‘He wasn’t able to show himself’: Maguire explains big Broncos bench call after Panthers loss

Broncos coach Michael Maguire has explained his decision to bring Ezra Mam off the bench while admitting a slow start left the dynamic five-eighth with little chance of having a big impact in their 26-0 loss to Penrith.

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Mam, who was injected into last year’s grand final off the interchange, came into Friday’s game with 10 minutes left in the first half and Brisbane already trailing 12-0.

There wasn’t much Mam could do to reverse Brisbane’s fortunes, with the Broncos guilty of coughing up far too much possession and that was the biggest message from Maguire after the 26-0 shutout.

“We put so much pressure on ourselves but that comes from the opposition,” Maguire said.

“They came here and applied pressure and we had too many errors to be able to put yourself into a game like that. When you play high-quality teams you’ve got to build pressure, we just definitely didn’t do that.”

Maguire, who had previously been cryptic about Ben Hunt’s role in the side ahead of Round 1, said the coaching staff had thought about bumping Mam back to the bench “throughout the week”.

But the plan backfired given Mam never really got a chance to settle into the game.

“I just felt that having Ez coming on and we obviously didn’t get our start with the way the game rolled, we didn’t put them under pressure,” Maguire said.

“We didn’t put the fatigue into them and having Ez come on the way we know he can, he then wasn’t able to show himself the way he can play. So, it’s part of building a whole game.”

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While Brisbane hardly entered Friday’s game in stellar form, having also fallen into a hole early in the World Club Challenge, Maguire said the last few weeks at training had been “really good”.

With that in mind, even though the outside noise is only going to grow louder after the latest loss, Maguire denied there is a “problem” at Red Hill.

“It’s just something we need to make sure we work hard at. We had uncharacteristic errors. We had drops where they shouldn’t be,” he added.

“To the credit of our boys, they actually forced a fair few on the opposition too. But where we were turning the ball over, we just put too much pressure on ourselves.”

It was a similar message to that from captain Adam Reynolds, who said the Broncos had “too many errors (and) penalties” to be a chance of threatening the Panthers.

“You give a side like that that amount of ball, and it’s always going to be a tough night,” he said.

“I think we had 18 errors, 61 per cent of the ball. It’s always going to be hard to win games.

“Both teams played in the same conditions, so there’s no excuses out there. We just need to be better with ball.

“We had simple errors in the play-the-ball, mistakes that we don’t usually have. We need to go back and try and work on that and be much better next week.”