The scars from his last foray in finals football may linger, but Herbie Farnworth enters the 2026 series as a changed man, and a key member of arguably the most lethal backline in the NRL.
The Dolphins centre looms as his side’s X-factor in their maiden finals campaign, which begins on Saturday in New Zealand when they play a Warriors side with a parochial crowd behind them.
Farnworth hasn’t featured at this point of the season since he played with the Brisbane Broncos in the heartbreaking 2023 grand final defeat at the hands of a Nathan Cleary-inspired Penrith Panthers.
While the Englishman has new ambitions in delivering silverware to Redcliffe – and holds no bittersweet feelings that Brisbane got the job done in 2025 – those memories still linger and serve as motivation.
“It’s definitely a hard one to get over, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it a fair bit,” Farnworth revealed.
“But I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a person and as a player from it. Obviously, the boys [Broncos] ended up putting it right in the end, which was good to see – it was a lot of good mates who worked really hard.
“Obviously, I didn’t get a ring, so hopefully, it’s our time this year. I know how hard all those boys work, I’d been with a lot of them since the under-20s, so it was nice to see them go on and do well.”
Since arriving at his former club’s nearest rival, Farnworth has gone from the best up-and-coming centre in the game to a clear standout. Despite being positioned out wide, he leads the competition for offloads (72) and tackle busts (150).
He has helped his team become one of rugby league’s most attacking sides, cementing a top four place ahead of finals.
“I’ve obviously got some very good players inside me in Izzy [Katoa] and Kodi [Nikorima] putting me in good spots to break those tackles and make those offloads, so the credit probably goes to those guys,” Farnworth said.
Fullback Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow chimed in: “He [Farnworth] doesn’t want to get tackled even more than me, I think that’s where I get it from.
“Just watching him play and how he goes about his game, he’s a special talent.”
Dolphins’ attacking style has had a ripple effect for the rest of the side, with the work of the ‘Fab Five’ – Farnworth, Tabuai-Fidow, Selwyn Cobbo, Jack Bostock and Jamayne Isaako – complementing a forward pack built on speed and skill rather than size.
No team in the competition this year has run for as many metres as the Dolphins’ nearly 43,800. The backline quintet has run for more than 16,800 of them, with only the ladder-leading Panthers running for more collectively among the teams named for the first week of the finals.
The more mobile and creative members of the Dolphins forward pack – Max Plath, Kurt Donoghoe and Morgan Knowles the leading examples – have expanded the side’s attack; producing faster play-the-balls and an interchange of passing to combat the increasing pace of the contest due to the six-again set restart laws.
“It should be the other way around, shouldn’t it?” Dolphins forward Felise Kaufusi said with a laugh, when asked about the mountain of work his backs get through.
“We’ve got some mobile and fit forwards, and the way the game is going – and how fit and fast it is – I think you need that from your middles. Those big bodies we have in our backs, they’re like extra forwards anyway, so I think we complement each other pretty well.”
Tabuai-Fidow credits the “special bond” shared between the squad for contributing to the on-field cohesiveness. He said he had “no regrets” about his move to Redcliffe from a North Queensland Cowboys’ outfit which had just reached the 2022 preliminary finals.
“It all comes down to working hard for each other. We have that special bond and that connection where the back five will do the hard yards, and the forwards will tackle for us – it’s a trade-off there where we work together and make our jobs easy,” Tabuai-Fidow told this masthead.
Isaako added: “Our forward pack is not as big as most forward packs in the comp, we’re a little bit of a smaller forward pack and a bit more mobile, and that sometimes means when the ball is kicked inside our 10, 20 metres zone we have a job to take the first three of four carries to get to our kick.
“It’s something we pride ourselves on is making sure we get the ball down the other end, and having a good kick-chase. In order to do that, we need our forwards to be in that chase line, so [we need to] do as much work as we can coming out of the backfield and make it easier for them.”
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