NRL Finals 2026 Archives - Redcliffe Today

Four seasons after entering the NRL, the Dolphins are heading into September from third place, with their first finals assignment taking them across the Tasman to face the second-placed New Zealand Warriors.

The qualifying final at Go Media Stadium on Saturday, 12 September offers a direct route deep into September. Win in Auckland and the Dolphins move straight into a preliminary final with a week off; lose and the double chance earned through their top-four finish keeps their season alive.

After spending their first three seasons trying to reach September, the Dolphins have finally arrived. What matters now is how far they can go.

Week One: Warriors v Dolphins

Qualifying Final
New Zealand Warriors (2nd) v Dolphins (3rd)
Saturday, 12 September
Go Media Stadium, Auckland
4.05pm AEST / 6.05pm NZ time

Both sides arrive in serious form. The Dolphins have won seven consecutive matches and the Warriors six, setting up a qualifying final between two teams carrying genuine momentum into September.

They Already Know How Close This Can Get

Their only meeting this season provided a fair indication of how little may separate them.

The Dolphins won 26–24 at Suncorp Stadium in Round 17 after Selwyn Cobbo scored late and Jamayne Isaako converted from the sideline. That gives them evidence they can break down the Warriors, although repeating it in Auckland under finals pressure is a different assignment.

The Warriors have home advantage and a powerful middle capable of restricting the Dolphins’ attacking freedom, making the contest for field position particularly important.

Three Matchups That Could Shape It

The Battle Through the Middle

James Fisher-Harris, Mitch Barnett and Erin Clark give the Warriors considerable experience and physicality through the middle. The Dolphins have plenty to answer with, but they need to earn the field position that allows their strike players to become influential.

If the Warriors consistently force the Dolphins to begin sets deep in their own half, Isaiya Katoa could spend much of the afternoon kicking from poor positions. Give him a platform further upfield and the complexion of the game changes quickly.

Katoa and the Kicking Game

Finals football places a premium on completing sets, finding grass and forcing opponents to work out of their own end, putting considerable responsibility on Katoa.

The 22-year-old has become increasingly important to the Dolphins’ attack, but Auckland may test his patience as much as his creativity. Against a Warriors side capable of punishing poor field position, knowing when to play conservatively could be as important as producing the spectacular.

Finding Space for the Strike Players

Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow and Herbie Farnworth give the Dolphins the ability to turn ordinary passages into points, while the wider backline provides Katoa with threats across the field.

The Titans saw that danger in Round 27, when the Dolphins recovered from 14–0 down to win 24–20 and Tabuai-Fidow scored twice while running for 261 metres. It was another demonstration of their attacking capacity, although repeatedly relying on recovery football would be a dangerous habit to carry into September.

The Selection Questions

The official Week One team is still to be named, with three players in particular to watch.

Cobbo missed the Titans match with an ankle problem, Kodi Nikorima was withdrawn with hamstring tightness and Kulikefu Finefeuiaki sat out with a knee issue. All three are currently listed by the NRL as targeting a return during the finals.

Their availability would bring the Dolphins considerably closer to the combinations used during their late-season run, but until the team is named, their Week One selection should not be treated as certain.

Seven Straight Into September

The Dolphins could hardly ask for a stronger form line. Seven consecutive victories have carried them into their maiden finals campaign, including wins over Parramatta and the Roosters before the 24–20 comeback against Gold Coast.

The Titans match was hardly a flawless tune-up. Gold Coast raced to a 14–0 lead inside 16 minutes and threatened again late, forcing the Dolphins to regain control and then withstand pressure to close it out.

There may be some value in having faced that immediately before the finals, but it also reinforced a concern that has followed the Dolphins through their winning run.

The Double Chance — and Why It Matters

Finishing third means defeat in Auckland would not end the Dolphins’ season. They would instead move into a sudden-death semi-final in Week Two against the winner of the Sharks-Cowboys elimination final.

Victory is far more valuable. Beat the Warriors and the Dolphins skip Week Two entirely, gaining an extra week to recover before playing a preliminary final for a place in the Grand Final.

The shortest route therefore requires three victories from here: Warriors, preliminary final, Grand Final. Lose in Auckland and an additional sudden-death match is added to the journey.

Five Reasons the Dolphins Can Go Deep

The case for the Dolphins as premiership contenders has already been built across the regular season, but several strengths matter particularly now.

Tabuai-Fidow and Farnworth provide elite strike power, while Katoa has grown increasingly comfortable directing the side. There is enough size and experience through the forwards to compete when finals football tightens up, and seven consecutive victories provide compelling evidence of current form.

Then there is their resilience. Brisbane led the Dolphins 24–0 in Round 23 before losing 40–32, while Gold Coast led 14–0 in Round 27 and lost 24–20.

Those comebacks are evidence of a team that is difficult to put away. They also point directly towards its biggest vulnerability.

The Biggest Obstacle

The Dolphins have developed an uncomfortable habit of showing how dangerous they are after making life considerably harder for themselves.

Recovering from 24 points down against Brisbane produced one of their most memorable wins of the season, and the Titans comeback sent them into September on another high. Against the strongest sides in the competition, however, those deficits can become too large to retrieve.

Their attacking talent gives them unusual capacity to rescue matches. In the finals, avoiding the need for a rescue in the first place may be more important.

What It Could Come Down To

The Warriors earned the advantage that comes with finishing second, and Auckland is about as demanding an assignment as the Dolphins could have drawn for their first finals appearance. They also enter September with six consecutive victories, so neither side has much reason to fear the other’s form.

The Dolphins have already shown they can beat this opponent, but doing it again will require something they have not always managed during their late-season surge: producing their best football without first putting themselves in trouble.

Get that part right and the reward is substantial. A victory in Auckland would deliver a week off and leave the Dolphins one win from the Grand Final.

For a club entering its first finals campaign only four seasons after joining the NRL, that is already remarkable territory. From here, though, the story is no longer about how quickly the Dolphins got here.

It is about what they do now.

Published 7-September-2026

It took the Dolphins just four seasons to go from a blank NRL team sheet to September. What began with Wayne Bennett, a collection of hardened veterans and a handful of calculated gambles has evolved into the club’s first finals team — and one that looks very different from the side that started it all.

When the Dolphins were awarded the NRL’s 17th licence in October 2021, the new franchise carried the history of a Redcliffe club founded in 1947 but deliberately entered the competition without the suburb in its name.

The ambition extended well beyond the peninsula. NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo said the Dolphins could reach from Brisbane’s northern corridor through Moreton Bay and towards the Sunshine Coast, giving the club a much broader footprint from which to build its support.

Wayne Bennett was appointed foundation coach eight days later and faced the considerable task of assembling an NRL roster from scratch. The recruitment strategy that followed leaned heavily on experience: Felise Kaufusi became the inaugural signing before Jesse and Kenny Bromwich and Mark Nicholls joined a forward pack carrying premiership success, representative experience and hundreds of first-grade games.

Alongside them were two younger recruits whose importance would become clearer with time. Isaiya Katoa was only 18 when the Dolphins signed him from Penrith, while Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow arrived from North Queensland with an opportunity to establish himself at fullback. Four seasons later, both are central figures in the first Dolphins side bound for September.

An Opening That Changed Expectations

Few expansion teams get an introduction quite like the Dolphins did.

More than 32,000 people were at Suncorp Stadium on 5 March 2023 when they faced the Sydney Roosters, with the occasion carrying an added connection through Arthur Beetson, the rugby league Immortal who had represented both Redcliffe and the Roosters.

The Dolphins won 28–18 and quickly showed it was more than an opening-day flourish, winning seven of their first 12 matches and sitting sixth after Round 13. The demands of a full NRL season eventually exposed the limitations of a new roster, however, and they finished 13th with nine wins and 15 losses, scoring 520 points while conceding 631.

Thirteenth place hardly suggested an immediate finals contender, but the first season had answered the more fundamental question confronting any expansion club. The Dolphins had demonstrated quickly that they could compete at NRL level, and expectations began moving accordingly.

One Game Short — and the End of the Foundation Era

By the end of 2024, credibility was no longer the benchmark.

The Dolphins entered Round 27 knowing victory over Newcastle would put them into the finals in only their second season. Instead, the Knights won 14–6 and claimed eighth place, leaving the Dolphins 10th with an 11–13 record.

The defeat also drew a line under the club’s foundation era. Bennett departed after two seasons, Kristian Woolf moved from assistant to head coach and inaugural captain Jesse Bromwich retired.

Bennett later credited Bromwich, his brother Kenny, Kaufusi and Nicholls with helping establish the standards required inside a new NRL club. Their recruitment had given the Dolphins something an expansion side could not develop overnight: players who already knew what successful NRL environments looked like.

Woolf inherited those foundations, but the next stage required the Dolphins to become less dependent on the generation recruited to establish them.

The 721-Point Season That Still Wasn’t Enough

The answer in 2025 was spectacular in attack and costly at the other end of the field.

In Woolf’s first season as head coach, the Dolphins scored 721 points, the best attacking return in the NRL, while Jamayne Isaako led the competition with 278 points. For all that attacking production, they conceded 596 and finished ninth with a 12–12 record.

According to rugby league historian David Middleton, they became the first team since Western Suburbs in 1924 to lead the competition in points scored and still miss the post-season.

The problem became particularly stark late in the season. Across successive matches against the Roosters, Broncos and Sea Eagles, the Dolphins conceded 36, 38 and 58 points. A side capable of scoring at a premiership-threatening rate had been left outside the eight because it could not consistently contain opponents.

That contradiction became one of the defining lessons carried into 2026. The Dolphins did not need to reinvent an attack that had already led the competition; they needed to become considerably harder to beat.

Woolf Builds a More Complete Dolphins Side

Defence, fitness and physical resilience were consequently prominent themes heading into Woolf’s second season, but the change since 2023 has involved considerably more than tightening the numbers without the ball.

Katoa has developed from an 18-year-old investment into the halfback entrusted with directing the team. Tabuai-Fidow has become one of the club’s defining players, while Max Plath went from joining the Dolphins in 2023 and making his NRL debut that season to winning the 2024 Arthur Beetson Medal and making his Queensland debut in 2026.

Isaako’s career revival has added another strand to that development, while the roster has been strengthened progressively rather than rebuilt in one hit. Daniel Saifiti and Kulikefu Finefeuiaki arrived for 2025, with Morgan Knowles, Selwyn Cobbo and Brad Schneider among the additions for 2026.

It is a significantly different model from the one Bennett needed in 2023. The inaugural Dolphins relied on established players to import experience and standards; the current side increasingly combines that foundation with players whose best football has been developed or produced during the club’s own short NRL life.

The Comeback That Finally Took Them to September

The breakthrough arrived in a Battle of Brisbane that initially looked like becoming one of the Dolphins’ worst nights of the season.

Brisbane raced to a 24–0 lead at Suncorp Stadium on 8 August before the Dolphins overturned the deficit to win 40–32, securing the first finals appearance in the club’s NRL history.

There was another indication of their progress three weeks later at Allianz Stadium. Forced to defend periods with 12 men and then 11 against the Roosters, the Dolphins conceded only 12 points and won 26–12. It was their 16th victory of the season and moved them to third on the ladder with one regular-season match remaining.

Through Round 26, the Dolphins have scored 612 points and conceded 474. The attack remains among the club’s great strengths, but the broader change is reflected in the outcome: 16 wins already, compared with 12 across the entire 2025 regular season.

Four Seasons, a Different Measure of Success

Four years ago, the Dolphins were an expansion gamble — a new NRL side built around hardened veterans and young talent that might or might not deliver.

Now the gamble is paying off.

The Dolphins are heading to September for the first time, and the players once recruited on potential are increasingly the ones driving them there. Katoa, Tabuai-Fidow and Plath are no longer prospects around an experienced foundation; they are part of the core of a finals team.

That is how far this club has moved in four seasons. The question is no longer whether the Dolphins belong in the NRL. It is how far they can go.

Published 30-August-2026

Tag: NRL Finals 2026

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