These coaches are facing the darkness on the edge of town
Coaching in the NRL is brutal. You are what your record says you are, and these coaches are in trouble.
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“Down here there’s just winners and losers
And don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line”
– Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City
Bruce Springsteen may as well have been writing about coaching in the NRL when he penned
Atlantic City in 1982, instead of exploring organised crime and the fates of the top dogs and small-time hoodlums.
In the NRL, there are only winners and losers. And those caught on the wrong side of that line are in desperate times.
Halfway through the season, let’s tally them up.
Des Hasler at the Titans is done. He won’t survive past season’s end. Don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise. We can put that number in the frame and move on.
Up the highway from the Gold Coast, for Michael Maguire at the Broncos the situation is more complex.
For heaven’s sake the guy just got there, employed to fix a rotten ‘rock star’ culture which supposedly festered under former coach Kevvie Walters.
Walters found himself on the wrong side of the line less than a year after guiding the club, with approaching two decades of failure under its belt, to within a few minutes of winning the whole thing in 2023.
Maguire signed for three years, uprooted his family including teenage kids, bought a house a suburb away from the club’s Red Hill base and, according to some, trained them too hard in the Queensland sun and the shrinking violets all melted.
Oh they breed them tough in Queensland because, that’s right, they’re Queenslanders. What rot.
The Broncos’ biggest problem is not Maguire. It’s off the field and has been for a long time.
Consider this. Front office gobbledygook said there were no cultural issues at the club, but sacked Walters and brought in a hard nut who made the players put shirts back on at club headquarters to kill the rock star image. Then head office said again “what rock star image?`′
They also said Walters would be staying on at the club as some sort of ambassador because the Broncos loved him so much. It never happened.
It was a softener to appease fans.
Being a publicly listed company, there’s no one properly at the top who runs the place with an iron fist, like a Chair with true passion such as Nick Politis or a hired gun like Phil Gould.
Then there’s the club’s low-level middle managers who call and swear at journalists who write constructively about how the team, or a certain player, aren’t going that well as the losses rack up.
Who does the buck stop with? Shareholders? They’re the last consulted, if they’re consulted at all.
Strange joint the Broncos.
North of Sydney, there’s no way Adam O’Brien will make it, despite a win over the Dolphins on Saturday.
Unfortunately for him, bagging Newcastle fans will do him in in the end.
The consistently inconsistent form can’t be tolerated,
and to get angry at working-class supporters after a win with your chest all puffed out is poor.
At least he spiced things up for once. As a former long-serving NRL and Kangaroos coach said to him over a drink during Magic Round: “Your team plays like your press conferences - boring.”
Anthony Seibold is on the brink at Manly.
Once Daly Cherry Evans channelled Springsteen’s anthemic
Hungry Heart by saying he was going out for a drive and never coming back, the season was derailed.
Then there’s Tom “Turbo” Trbojevic looking like an Alpine perennially at the back of the Formula One grid rather than the purring Ferrari he is when his hamstrings fire.
With Turbo unwilling, or worse, unable, to shift from third gear through fourth and fifth and beyond, then he’s no good to them. Sadly.
Short on time to save himself, and short on patience with his bumbling team,
Seibold used the bye week to experiment with speed dating, conducting seven-minute interviews with each member of his squad.
How you crunch 15 rounds of sputtering form where black smoke has been spewing out of the exhaust into seven minutes is anyone’s guess.
Surely a few of them were told “sorry, but you’re not for me” and quickly shuffled out. Others may have been put into the “maybe” file.
It was a perilous strategy. No one likes to be told straight out what their faults are. It kind of wipes the self-esteem which was already vulnerable when they entered the speed dating scene.
Benji Marshall is battling way admirably after the game’s boom teenager Lachie Galvin publicly gave him the old ‘it’s not me, it’s you’ and bailed after a brief courtship.
Galvin is in the Born to Run category, deciding to get out while he’s young.
Marshall’s hanging on in the safe-for-now file but if
Jarome Luai ghosts him by activating his get-out clause it may be one break-up too many.
Todd Payten and the Cowboys are surely in marriage counselling. They’re trying to make it work but their love may be too cold.
To Shane Flanagan at the Dragons, who’s on the ultimate rebound in coaching, finding a new partner down the road at the Dragons after his Sharks relationship ended.
He’s quickly found kids can be a big problem in fledgling relationships.
With his son Kyle as his key playmaker, consistent form has to be found soon or his new suitor might just say “this is all too hard”.
Painful break-ups are coming. In the meantime, they’ll dance in the dark.
