Wayne Bennett's mind games over his problematic fullback spot have backfired after Brisbane were edged 24-22 by the Sydney Roosters in their NRL qualifying final.
Bennett opted to name utility Kodi Nikorima in the No.1 jersey on Tuesday after skipper Darius Boyd was ruled out with a hamstring injury.
Nikorima trained all week at fullback, however that didn't stop the master coach from reaching into his bag of tricks and naming Jordan Kahu on the final team sheet an hour before the match.
Nikorima was pushed to the bench.
But Bennett still wasn't done at Allianz Stadium, instead choosing to shift Kahu back to his original spot on the wing and utilising David Mead at the back when play began.
Whatever the legendary coach had planned certainly didn't work early on, with the Broncos staring down the barrel of 14-0 deficit in the space of 24 minutes.
Bennett then made the strange decision to burn an interchange by calling Mead to replace Nikorima after 20 minutes, a move which stemmed the flow of points.
"It was in the back of my mind. I just thought we'd take a bit of pressure off Kodi. That didn't affect us; that worked pretty good," Bennett said of his changes.
Asked whether he had planned to take Mead off after a quarter of the game, he said: "It wasn't that precise, but something like that, yeah."
The Broncos got on the board before the break through James Roberts, before Nikorima answered Luke Keary's second-half try by setting up Corey Oates to cut the advantage back to eight points.
The visitors refused to go away and they surged to the lead on back-to-back tries to Oates and Ben Hunt with 10 minutes to go.
But Roosters centre Latrell Mitchell stole back the ascendancy with an individual effort in the 75th minute, leaving the Broncos to rue giving up the head start that limited them to just two interchanges for the final quarter of the match.
"If you watch it, it's pretty easy to see where we went wrong. Just full of mistakes. Just our performance - it was poor," Bennett said.
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