Steve Deane: Dragons being forced to go to the Lang Park cauldron is unfair

To paraphrase a beer commercial from a few years back, it's a hard road finding the perfect finals system lad.

One thing is certain, the NRL's McIntyre system ain't it.

Sympathy for Wayne Bennett isn't something many people outside Brisbane and now Dragonsville are particularly used to feeling. For me, it's an entirely new sensation. I don't like Bennett's surly attitude to the media. Never have. No one expects coaches to go around handing out pats on the bum to journalists, but they do have a responsibility to share their thoughts.

Not doing so equates to not communicating with the game's stakeholders, the fans. People with a vested interest in the game - even a purely emotional one - deserve a decent flow of information from the club they support. It's an attitude that flows through to his players. Dragons fullback Darius Boyd's recent monosyllabic effort is a good example.

The flipside of Bennett's verbal reluctance is that, when he does issue forth with something substantial, it is usually worth listening.

While it was possible to dismiss his pre-finals description of the McIntyre finals system as "unfair" as so much self-serving grumbling , Bennett was right - and something should be done about it.

That the Dragons must tonight travel to the cauldron of Lang Park (Suncorp) to face the Broncos is unfair. The Dragons finished a 24-match regular season in first place, while the Broncos finished sixth. And yet it is the Broncos who have home advantage for a match that will end the season of one of the two teams. The reason, of course, is last week's results, when the Dragons were steamrolled by the Eels, while the Broncos edged a thrilling Queensland derby with the Titans.

But should those results really overturn seedings based on a 24-match season?

"Everyone's worked hard to get the top teams where they are, and at the moment, you could come first and play eighth and eighth could be a better team right now than two or three is," Bennett said before his side's date with the Eels was set. Well, sorry Wayne, there's not much that can be done about an eighth-placed team being better in September than many - perhaps even all - of those above it. It happened last year when the Warriors surged into the finals and tipped over the Storm. A finals system simply can't legislate for current form.

But what it can and must do is provide significant advantages for the teams that finish at the top. And that is where McIntyre fails.

"There's no reward, or the reward's not good enough," Bennett said.

Absolutely. The one obvious reward a finals system can provide is home advantage. Surely the Dragons did enough this year to deserve to have their fate decided at home in front of their own fans?

Super League has this season expanded its playoff system from five to eight teams. It will be interesting to see how a system that bears little similarity to McIntyre pans out.

Super League's old system worked well. It matched teams that finished close to each other in a series of elimination matches. It provided multiple lives for the top teams and, crucially, guaranteed home advantage to the top-ranked team in any match. All of those concepts have been preserved. But a radical change now allows the top-ranked winners from week one to chose their opponents for the Grand Final qualifier in week three. How teams make that sort of decision will be intriguing. The potential for egg smeared faces looks vast.

As for McIntyre, the end results suggest it works well enough. Since it was introduced in 1999, no team has won the competition from outside the top four, while three teams have lost in week one and gone on to win the premiership (1999 Melbourne, 2004 Bulldogs and 2006 Brisbane).

So it can be done. If the Dragons are good enough, they'll get there. If they don't, at least Bennett will have a good reason to be grumpy.