Anthony Griffin never played first grade. Lower grades as a hooker out of Rockhampton, then a coaching climb from colts up through the Queensland Cup, until somebody handed him the Broncos less than three weeks before the 2011 season and he took them to within one game of a grand final.

The Romans had a word for the bloke who reaches the Senate without a single ancestor to vouch for him. Novus homo. New man. Cicero was one and he never stopped mentioning it.

More than 230 games in the NRL across Brisbane, Penrith and the Dragons. All three ended with the club making the call, the last of them delivered at eight in the morning, just before training. In 2026 he took a Shute Shield side for the first time.

Here is the detail that matters. League hands you a sonnet. Fourteen lines, six plays, you know exactly where the turn comes, and when it goes wrong there is a scrum or a drop-out and a tidy little reset waiting. Union hands you Ginsberg and wishes you luck. The ball is always live. You can be well clear and still be in strife by the time you have finished telling your winger about it.

Eastwood played the year like a side that had taken that into its bones and then been thoroughly done over by it, roughly every second Saturday.

No set of six out here

The Woodies played more football than anybody: 569 minutes of ball in play across the first 16 rounds, the most in the competition, 53% of the possession, 52% of the territory. For a side that finished 93 points underwater, that is a deeply peculiar hand to be holding.

And they used it. 71 tries. Isaac Crowe beat 67 defenders from fullback, more than any other man in the Shute Shield, and he got there with a late kick nobody saw coming, adding 11 in the final fortnight to go past Otto Serfontein. Lachie Shelley beat 56 on the wing, third in the grade, and kicked goals when asked. Brad Roderick-Evans landed 77.4% to finish eighth.

And Xavier Degei scored 11 tries from the back row, equal seventh in the competition, seven of them in the last five rounds. Doubles in Rounds 14 and 17, a hat-trick in the last game of the year. He collected them the way back-rowers do, off mauls and pick-and-goes and close-range burrows, too big and too strong, until somebody stopped him. Largely nobody did. 11 meat pies, and he was still at it long after the season had stopped going their way.

This was never a bad football side. It was a side that spent the whole year batting all day and still losing the Test. In a code where the ball refuses to die, that cuts both ways with no mercy going: 16% of their points came in the first 20 minutes of games, and 32% of what they conceded came in the last 20.

Both barrels, every single week

Nine wins. Nine losses. Not one boring afternoon in the pile.

33-31 over Randwick in Round 1. 38-36 up at Hunter in Round 2. 27-24 over the reigning premiers in Round 8, game of the round. 42-39 over Uni in Round 9, also game of the round. 35-33 over Souths in Round 17. Five of their nine wins came by three points or fewer, two of those by two. These are not rugby scores. These are box scores.

Then there were the other sort. Four defeats by 19 points or more, and in Round 16 the Beasties put 38 on them and Eastwood did not score. Not a try, not a penalty, not a thing. Carthage, basically. The earth was salted and, to garnish it, the Woodies handed out two naughty boys on the way through, Josh Narcessian collecting the Roquefort for offside and Degei a slice of Gouda for assorted ruck business.

That is the club in two paragraphs. Either you could not look away, or they were being carried off in bits.

Which is how they reached September. 17 bonus points, 14 of them attacking, because they crossed four times or more in 14 of 18 matches. A side can lose half its games and still bank a fortune if it keeps finding the line. They made the finals on 53 competition points with a differential of minus 93, the only side in the six to concede more than it scored, and not narrowly: Easts were plus 420, Randwick in fifth plus 32.

The semi-final was the bill arriving. Easts 59, Eastwood 22. The ball stayed live and the minor premiers knew exactly what to do with it.

Tartan noir

Now the part they are still chewing over at Marsfield, and it wants handling carefully, because there are people at both ends of it.

With one round to play in 2025 and Eastwood sitting fifth, Dave Telfer was told he would not have the job in 2026. Anthony Griffin was the club’s director of rugby when that call was made and was appointed to first grade days later. Griffin has publicly denied any involvement in how Telfer’s exit came about, and that deserves saying plainly rather than left hanging.

Telfer went to Gordon, his junior club. Then Gordon signed 11 Eastwood players. Jordan-Lee Bacon. Ronan Kelly. Miles Ball. Cole Spinks. Harry Snook. Daniel Stovold. Mitch Holmes. Jayden Henderson. Lachie Albert. Toby Stewart. And Harry Turner, the captain.

Xenophon marched 10,000 Greeks home out of Persia and got a whole book out of it. Telfer managed 11 and only had to get them to Chatswood.

I flagged it in the Round 4 wrap and claim no credit, because it was about as subtle as a dropped piano. Gordon finished third. Eastwood finished sixth.

And here is the line that has been rattling round my skull. Asked before a ball was kicked what his new side would look like, Telfer said this: “I’ve always been an attacking coach, but to be brutally clear I know defence will win premierships in the Shute Shield.”

Eastwood conceded 573 points.

Then in Round 12, Gordon came to TG Millner. Eastwood scored one try and lost 15-7, their lowest score of the year by 10 points and the only round all season they banked nothing at all. Albert, by then in Tartan, got himself binned in front of the old home crowd and heard every syllable of it. Five minutes from the end Shelley had a penalty 25 metres out and in front, a kick that would have cut the margin to five and earned a losing bonus point.

It missed.

The other half of the game

That 573 is the whole problem, and everybody at Marsfield already knows it.

It is more than any other side in the six conceded, and not narrowly: Easts let in 339, Warringah 417, Gordon 492. 74 tries through Round 16. And almost a third of everything they gave up arrived in the last 20 minutes of matches.

Which is an interesting problem to land on this club in particular. League defends off a known quantity: a set of six, a flat line, the same picture again and again, so it gets drilled as a system. Union hands you a contest at every breakdown and a ball that never stops. Whether 30 years of the first is any use in fixing the second is the question Griffin now gets to answer.

Because the other half is already built. 71 tries, more possession than almost anybody, four or better in 14 of 18 matches. Nobody has to teach this side how to play.

Telfer was right, and Eastwood spent a season proving it: nine wins, a finals berth, and a semi-final in which the minor premiers put 59 on them.

What they have is a group. Crowe, Shelley, Degei, the two Goddards, Gonzalez, Roderick-Evans, Nelson, Legg, Opetaia, Sheldon. Nine wins from a squad that watched 11 blokes and its coach go out the gate 12 months earlier, playing the most watchable football in the bottom half of the grade.

The ball is always live. Griffin found that out the hard way, in his first season running a rugby union side.

What he does about it is the only question that matters at Marsfield this summer.