LONDON BRONCOS come to Boundary Park on Sunday (3pm) on top of the world after getting back into Super League and having coach Mike Eccles named as one of five personalities of 2023 alongside the likes of James Roby, Bevan French, Lachlan Lam and Mikey Lewis.
The Broncos story is indeed a remarkable one and the mere fact that Oldham have got them to travel up here to play a pre-season warm-up game is indeed a tribute to the Roughyeds’ pulling power as much as it is an acknowledgement by the team from the capital that this Oldham side is no ordinary League One team and is, in fact, worthy of a much higher ranking in Rugby League’s pecking order, writes ROGER HALSTEAD.
The Londoners were promoted to Super League just a year after they were on the brink of relegation to League One and Eccles, the club’s Director of Rugby, stepped into the breach and was credited with guiding them to safety.
Last season, 2023, was an amazing one for Eccles’s men, who lost four of their first five games and had a mid-June hammering at Featherstone, who won 50-6 with a side coached by Sean Long and which included Matty Wildie at hooker.
After that, though, they were almost unbeatable, finishing fifth in the Championship with three more points than Halifax and then entering on a fantastic play-off run which arguably made them the team of the season, outside of Super League.
Wins away from home at Halifax. Featherstone (the big one) and Toulouse Olympique in the Grand Final plummeted them into Super League instead of Wakefield Trinity, stunned the whole of the Rugby League and elevated Eccles from a Rugby League nobody into the headlines. He had rebuilt Broncos with a large core of southern-based Academy players, but at the he end of the French domestic season he snapped up former New Zealand international Dean Whare and ex-NRL star Corey Norman and those signings proved pivotal.
They played centre and stand-off respectively. Norman having played for Brisbane Broncos, Parramatta and St George, and the Londoners smashed their way to glory by winning nine of their last ten games, including those play-off stunners which made the whole Rugby League community sit up and take note.
At the end-of-season awards night, Eccles was named Championship Coach of the Year and utility man Dean Parata was named joint Championship player of the year. Maidstone-born hooker Bill Leyland was honoured as Young Player of the Year.
Since then, the club has suffered an IMG grading setback and has lost key men Whare and Norman, but Eccles remains in situ; he and club chairman David Hughes have gone public in their criticism of the grading system and the club is well settled in its n ew Super League-standard stadium in Wimbledon.
New signings Robbie Storey, Gideon Boafo, James Meadows, Sadiq Adebiyi (no stranger to Oldham fans), Harim Miloudi, Jack Campagnolo and trialist Lee Kershaw (also well known to Oldham fans) have given the club a boost, as did their pre-season
draw at Castleford, followed since by a heavy defeat at Huddersfield.
However you look at it, this will be another cracking challenge for talk-of-the-town Oldham and one that local RL fans can see on their doorstep.
