Walsh’s superstardom will now know no bounds. He has one man to thank

3 hours ago 3

It’s Michael Maguire’s greatest triumph. The rebuilding and rewiring of one of the biggest NRL stars we’ve seen, Reece Walsh.

The game has had big stars, plenty of them, but nothing like this. This is the social media age, the Instagram and TikTok eras, where everything is magnified and multiplied.

And right at the top of the heap of this modern style pop culture is Reece Walsh.

His Clive Churchill Medal-winning performance in Sunday’s grand final win over Melbourne, the game’s biggest stage, will go down in folklore and send his stardom into the stratosphere.

His try in the 31st minute, where he took on seven defenders and beat them with speed and strength, has to go into the top handful ever scored in a decider. All the way back to 1908.

As these pages labelled him after the miracle win over the Raiders, he’s Reece Lightning and Reece Frightening all rolled into one. And it’s beyond frightening what he might become, as he is only 23.

Reece Walsh was at his best in the Broncos run to the grand final, which started with a thrilling finals win over the Raiders last month.

But to work out Maguire’s role in Walsh’s form explosion, we have to go back to the first six or so weeks of the season, when Walsh was nothing like what we saw in the last two months.

He was averaging less than 60 run metres per match, passes were hitting the deck and going over the sideline, and he was being picked too easily when he attacked. He looked lost, and the harder he tried, the worse it got.

This columnist spoke with Maguire about Walsh’s form for over an hour in April.

Maguire explained there was a lot more video on Walsh now, and other teams had done their homework on him. In 2023, when he tore the competition apart, teams didn’t know what had hit them. In 2025, they knew.

But Maguire wasn’t worried. “What you’re missing is the work we have been doing with Reecey on his defence. That’s what we want him to get right. I’m not worried about him at all.

“His defence has really improved and that’s what we wanted from him.”

Walsh’s form was such that he was overlooked this year for State of Origin by Billy Slater, who loves him as a player and handed him his Maroons debut in his breakout 2023 season.

“Have you seen Reece Walsh play,” was what Slater said at the ’23 Origin press conference when asked if he thought the flashy youngster would handle the big stage.

Billy Slater congratulates Reece Walsh after Queensland won game one of the 2023 State of Origin series. It was Walsh’s debut for the Maroons.

However, when Kalyn Ponga was injured this season, Slater overlooked Walsh as fullback for Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow in the decider. Walsh was 18th man.

It was after Origin that Reece Frightening turned up and almost single-handedly won the Broncos their first premiership since 2006. He torched minor premiers the Raiders in a mind-altering 15 minutes after being sin-binned, and then he took out the four-time premiers the Panthers last week when his explosive speed set up the match-winning try.

And it was Maguire’s patience that bore the fruit. He explained on that April day, it was about laying a foundation and allowing Walsh to grow and accept the ups and downs. Get his defence right, work on new ways to attack. Walsh’s attack on Sunday night was as good as we have ever seen, scoring that try and laying on three others.

Reece Walsh celebrates his Clive Churchill Medal win after Sunday’s grand final.

But his defence was as good. Maguire knew what he was talking about. Look at his effort to take down Ryan Papenhuyzen in the last 20 seconds. Beyond brilliant.

Just as Maguire taught Walsh about learning his lessons, Maguire himself has learnt. After bringing a famous premiership to South Sydney in 2014, his time there crumbled when the players lost their way under his tough military ways.

He was given a fresh start at the Wests Tigers, and his time there crumbled similarly, some of it brought upon himself when he broke the swearing world record in the ill-fated documentary Wild Wests: Tales From Tiger Town.

Losing the Tigers job didn’t finish him, as success with the New Zealand Test side and NSW in Origin football resurrected him and propelled him into the Broncos job - a club dealing with equal parts amazing talent and poor discipline.

Reece Walsh and coach Michael Maguire celebrate the premiership win.

They wanted a hard nut in charge and went for Maguire.

But even then, there were whispers he had been too hard on them too with ‘spew buckets’ at training and unending brutal sessions being blamed for an early season slump that saw Brisbane with five wins and seven losses. They were outside the eight.

Maguire knew it was what would happen in September and October that would count, not June.

It’s now up to Madge, who has bought a house in a neighbouring suburb to the Broncos’ Red Hill base and moved his family from Sydney, to work out how to balance his love of hard training and discipline with the super rock stardom which will come with premiership success.

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