WITH a huddle, a short wait of expectancy and a combined yell of excitement, it carries some of the noise and showbiz which surrounds world championship fights.

It’s the pre-training weigh-in for David Taylor. It happens before every session at the Broncos for all of our players.

It’s mostly the Broncos forwards who sneak a look at what weight big Dave has come in at, but the scales are near my locker and I’m always interested.

The Broncos forward could be 120kg one day and 116kg the next and back up the session after that. But his skinfolds are as good as most of the backs – he’s a hulk.

His weight is where it needs to be, but it’s really not far away from where it was at the start of the year.

There was a week where his weight was getting too much so our staffers told him to stop doing weights. He had two weeks off weights. Then he resumed and equalled the club’s bench-press record of 175kg.

It’s that natural strength he has transferred on to the football with a little more consistency in recent weeks.

There is still a bit to go in terms of him being a tough forward.

Dave has shone in a new role which Ivan Henjak has found for him within the team. His problem – and to Dave’s credit he has turned it around – was that he’d knock up comparatively quickly and then struggle to fulfil his workload.

Now, Dave defends in the middle, which is hard work, and when we have the ball he swaps roles with Corey Parker. He’s running wide and enjoying the tackle busts and big plays he has been able to make in that role.

Because he’s not required to do a lot of hit-ups, it’s helping him keep his fuel gauge high and have a bigger impact on the game.

Corey is a really fit guy who gets through 80 minutes and is taking a lot of hit-ups out of our defensive end.

When he signed with the Rabbitohs earlier this season, there were issues that stopped Dave from being the player he is showing us now. He has also become a dad since, which has made him more mature.

I’m a chance of defending against him next year when the Broncos play South Sydney.

Jamie Soward was isolated, one-on-one sometimes last Friday night, which would be quiet scary for anyone, let alone a smaller guy.

What I’ve accepted is that it’s going to be a regular thing at the Broncos for one or two good players to leave every year.

The Broncos over the years have retained players on “unders”.

The percentage of players willing to stay at the Broncos for, say, 20-30 per cent less than they pull down elsewhere is smaller than it was 10 years ago.

Another player of the “moment” in the media coverage of the finals race has been Parramatta’s Jarryd Hayne.

Jarryd is athletic and instinctive. He’s similar to Greg Inglis . . . when he has confidence he’s hard to stop.

Hayne has long had this talent, but he’s grown so much with the confidence of having excelled at State of Origin. He came back and carried Parramatta along to some extent.

Jarryd was in the headlines for the wrong reasons early last season, but he seems to have learnt from that. It was probably a wake-up call for him, a moment in which a young bloke assesses what he’s doing with his life. He admits how valuable it was to him to be in the Fijian World Cup team last year – it gave him some direction.

When Parramatta were going badly earlier this year, he was struggling compared with his standards. Jarryd would say he was a little less fit than he is now. From experience, my advice to both Jarryd and Dave would be to not listen to all the praise.

It puts pressure on you to do it every week and it disrupts your focus on what you need to do on the field for your footy team. Your preparation is everything. Dave and Jarryd will never lose their talent but they might come off the boil if they start losing focus on the important things in football.