses.

It’s tough to say player A isn’t ready and some simply aren’t I agree but some can absolutely surprise and show that they were wrong and that they are ready, happens a lot in league.
 
Sharpe has over-achieved in every position and every grade.
He was one of our very best when we made the Flegg grandfinal in 2022 - when he was 17 and had played Mathews the year before - and the next year he was one of our best when he dropped back a grade and made the SG Ball grandfinal.
In firstgrade he has been asked to play positions he's never played before, and he instantly looked at home.

I don't know why people doubt his ability to learn and do a job.

His kicking and passing are his weak points, but I have a lot of faith in his ability to learn anything he sets his mind to.

I remember a kid named Dylan Brown came into firstgrade as a very young guy with a great running game and not much more going for him. It took him a few years, but he turned into a pretty handy playmaker. He'd be a good guy to mentor young Sharpe maybe. They seem to be on a similar journey.
 
Billy said:
Sharpe has over-achieved in every position and every grade.
He was one of our very best when we made the Flegg grandfinal in 2022 - when he was 17 and had played Mathews the year before - and the next year he was one of our best when he dropped back a grade and made the SG Ball grandfinal.
In firstgrade he has been asked to play positions he's never played before, and he instantly looked at home.

I don't know why people doubt his ability to learn and do a job.

His kicking and passing are his weak points, but I have a lot of faith in his ability to learn anything he sets his mind to.

I remember a kid named Dylan Brown came into firstgrade as a very young guy with a great running game and not much more going for him. It took him a few years, but he turned into a pretty handy playmaker. He'd be a good guy to mentor young Sharpe maybe. They seem to be on a similar journey.
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I don't get it either Billy, I have full faith in him.
 
Owey said:
The thing that surprised me most last year with Sharpe was his defence. It was seriously good for a first grade half. The odd wrong read, but his contact is already very good.
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I always thought his defence was what would let him down, because in Flegg in 2022 he hardly made a tackle. He was always in position and had a go, but the highlights reel just showed every try against us had Sharpe missing the tackle.
I realise now that he was a skinny little guy playing against guys 3 or even 4 years older. He's grown a lot since then.
 
Billy said:
I remember a kid named Dylan Brown came into firstgrade as a very young guy with a great running game and not much more going for him. It took him a few years, but he turned into a pretty handy playmaker. He'd be a good guy to mentor young Sharpe maybe. They seem to be on a similar journey.
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Rookie Dylan Brown was by some distance a more natural ball player and kicker. But also the doubts about Brown/Sharpe as a pairing are very specifically over whether playing 7 is the best use of Brown, just as much as it’s a question mark over Sharpe as a half.

If our options were Fogarty, Sharpe, Gamble and Cogger, I’d pick Fogarty 7 Sharpe 6.

We have different looking options.
 
Question it didn’t occur to me to ask till now: who do people think played better this year? Sandon Smith or Fletcher Sharpe?
 
HarVeeGee13 said:
Rookie Dylan Brown was by some distance a more natural ball player and kicker. But also the doubts about Brown/Sharpe as a pairing are very specifically over whether playing 7 is the best use of Brown, just as much as it’s a question mark over Sharpe as a half.

If our options were Fogarty, Sharpe, Gamble and Cogger, I’d pick Fogarty 7 Sharpe 6.

We have different looking options.
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Good thing rookie Brown has had five years to develop as a ball player and kicker. We should be all good. How good will Sharpe be in five years?
 
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