‘Always the end goal’: Hynes and his Sharks hellbent on proving their NRL haters wrong

It’s not quite being dubbed a “last dance” for the team just yet, but star halfback Nicho Hynes knows that this impending NRL season may be the last that this Cronulla Sharks squad has a real chance to win an elusive premiership before they head back into a fresh rebuilding phase — and they absolutely want to get over the line to prove all their haters wrong.

Hynes has been at Cronulla for nearly half a decade now, and his leadership and command on the field has seen the sky blue team play in a semifinal, an elimination final and then back-to-back preliminary finals.

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But, Cronulla has never been able to get past that final hurdle and play in the big dance — let alone win the whole thing, like the Brisbane Broncos and Penrith Panthers have in recent years — and that’s absolutely the goal for Hynes and his team as they head into the next campaign.

“That’s always the end goal, just getting into that final game of the year in the grand final,” Hynes declared as the team’s ’26 preseason got underway. “We’re certainly not getting any further away. We’re definitely getting closer, and I feel like the mentality we’ve got right now in this pre-season is better than we’ve ever had, so I know everyone’s hungry [for a title].”

He continued: “We grew and grew in confidence over that back end of last year, so hopefully we can take that into Round 1. I know it’s always a different year with new challenges, different teams have different players, and they always get better, so it’s about just putting all the work we’ve done over the last few years and making it happen this year.”

Adding a pressing feeling to the whole campaign is the fact that some fifteen players are off-contract at the end of the season, meaning the southern Sydney club is going to have to choose who to keep and who to let leave for other ventures.

Some have already gone, too, including Daniel Atkinson (to the Dragons), Max Bradbury (Seagulls), and Kade Dykes (Bulldogs).

The issue may be that, should this not be the year, that many exits could send Cronulla into another rebuild.

It’s a fact that every Shark is already thinking about.

“We haven’t really touched on a last dance or the players leaving; it’s probably just an unspoken thing that’s going on in the background. Everyone knows it… We haven’t spoken about it. It doesn’t need to be spoken about; we just need to win every day and get all the players singing from the same song again and putting it on the paddock,” Hynes explained.

That is where the energy is coming right now, he added. “The motivation is coming from within after being in back-to-back prelims and not getting that done. That’s what we’re talking about at the moment. We can feel that presence.”

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At least having been together for so long is a boon as well as a curse. Many of the Cronulla players across the squad have been in the team since the early 2020s and know each other so well that attacking and defending together is second nature. No one has to learn new systems or plays, and that will give the Sharks a huge leg up early in the hunt.

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“All our connections and our squad culture are the same, so no one really has to come in and learn any new systems, and we’ve kept the nucleus of the group for the last four or five years. We know each other’s game play back to front now, so another year our spine’s together, another year Tricky [Braydon Trindall] and I are going to be gelling together,” Hynes said.

“I’m just really looking forward to what this squad can do because you never know what’s going to happen.”