Dolphins captain vows side will do better

Published 10:00pm 19 February 2023

The Dolphins’ NRL side has some work to do before their historic round one clash against the Roosters in two weeks after a schooling by the Titans in their final preseason trial game at Redcliffe’s Kayo Stadium.

They went down to the Titans 40-16 in their first runout with a full-strength team in front of a big home crowd eager to see them in action.

Check out the photos at the end of this story.

There were highlights, which the crowd relished, including tries to Jack Bostock (37^th minute), Connelly Lemuelu (60^th minute) and Kurt Donoghoe (65^th minute).

But poor edge defence and ball-handling gave the Titans opportunities they grabbed with both hands. The Titans also defended their line well and were more urgent and organised in attack.

The Dolphins will take many lessons from tonight’s game, hopefully one of those will be how to work with the afternoon sea breeze their home ground is renowned for.

Despite the performance, fans were in good spirits wearing Dolphins’ hats, face paint and jerseys, putting their phins up and cheering their boys on. Many stayed after the game to meet the players and take selfies, and the team were in no rush to leave.

Many of the players’ children were on the field after the game, a reflection of how they are embracing the ‘family-club culture’ built during the past 75 years.

Captain Jesse Bromwich reassured fans the team is better than their performance tonight.

“We’ve got a lot of work in front of us. Obviously, it’s our first game together. We’re only going to get better from here,” he said.

“It will probably be a tough game to watch back but one that’s needed.

“You could really feel that these fans love this club and this club’s been around for a long time. It felt surreal. It felt like a long time coming. I think there was a bit of emotion with running out tonight, hopefully we’ve got that out of the way and we’ll look on to a very tough game against the Roosters.

“Of course we need to be better. I’m not really happy with the way we performed tonight but we’ll take the positives out of what we’ve done tonight, obviously there’s a few things we need to work on with our defence, edge defence was pretty leaky at times but we’ll go back with the video and work extremely hard over the next few weeks.

“We know what we need to work on and we’ll go and work really hard at doing that.”

No doubt, Super Coach Wayne Bennett will make sure of that before they run out at Suncorp Stadium on March 5 in round one. The next training session will be brutal.

In the curtain-raiser to tonight's NRL trial, the Redcliffe Dolphins were defeated 32-18 in their trial game against Norths Devils.