The Broncos are fuming with Gorden Tallis' persistent attacks to start this season, with the club legend taking every opportunity to stick the boot in to coach Michael Maguire, captain Adam Reynolds and the club's broader leadership.
Tallis has one of rugby league's biggest media profiles, with regular spots on Fox League's NRL 360 and Triple M's NRL shows to offer his opinions.
Naturally, as a former Broncos captain and one of the greatest players in the club's history, his thoughts about the glamour club and 2025 premiership winners are of particular interest. He makes a big splash when he's critical.
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On Thursday morning, Tallis was again dominating social media feeds of NRL fans up and down the east coast for his take on the Reynolds injury situation, with the star halfback ruled out of Friday night's blockbuster clash between last year's grand finalists after he was named in the side on Tuesday.
Tallis is adamant that Reynolds should not have fulfilled his obligation to Fox League by appearing on a panel last Friday, 24 hours after a rib cartilage injury forced him off the field in the Broncos' loss to the Eels.
The Raging Bull, in his indomitable way, says the first two days after an injury are the most important to a player's prospect of healing and he shouldn't be getting on a plane in that time.
The counter claim, which has been prosecuted by a range of journalists after speaking to physiotherapists and other medical experts, is that short flights have no impact on rib cartilage injuries and that Reynolds' trip to Sydney last Friday made no difference to his recovery.
Maguire also pointed that out, describing Tallis' claim that Reynolds wasn't looking after himself professionally as "garbage". He added that "if it was a grand final Reyno would have played but it's only early and it's a long season".
When that was put to Tallis by The Courier-Mail's chief rugby league writer, Peter Badel, on NRL 360 on Wednesday night, Tallis changed tack slightly, arguing that as the captain of a team that has started the season 0-2, Reynolds should be fronting up to play through the pain against the Storm on Friday night.
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"I'm telling you in my era, in my era, when we won six (premierships), when the Broncos were winning six, if you got injured and you put yourself in front of the team and you went to Sydney – OK, the coach might have dealt with it and the physio and the doctor, but the players would have frowned upon it," Tallis said.
"If you can jump on the plane and put yourself in that situation, the dressing room would have frowned upon it."
For what it's worth, here's what Andrew Johns says about rib cartilage injuries.
"You can't touch it, you can't get out of bed, if you've done a rib cartilage really bad it is the worse injury," the Eighth Immortal told Nine's Freddy and The Eighth on Wednesday.
"They're worse than broken ribs. Far worse."
Tallis is an expert at changing his argument on the run if his initial point is shot down. If he throws a punch against a player, coach or an issue, he keeps throwing them to double down until the conversation moves on.
He's been throwing punches against the Broncos consistently since Kevin Walters was sacked in September 2024 and there's a clear agenda there, which Tallis doesn't hide from. His gripe with Maguire certainly can be linked back to Walters' axing. Whether or not he has a personal axe to grind with Reynolds isn't quite as clear, but it's possible that he believes the skipper also played a role in the coaching change.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
It's a fact that Tallis is close mates with Walters and has been for decades, going back to when the pair played together for the Broncos in the '90s and early 2000s.
As recently as last year, Kangaroos coach Walters appointed Tallis to be his assistant coach for the Ashes tour after the NRL refused to let him bring his mate on board as a "cultural figurehead".
Tallis has said that he believes the Broncos would have won the premiership last year without the coaching change, backing Walters to have got the same uplift in performance out of the team that Maguire did.
He has never really given Maguire any credit for the 2025 premiership and has been a vocal critic of Madge's methods, as recently as the last month giving voice to the narrative that Broncos players were off him over a gruelling pre-season camp in Toowoomba. Tallis has also poured fuel on the theory that Payne Haas was leaving the club because of Maguire.
Many in the game believe that this concerted effort to put pressure on the coach stems from Tallis' belief that Maguire white-anted Walters by making phone calls to Broncos players and club management to lobby for the job while Walters was still the coach.
Maguire has spoken privately to Tallis denying he made those phone calls but it's abundantly clear the Raging Bull doesn't believe him.
Only Maguire and the Broncos figures who were supposedly canvassed by him know the truth but it doesn't really matter what they say at this point, Tallis is likely to keep swinging.
There is a theory doing the rounds at the moment that Tallis believes that Reynolds was one of the players who took phone calls from Maguire and helped him get the job. Put in different terms, Tallis may believe that Reynolds, as captain of the club, was partly responsible for knifing Walters.
Wide World of Sports has made phone calls to several sources in an effort to confirm that Tallis has a personal agenda against Reynolds but that part of the story is still murky. It can be considered nothing more than a theory.
But if Tallis believes, as he appears to, that Walters' sacking was a coup from within the club, engineered by Maguire, then it stands to reason that he would believe that Reynolds, the club captain, was one of the players taking phone calls.
As long as Tallis is friends with Walters, has a platform, and is asked questions about the Broncos, he is likely to keep twisting the knife until his grievances with Maguire's appointment are squared away.
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