Sack Adam O'Brien

[Dr Dr Gimedanews]

If Sully continues down the refusing to overpay IF we need to overpay to get the right players in the right position because we are such a basket case, then it will soon become on him.

IF? I think that's already a reality. With an apparent lack of 3rd party deals the club is up against it. Surely Wests have some business connections?

The main conduit to success is development. I keep hearing about these juniors. Much like labor pains, I'm over it - I just wanna see the baby. Wests have had the club for the better part of a decade, and no baby.

Basket case rep would be solidified by sacking the coach and continuing the merry-go-round.

 

[HarVeeGee]

If you look around at what people are saying, the prevailing sentiment is that AOB still having the job is more of a sign of an inept/basket case admin. "A better organisation would have cut AOB loose long ago" would be the take of maybe 90% of fans of other teams, in the media, and of the rugby league community more broadly.

We keep hearing about the supposed $2 million payout. Anasta was on a podcast the other day joking about how incompetent he thinks AOB is (side note: May have had an impact on missing the Pezet signing), cracking jokes about Wests not paying the $2 million is just due to being cheap. Not really wanting to win.

Anasta manages Jesse Southwell too now by the by, by far the most important female player at the club going forward. So that's fine.

 

[Dr Dr Gimedanews]

Caves actually rot from the head down after they collapse, little known fact.

Collapse is often imminent when a bloated state reaches a point of diminishing returns. Much like when government employees fail to provide commensurate value to tax payers.

Bit like managing a cap - A more well known fact.

 

[Mr_Knightside]

IF? I think that's already a reality. With an apparent lack of 3rd party deals the club is up against it. Surely Wests have some business connections?

The main conduit to success is development. I keep hearing about these juniors. Much like labor pains, I'm over it - I just wanna see the baby. Wests have had the club for the better part of a decade, and no baby.

Basket case rep would be solidified by sacking the coach and continuing the merry-go-round.

I felt the same way that you do about not constantly sacking coaches but surely right now we’re trying to pick the best out of two bad outcomes and right now I think AOB being at the helm is doing more harm to the club’s reputation than if we sacked him and looked for a new coach. At least looking for a new coach shows that the club recognises the need for change rather than accepting mediocrity which is what AOB has been bringing us.

 

[Dr Dr Gimedanews]

I felt the same way that you do about not constantly sacking coaches but surely right now we’re trying to pick the best out of two bad outcomes and right now I think AOB being at the helm is doing more harm to the club’s reputation than if we sacked him and looked for a new coach. At least looking for a new coach shows that the club recognises the need for change rather than accepting mediocrity which is what AOB has been bringing us.

I do understand and to a degree agree with you. .....but.....please hear me out.

A coach, as with any leader, must secure the team's commitment to the program, and as with any team or group, they need to see tangible progress and advancements within a reasonable timeframe or faith begins to wane.

What we're seeing now is that critical juncture.

Without real change to the clubs management culture replacing the coach will do nothing meaningful - merely a rinse and repeat.

I'm hopeful the recent announcement that Gardner will step aside is due to the fact he recognizes micro managing a NRL club is out of his depth of expertise.

Compare Wests Group to Panthers, the emergence of the Dogs from wooden spooners. Raiders are probably a better comparison, regional team, few if any 3rd party deals, but building a roster for the future. Wests Group have squandered the natural resources of an abundant junior nursery, failed to identify and develop talent, failed to recruit with adequate due diligence, and capitalize on a generational talent in Ponga. With little to nothing to show other than an average club - the better part of a decade in. Atrocious.

What good career coach would risk all on that circus? I'd sit it out and bide my time to join a winning management team with clear goals, decisive performance, and sound culture.

If I'm an agent or player manager I'm advising any future super star to steer clear, the money isn't worth it.

 

[HarVeeGee]

Wests Group haven't "squandered the natural resources of an abundant junior nursery". That's an inherited problem. The acquisition of the Knights was in November 2017, and the club they walked into had maybe the most chronically underfunded and poorly managed development program in the NRL. It had gotten so bad that for years, what should be affiliate clubs in Hunter Junior Rugby League etc had been actively funnelling their most talented kids away from the Newcastle Knights. You can't just flip a switch on that. "Hey, we're good now, trust me."

The announcement in what I think was this time last year of the "Memorandum of Understanding" with Hunter JRL, if your reaction to that was "why does this need to exist? It's the junior footy association of the local region, of course it's linked with the Knights!" well... no it wasn't. Local clubs absolutely despised the Knights. It has taken way, way more work behind the scenes, as well as a lot more investment, and very possibly a lot more "investment" of the kind the Panthers engaged in to get their pathways humming (the same kind you might make to make friends with a powerful politician or official, if you get me), to begin to repair these relationships.

Leaving that aside, the calibre of prospect coming through since Wests have taken ever, eg Sharpe who would have been 12 at the time, are to my eyes clearly better than the talent under the previous regimes. They've held onto him in the face of the concerted poaching efforts of the Roosters among others, the Dogs have been after Connor Votano, the Storm after the younger Votano, Cody Hopwood had half the teams in the comp after him, etc etc etc. This wasn't happening before. I would give you an ironclad guarantee that before Wests took over, we would have lost most if not all of them.

Next step is trying to partner with the Awabakal Group too, which has a partnership with the Wests Tigers instead FFS.

The recruitment for the NRL side has been very bad though, no argument there. No club has made fewer decisions with potential benefits 3-5 years down the line in mind. Always trying to turn 7th this year into 6th next year, instead of maybe accepting a few years of finishing 9th-13th in exchange for multiple top four finishes.

 

[Apey]

Anasta manages Jesse Southwell too now by the by, by far the most important female player at the club going forward. So that's fine.

Oh Jesse what are you doing. Better than Moses I guess.

 

[Dr Dr Gimedanews]

Wests Group haven't "squandered the natural resources of an abundant junior nursery". That's an inherited problem. The acquisition of the Knights was in November 2017, and the club they walked into had maybe the most chronically underfunded and poorly managed development program in the NRL. It had gotten so bad that for years, what should be affiliate clubs in Hunter Junior Rugby League etc had been actively funnelling their most talented kids away from the Newcastle Knights. You can't just flip a switch on that. "Hey, we're good now, trust me."

The announcement in what I think was this time last year of the "Memorandum of Understanding" with Hunter JRL, if your reaction to that was "why does this need to exist? It's the junior footy association of the local region, of course it's linked with the Knights!" well... no it wasn't. Local clubs absolutely despised the Knights. It has taken way, way more work behind the scenes, as well as a lot more investment, and very possibly a lot more "investment" of the kind the Panthers engaged in to get their pathways humming (the same kind you might make to make friends with a powerful politician or official, if you get me), to begin to repair these relationships.

Leaving that aside, the calibre of prospect coming through since Wests have taken ever, eg Sharpe who would have been 12 at the time, are to my eyes clearly better than the talent under the previous regimes. They've held onto him in the face of the concerted poaching efforts of the Roosters among others, the Dogs have been after Connor Votano, the Storm after the younger Votano, Cody Hopwood had half the teams in the comp after him, etc etc etc. This wasn't happening before. I would give you an ironclad guarantee that before Wests took over, we would have lost most if not all of them.

Next step is trying to partner with the Awabakal Group too, which has a partnership with the Wests Tigers instead FFS.

The recruitment for the NRL side has been very bad though, no argument there. No club has made fewer decisions with potential benefits 3-5 years down the line in mind. Always trying to turn 7th this year into 6th next year, instead of maybe accepting a few years of finishing 9th-13th in exchange for multiple top four finishes.

Firstly having any resource is not an "inherited problem" - Jeez what a mind set you have. Secondly, a resource that's under utilized or under funded is still a resource, and something that many a business would only dream of.

A good business having resources at their disposal doesn't operate nearly a decade without results, and no amount of excuses you can imagine will alter those facts. It appears commentators like Braith Anasta know that also, and it's simply embarrassing.

 

[HarVeeGee]

Mate. You're just dropping buzzwords and lingo. I don't think you have a strong grounding in the facts.

Most of the junior/pathways coaches at the Knights in the 00's/10's until Tinkler took over were unpaid volunteers. There were no resources. What little investment there was was just in the senior squads.

Tinkler reinvested money in junior development but via this specific "high performance" program dreamed up by Graham Murray, basically the young teenagers the club liked the most at that time got in and various kids got rejected, including, famously, a fat Indigenous kid called Latrell Mitchell. Many of the names from that program will be familiar to you: Lamb, Cogger, Jones, Hoy, Starling, Crossland, Madden, Musgrove, Pezet. Getting a spot in that program was way more likely if you had a dad with the right connection, eg, one who was a former first grader, or best mates with a former Immortal. Before the Knights had a rep for being broke, having a nepotism problem, being incompetently run (obviously no resources doesn't help); then when some money comes in, it's invested in basically the exact opposite way to how Penrith did it - casting as wide a net as possible, training up big squads as equals and not picking a handful of "elite" 14 year olds to concentrate on - and the nepotism, the arrogance, the high handed treatment of potential local affiliates, only got worse.

And then Tinkler turned out to be a paper millionaire and once again the club is completely broke, no resources, bailed out by the NRL, and essentially purchased as a distressed asset by Wests.

It's not an "excuse" to point out that this is a terrible situation to inherit. It's just the reality. This great resource you speak of just wasn't there anymore, don't you get it?

The predecessors of the Hunter JRLA (Newcastle + Maitland & District JRLAs, which merged in 2021 from memory) just did not have the kind of relationship with the Knights that clubs in the catchments of our rivals do. That's how it ends up the case that constantly, way more often than they should have, promising kids from junior clubs in Maitland, Newcastle, etc progressed into the Roosters Harold Matts program, or Manly, or Bulldogs - whereas any promising kid from Redfern playing junior footy is about a 100% chance of joining the Rabbitohs system at that age. And then the kids we actually did keep just were not being as effectively coached as they would be elsewhere, due to the program being under-resourced and relying heavily on unpaid volunteers, which just was not the case elsewhere.

In addition Sydney clubs had basically totally "colonised" traditional Knights areas like the mid north coast, northern central coast, etc. That's our equivalent of what areas like the Blue Mountains, Dubbo etc are for the Panthers. The Panthers rules over those regions with an iron fist. Our equivalent areas are an absolute mess of affiliations with Sydney clubs - I don't know if it can ever be untangled.

This is the problem Wests inherited. If you were going to ding them for anything, I would say they were probably a bit slow to realise the scale of the problem (they are slow on a lot of things), but realise they have, and move they have (COVID of course had a bit of a derailing impact, not great timing for us).

Phil Gould took over as GM of the Panthers in 2011. They weren't in anything like as bad a state as we were. But he didn't just snap his fingers and say "okay now we're an elite development club, look at how many kids play footy out here". He pretty explicitly talked about "five year plans" and was, if you'll remember, pretty widely mocked for how long it took the current junior conveyor belt to really get going. Five years became six, seven, eight, almost a decade, in fact. But get going it did.

Now. Wests Group are not putting as much money into pathways as the Panthers did. But the investment now is significant and it's higher than most clubs in the NRL. Your idol Peter O'Sullivan has stated that he thinks the pathways are in a much better spot than he thought from the outside looking in (again - everyone outside the Knights has long understood the Knights to be a bad development club with significant issues with pathways - Wests can't click their fingers and fix that the moment they arrive, and you only develop a reputation as a development club long after the work to make yourself one is put in). We are seeing promising green shoots re: some of the kids coming through, eg Sharpe is in my opinion our best prospect since, well, Joey, or Bradman if you want to argue the point. And the talent in Matts, Ball atm looks a lot better than what had been there in previous years. Whether the steps being taken are enough? We won't know for sure for 3-5 years, most likely. But they have invested more money and energy in it than anyone we've had at the helm previously. That's just a fact.

It's not a 1:1 thing, but NRLW pathways at all clubs have basically started as a blank slate, and Wests have done as good a job as anyone on that side of the program, so that's at least promising.

Also what Braith was laughing at Wests about was for not firing AOB despite clearly being able to afford the payout, which he thinks makes the club look cheap. But you think we should keep AOB, right? So what's your point there?

 

[HarVeeGee]

And in terms of operating for a long period without results... AOB is one of the longest tenured coaches right now. He's gotten a bloody good go at it. One thing the Knights absolutely do not have a reputation for is running through coaches like used underwear. Guys get a fair bit of leeway. For this reason, I reckon the job will actually be pretty enticing to a few options we may have. Nathan Brown had about as bad a record as you can have as a head coach, told his players when he arrived that losing was acceptable... and still got four years.

There's real chat that Brad Arthur might take the Titans job FFS. An NRL head coaching gig is not hard to fill.

 

[Yosh]

There is no doubt we are much better shape compared to 8 year ago. Wests also guided us through the Covid period as well.

It sux we are going to get the spoon again but that's more on AOB than Wests. If AOB stays and doesn't get fired, that's definitely on Wests.

 

[macavity]

Mate. You're just dropping buzzwords and lingo. I don't think you have a strong grounding in the facts.

Most of the junior/pathways coaches at the Knights in the 00's/10's until Tinkler took over were unpaid volunteers. There were no resources. What little investment there was was just in the senior squads.

Tinkler reinvested money in junior development but via this specific "high performance" program dreamed up by Graham Murray, basically the young teenagers the club liked the most at that time got in and various kids got rejected, including, famously, a fat Indigenous kid called Latrell Mitchell. Many of the names from that program will be familiar to you: Lamb, Cogger, Jones, Hoy, Starling, Crossland, Madden, Musgrove, Pezet. Getting a spot in that program was way more likely if you had a dad with the right connection, eg, one who was a former first grader, or best mates with a former Immortal. Before the Knights had a rep for being broke, having a nepotism problem, being incompetently run (obviously no resources doesn't help); then when some money comes in, it's invested in basically the exact opposite way to how Penrith did it - casting as wide a net as possible, training up big squads as equals and not picking a handful of "elite" 14 year olds to concentrate on - and the nepotism, the arrogance, the high handed treatment of potential local affiliates, only got worse.

And then Tinkler turned out to be a paper millionaire and once again the club is completely broke, no resources, bailed out by the NRL, and essentially purchased as a distressed asset by Wests.

It's not an "excuse" to point out that this is a terrible situation to inherit. It's just the reality. This great resource you speak of just wasn't there anymore, don't you get it?

The predecessors of the Hunter JRLA (Newcastle + Maitland & District JRLAs, which merged in 2021 from memory) just did not have the kind of relationship with the Knights that clubs in the catchments of our rivals do. That's how it ends up the case that constantly, way more often than they should have, promising kids from junior clubs in Maitland, Newcastle, etc progressed into the Roosters Harold Matts program, or Manly, or Bulldogs - whereas any promising kid from Redfern playing junior footy is about a 100% chance of joining the Rabbitohs system at that age. And then the kids we actually did keep just were not being as effectively coached as they would be elsewhere, due to the program being under-resourced and relying heavily on unpaid volunteers, which just was not the case elsewhere.

In addition Sydney clubs had basically totally "colonised" traditional Knights areas like the mid north coast, northern central coast, etc. That's our equivalent of what areas like the Blue Mountains, Dubbo etc are for the Panthers. The Panthers rules over those regions with an iron fist. Our equivalent areas are an absolute mess of affiliations with Sydney clubs - I don't know if it can ever be untangled.

This is the problem Wests inherited. If you were going to ding them for anything, I would say they were probably a bit slow to realise the scale of the problem (they are slow on a lot of things), but realise they have, and move they have (COVID of course had a bit of a derailing impact, not great timing for us).

Phil Gould took over as GM of the Panthers in 2011. They weren't in anything like as bad a state as we were. But he didn't just snap his fingers and say "okay now we're an elite development club, look at how many kids play footy out here". He pretty explicitly talked about "five year plans" and was, if you'll remember, pretty widely mocked for how long it took the current junior conveyor belt to really get going. Five years became six, seven, eight, almost a decade, in fact. But get going it did.

Now. Wests Group are not putting as much money into pathways as the Panthers did. But the investment now is significant and it's higher than most clubs in the NRL. Your idol Peter O'Sullivan has stated that he thinks the pathways are in a much better spot than he thought from the outside looking in (again - everyone outside the Knights has long understood the Knights to be a bad development club with significant issues with pathways - Wests can't click their fingers and fix that the moment they arrive, and you only develop a reputation as a development club long after the work to make yourself one is put in). We are seeing promising green shoots re: some of the kids coming through, eg Sharpe is in my opinion our best prospect since, well, Joey, or Bradman if you want to argue the point. And the talent in Matts, Ball atm looks a lot better than what had been there in previous years. Whether the steps being taken are enough? We won't know for sure for 3-5 years, most likely. But they have invested more money and energy in it than anyone we've had at the helm previously. That's just a fact.

It's not a 1:1 thing, but NRLW pathways at all clubs have basically started as a blank slate, and Wests have done as good a job as anyone on that side of the program, so that's at least promising.

Also what Braith was laughing at Wests about was for not firing AOB despite clearly being able to afford the payout, which he thinks makes the club look cheap. But you think we should keep AOB, right? So what's your point there?

Great post.

We need to get our areas back, its non-negotiable. And if we need to grease palms and piss people off to do it, then thats what we do.

Still think we need to invest in physical infrastructure - Wests should be buying licensed clubs everywhere they can within a 250km radius and building strategically placed Academies - Central Coast, Upper Hunter, Taree, Port Macquarie, Coffs, Tamworth, Armidale. Giving kids opportunities while letting them stay at home gives us the best possible chance to identify and develop. Building them the facilities to do that embeds us in those communities.

 

[Dr Dr Gimedanews]

Mate. You're just dropping buzzwords and lingo. I don't think you have a strong grounding in the facts.

being mediocre is a fact, no buzzwords or lingo required - just a fact. The Knights are no more than average, in the better part of a decade.

Phil Gould took over as GM of the Panthers in 2011. They weren't in anything like as bad a state as we were. But he didn't just snap his fingers and say "okay now we're an elite development club, look at how many kids play footy out here". He pretty explicitly talked about "five year plans" and was, if you'll remember, pretty widely mocked for how long it took the current junior conveyor belt to really get going. Five years became six, seven, eight, almost a decade, in fact. But get going it did.

again you read too much into media ( Buzz Slothfield - Murdoch gibber ) labelled it a 5 year plan. Please provide a direct quote from Gould to this "5 year plan" - you won't find one. Why ? because that statement is just dumb.

Gould took over in 2011 ('days from insolvency" - with an emergency loan from Packer saving the club) to a GF loss to Storm 2020. https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/th...ut-concerned-for-the-nrl-20170808-gxrktu.html
So, what about Phil Gould's five-year plan at the Panthers? "There has never been a five-year plan. That's media gibberish," - Phil Gould

It doesn't take nearly a decade to turn around a club. Unless it's ineptitude at management level. It is simply unacceptable. That's why they're a laughing stock.

Make all the excuses you like till ya black and blue in the face. Can't argue facts - the Knights have gone from Wooden Spooners to mid table battlers (at best) under the management of Wests Group - Excuses are for losers.

 

[HarVeeGee]

Haha we do love to pick and choose which media we read too much into, don't we.

Gus is the master of bullshit. The phrase "five year plan" came into vogue because he said it would take five years to turn the club around when he was pitching himself for the director of football job. He never pushed back on the idea of a five year timeframe, in the media, in his TV appearances, never once, he always maintained things were on track for that timeframe, until *after* the five years elapsed. That's when it became media nonsense which he never said.

What's funny about what you're saying, "it doesn't take nearly a decade to turn around a club", is that if you look at where Penrith was the same amount of time into the Gus regime as the Knights are into the Wests regime now: They were in 14th, 5 wins 8 losses, with one of the worst attacks in the comp, and having a 'down' year after making finals 4 times in the preceding five seasons. Sounds a bit familiar.

Not suggesting we're about to go on a Penrith-like run, but it literally did take almost a decade to turn around the Panthers from also-rans to elite.

Make all the excuses you like till ya black and blue in the face. Can't argue facts - the Knights have gone from Wooden Spooners to mid table battlers (at best) under the management of Wests Group - Excuses are for losers.

I didn't make excuses. I'm not offering some blanket endorsement of Wests Group. I was pushing back on one specific point, "squandered resources of a junior nursery". There is a big difference between Penrith - sitting on what was a massive resource that no one was tapping in any significant way - to Newcastle - sitting on what is widely known to be a good resource, which had been alienated by the previous admins at the club for years and years, partially due to circumstances beyond their control, and is now a very contested resource which is not easy to wrest back. That's all. It was a pre-squandered resource that they're trying to fix. They're probably not doing enough, but there's no reasonable prospect of something better coming along unfortunately. I would have thought this was a relatively simple point, but apparently not.

You do seem to need to operate in some weird binary world though don't you. Wests Group are a totally inept organisation who are categorically unable to make good decisions, except appointing AOB and keeping him long after the entire rugby league world thinks he's a joke, because he's working miracles with a roster which is terrible for reasons which are entirely the fault of Wests Group and nothing to do with the head coach - specifically, the head coach who I've heard explicitly state that he brought in Adam Elliott, your most hated player, as a "captain's pick". Also bringing in Peter O'Sullivan is a great move from the across the board shit organisation which is to blame for everything which goes wrong at the club, yeah? Is there any part of the club which isn't either unimpeachably brilliant or a complete failure? The girls in the merch shop maybe? Are they merely doing an okay job?

 

[HarVeeGee]

Great post.

We need to get our areas back, its non-negotiable. And if we need to grease palms and piss people off to do it, then thats what we do.

Still think we need to invest in physical infrastructure - Wests should be buying licensed clubs everywhere they can within a 250km radius and building strategically placed Academies - Central Coast, Upper Hunter, Taree, Port Macquarie, Coffs, Tamworth, Armidale. Giving kids opportunities while letting them stay at home gives us the best possible chance to identify and develop. Building them the facilities to do that embeds us in those communities.

Absolutely, if the resources are there to do it, that's where they should go.

Affiliate/scholarship programs with key schools feels like something which should be explored too. I believe Penrith have done a lot in that area, to counter that competitive advantage the south east queensland region has with their high schools which basically do a lot of player development work for them like Keebra Park and Palm Beach Currumbin.

Basically if you want a competitive advantage in this sport, you need to ask the question "What would I do if I was allowed to cheat?"

Roosters: A web of millionaires surrounding the club giving borderline free accommodation to players who sign for the club, free financial advice, investment opportunities, etc. If the club didn't specifically arrange it they're not cheating the cap!

Panthers: Investing hard enough in every aspect of bringing players into the club which *doesn't* go on the salary cap to activate a continuous talent pipeline which won them four comps despite annual raids on their top 30 by every club they compete with.

We've got a much better chance at option 2.

 

[Knight Tales]

Next Knights coach hiding in plain sight; why Galvin move makes no sense — McKinnon

Next Knights coach hiding in plain sight; why Galvin move makes no sense — McKinnon

www.foxsports.com.au

If he coaches like he played then absolutely this is worth a big consideration.interesting it comes from McKinnon who would still have strong links to this place.

 

[Mr_Knightside]

Honestly I wouldn’t be totally against it because I’m sure he’d have the boys wanting to run through walls for him. I’d be a little concerned that he hasn’t got a bit more coaching experience apart from SG ball though.

 

[Mr_Knightside]

Of the guys McKinnon mentioned I’d actually be more interested in Matt King at this stage. He seems pretty sharp and he’s been an assistant coach at NRL level for a little while now.

Although I’d still probably look at John Morris given he’s got NRL coaching experience and imo he got a pretty underwhelming sharks roster to over-perform for the couple of years he was in charge there.

 

[Apey]

Cordner is a better candidate for CTE than coach. Dude's never been a great speaker anyway.

 

[HarVeeGee]

Of the guys McKinnon mentioned I’d actually be more interested in Matt King at this stage. He seems pretty sharp and he’s been an assistant coach at NRL level for a little while now.

Although I’d still probably look at John Morris given he’s got NRL coaching experience and imo he got a pretty underwhelming sharks roster to over-perform for the couple of years he was in charge there.

I'd go Brad Arthur but there seems to be a likelihood that this is a non-starter - he'd basically be taking his mate's job, and I've heard he's trepidatious about coaching his own son after the gross & unfair abuse Jake Arthur copped for being a nepo baby from Eels fans (Jake is dominating NSW Cup and is competent if unspectacular when he subs in in first grade, he's no star but there's no question he's earned every NRL jersey he's gotten).

In which case yeah, Morris. Pretty much the only guy on that assistant carousel who has actually had an extended run as a first grade coach and acquitted himself well. Transitioned out of an old, washed team, blooding heaps of the players who came through their system & kept the team competitive over that period, and then copped the sack before he got a real chance to show what he could do with the players whose development as week to week NRL players he stewarded. The Knights are going to need to make a similar sort of transition.

Only real worry with Morris' record is that he's sort of an inverse-AOB. They could always find ways to score points even when his marquee player at that time (Shaun Johnson) and experienced halfback in Chad Townsend were both out, and they were relying on some combination of Connor Tracey and a very young Braydon Trindall as their halves. But they had issues with defensive resilience, second efforts. Hard to say how much of that is coaching and how much is personnel (eg having to rely on Aaron Woods to play A LOT of minutes pretty much every game). You'd just have to hope that the ability to tough it out in defence for long periods is something a bit more baked into the club now (and try to find the right defensive assistant).

But when he got fired a lot of his playing group clearly was not happy with it & I've heard him get strong wraps from halves who developed while he was there, how much he helped improve their game. I think that lines up with a clear improvement area we'll have next year.