This is the last weekend I’m letting the Warriors ruin.
After a catastrophic collapse at the hands of the Panthers last week, the Warriors showed the pride they had in their jerseys by serving up another gutless performance against the Dragons.
After the match the players offered the same empty explanations, as though the game were a stage play and they had done a great job performing their part as "17 Blokes Impersonating a Professional League Team”.
True champions don’t accept routine thrashings as simply par for the course. Players like Cam Smith and Paul Gallen look mortally wounded by every loss. After a loss most of the Warriors look like they are more concerned about checking their Tinder account than figuring out why they were humiliated.
The club has no standards. Players aren’t dropped after terrible performances, contracts aren’t ripped up. Mediocrity is accepted and expected.
Simon Mannering is the one Warrior who delivers a consistently full-hearted effort and in his absence the previous two weeks the team has completely disintegrated, despite sporting a bevy of rep stars and extremely experienced NRL players.
Coach Stephen Kearney is performing exactly in line with his career statistics – he’s a 26 per cent career-winning coach with a nice line in bland platitudes and very little idea of how to fashion a winning NRL side. He continues to spout a second-hand aphorism (“Trust the Process”) that originated with the long since fired general manager of the historical inept Philadelphia 76ers, without actually enunciating what this process might be or how quickly we can expect it to have an impact.
This might have been acceptable if the Warriors had actually identified a process other than "keep collecting pay cheques and hope the fans don’t riot". Kearney would do well to ask Sam Hinkie how "Trusting the Process" worked out for him.
It seems like Kearney was given the job because he was simply willing to confirm management’s misapprehensions about the quality of their operation. In reality, the Warriors desperately need someone who is going to tell them the truth - regardless of how brutal it might be. Kearney is just a yes man content to collect a pay cheque for a year or two before he is found out and the club moves on to the next incompetent.
Worse still, his attempts to fashion them into a third-rate Melbourne Storm has robbed the club of anything resembling its trademark style and flair - apparently outlawing offloads and ad lib football in favour of offering up a joyless style of play better suited to a team of automatons. Losing is one thing, but they aren’t even playing like the Warriors when they lose. When a team sporting Shaun Johnson, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and a host of young backline talent is this dull something is seriously wrong.
The players have a lot to answer for. Johnson is set to be a million-dollar player next season but he still looks clueless on fifth tackle. Issac Luke should be one of the team’s leaders but his effort and performance varies so wildly from week to week, it’s safe to assume he’s counting down the days until he’s shipped off to the Super League.
A host of former NYC stars have failed to turn into consistent first grade performers, instead settling into a comfortable mediocrity. It is becoming obvious the club is seen as a soft option by Kiwis in the NRL, a place where they can come home, collect an outsized contract and skip the scrutiny and expectations they would find at a real NRL club.
Too many players are simply happy to be playing first grade and collecting first grade pay cheques. Players make big claims about effort and desire, but it’s obvious to anyone watching that this just lip service. Until they leave it all on the field and back up all these platitudes with performance, it’s impossible to believe anything they say.
Management is derelict in its duties and has no idea of what it takes to build a consistent winner in the NRL. This off season they signed a single player to a squad that had missed the finals five years in a row, adamant they had the talent to content on a routine basis in the NRL despite extensive evidence to the contrary.
Boss Jim Doyle’s recruitment policy seems to be signing anyone whose number he still had in his phone from his time in charge of the NZRL. Management is so addled they didn’t even fire the coach responsible for poor performance – apparently failure is tolerated if you change its job description. A cynical person might suggest the only reason Andrew McFadden was kept around was so they didn’t have to pay him any money they still owed him.
Rugby league fans are generally working class folk and these are the people that fill Mt Smart week after week, regardless. Truck drivers and cleaners, labourers and tradies. People who work tough jobs for not a lot of money. Going to a rugby league game is one of their few luxuries in life. These are families who save for months just to be able to afford to take their kids to a game. They are Mums and Dads who work extra shifts just so they can buy their kid a Warriors jersey at Christmas. The players seem to have no concept of how much the club means to these people and their continued ineptitude and lack of effort is an insult to the sacrifices made by their fans.
These people deserve a winner, but they are continually served up half-hearted failure by a bunch of overpaid players who care more about looking good on Snapchat than doing the hard yards to craft a champion.
At the end of the day, the only people with the power to change the club are the fans. If we continue to watch the games, buy the multitude of alternate jerseys and click on stories about the team, nothing will change. We only have ourselves to blame because we’ve devoted ourselves to a club that is at best indifferent and at worst callous to the affection and faith we have placed in it.
We deserve better, but we won’t get it until we start demanding it.
The Warriors should be treated as an irrelevancy until they display the kind of commitment to consistent performance that the fans' devotion deserves. Until we take matters into our own hands and let the club know that their performance is unacceptable, we will continue be served up mediocrity and underachievement – if we aren’t prepared to do anything about it then it’s all we deserve.
In professional sports you can either sell success or hope. It’s been a long while since the Warriors have been able to sell anything resembling success and any pretensions of selling hope are rapidly evaporating – when the bills come due and they haven’t got the support of their hard-working fans to rely on, then maybe the club will realise they need to earn their fans' devotion rather than taking it for granted.
- Stuff Nation
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff-nation/92812958/open-letter-to-my-fellow-warriors-fans
