analysis

After his end with Brisbane Broncos, Payne Haas must conquer a new beginning

Posted Fri 4 Sep 2026 at 7:34amFri 4 Sep 2026 at 7:34amFri 4 Sep 2026 at 7:34am

A dead rubber game in an empty stadium was no way for Payne Haas’s time as a Bronco to come to an end.

To match what he’s produced in nine seasons with Brisbane that averaged out to magnificent, Haas’s last game would’ve needed to feel like a life and death struggle where the winners touched the heavens and defeat sent the fallen screaming into hell.

Such contests have been where Haas has enjoyed some of his finest hours and those are the games of 159 appearances for Brisbane that have made him a living legend.

But for the last before he heads to South Sydney, he had to settle for purgatory.

Brisbane’s 34-20 win against Canterbury on Thursday night felt like so many other games that happen as non-finals teams grimly march to the end of the season.

Tackles were made, tries were scored and whistles were blown on a night that felt flat and lonely, as the citadel of Stadium Australia often can be with nearly 70,000 empty seats.

Brisbane did send Haas out a winner, and that still matters. Josiah Karapani played a blinder and the Broncos found a little of the football that marked that championship season last year.

Haas got in the action early, smashing his way through four defenders to score the opening try of the night and later spent time in the sin bin after being pinged for repeated infringements.

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With 152 metres across 71 minutes the numbers were strong, as they always are for Haas, but it’s important not to get lost in them.

While the match as a spectacle and a contest was not a fitting finale for Haas’s Brisbane career as a whole, it made much more sense as the close for what has been an uneven year in comparison to his other campaigns.

Haas has not played poorly and even if he had, a poor Payne Haas game would be a stand-out performance for many other props.

You could say he’s good enough on a bad day but he hasn’t had enough truly bad days for us to be sure.

Haas has still averaged 156 run metres and just under 35 tackles a game, marks many players would be proud to call their own.

He has still had big moments, like his rampaging try against the Bulldogs on his last night, or his similar effort against Canberra two weeks ago that kicked off a rollicking Broncos comeback win.

Australia and Samoa would still both crawl over broken glass to have him in their World Cup sides because he is still the best prop on the planet.

But Haas has not quite been superhuman, and that is what we have become accustomed to during his Bronco years.

We are used to him being closer to a miracle than a man — 156 metres per game, somehow, is the second-lowest average of his career as a starter.

His offloads have plummeted, from 70 last year to just 21 this season. So too his tackle busts, which have fallen from 130 to 64 with the wide-running charges that became such a feature of his game in recent years seemingly hard to find.

In similarly short supply are the inexplicable, gut-busting efforts to cover the defensive mistake of a teammate or clean up a loose ball or just generally be where no prop forward ever should be to do a little extra that no other prop forward can ever really do.

After making the Dally M team of the year four times in the past five seasons — with a 14-match year in 2024 marking his only exclusion — Haas will miss out this year and rightly so.

The Roosters’ blunt-force artist Naufahu Whyte and New Zealand’s James Fisher-Harris have both enjoyed better seasons.

So too has the old iron Cowboy himself, Jason Taumalolo, and the greatest forward of an age now past got the better of Haas in both of North Queensland’s wins over their southern rivals.

Mitch Barnett, Haas’s replacement in Brisbane for next year, did the same last month when the Warriors beat the Broncos up like they owed them money.

Even players outside the top eight have got a bit of a turn to put one on the living legend.

Haas barely ever misses tackles — he made 40 without a single miss against Canterbury — but last week against Melbourne Stefano Utoikamanu brushed past him for a try the Storm man can tell the grandkids about because it’s not every day you get one on the king.

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Haas is not the only player at Brisbane who has struggled to deal with the premiership hangover but he is the only player who seemed above such things. Motivation is fleeting, it comes and it goes and that is why it’s for humans, not heroes.

Haas is the player who goes all day, every day, no matter what and he has done it on worse Bronco teams than this.

In the final game of the 2020 season, when Brisbane lost to North Queensland to confirm their first wooden spoon on as low a night as the club has ever had, it was a breakaway try to Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow that confirmed the result.

Chasing Tabuai-Fidow, then or now, is to put in maximum effort for a futile cause at the best of times, let alone in the dying stages of the final game of a nightmare season.

But there going after him, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, was Payne Haas. It didn’t make a difference, but Haas did it just in case it might.

He kept going like that until it felt like a way of life, until years later when he lifted the premiership trophy and confirmed a legacy that meant he could stand alongside the likes of Glenn Lazarus, Shane Webcke and Petero Civoniceva as the greatest forwards in Brisbane’s history.

That journey to greatness is in starker relief given his first Brisbane years began in low-down valleys, making the trail he forged all the way to a premiership his Everest.

His sense of triumph and relief was palpable after that grand final win even amid the throng of family, friends and backslappers that filled the Brisbane sheds as the air felt thick with emotion and cigar smoke.

The player who always found more to do at last had some satisfaction. The seemingly endless appetite for the grind and the fight was satiated.

It was the culmination of Haas’s entire footballing life and if anyone had earned the right to look a little more mortal in the aftermath, it was him.

This version of Payne Haas is still more than good enough to impact the premiership race. If this is the new normal he will still be mighty for South Sydney in a way few players can ever dream of and regardless of what happens next, his greatness is already assured.

But there’s every chance the move now creates the chance for another rise, in a new city with new colours and a fresh start amid new challenge that will, from time to time, demand he again pushes himself beyond reasonable limits.

As hyperbolic as we can get about players of Haas’s ilk, they are still human. They still need something to chase and last year, after so much effort and so much time, Haas made his ultimate catch.

Perhaps it meant that his farewell season as a Bronco, and particularly his final night, could not match what has come before.

But even if it wasn’t a fitting end to what was, it is still an end — which means a new beginning can follow.