Coaches turn to players to avoid bad boy blues
NATHAN BROWN faces a challenge as daunting as keeping the Dragons in the play-offs should serial bad boy Todd Carney join him at Huddersfield, as expected, next season.
Carney leaves the Raiders with 31 breaches of discipline against him, yet only those incidents involving police charges have been made public. Sharks lock Greg Bird, alleged to have struck his girlfriend in the face with a glass, has a similarly bad rap sheet, raising the question how many discipline breaches at NRL clubs go unreported and unpunished.
If action is taken against the highly talented only when a case becomes public, they are effectively told: "It's only a problem if it gets out." Yet at some clubs the reverse applies: breaches are punished and never reported.
When the Storm went to London for two days following their World Club Challenge game against Leeds in February, a curfew was imposed. One player was late back to the team hotel on the final night. The leadership group voted to send him home.
But this was impossible: the earliest flight was the one on which the Storm were booked. Their solution was to send the offender to Melbourne economy class, alone and on the outer, while his teammates took their assigned seats in business class.
Clubs with powerful leadership groups have less disciplinary problems than those where a coach is entrusted with the responsibility.
In the AFL, top-of-the-table Geelong have the most potent senior player group and a reduced incidence of anti-social behaviour, while Collingwood, with coach Mick Malthouse perceived to be a control freak, have serial offenders.
Leadership groups can fill the void left by the now defunct reserve grade. Reserve grade teams in both NRL and AFL consisted of old players on the way down and young players on the way up. In some ways, they were the conscience of the club. They cast a keen eye on injustices and inconsistencies with selection and training performance, particularly if an undeserving first-grade player was depriving them of a place in the top team.
Any first-grade coach who ignored their mutinous mutterings was inviting trouble. Earlier this year, when Canberra coach Neil Henry announced he would leave the club at the end of the season to coach the Cowboys, despite assuring his players he would stay, I was horrified and said so in the Herald.
After all, Carney had renewed his contract on the assurance Henry would see out the third year of this Raiders' contract.
Henry phoned me to protest, explaining he had subsequently discovered a get-out clause in his contract which allowed both coach and club to give eight weeks' notice of termination. While I accepted this, it was still something I couldn't endorse and assumed his position would soon become untenable in Canberra.
I was wrong.
The Raiders went on a win-loss cycle for a month but have subsequently put themselves in a position to finish sixth. Their winning run began with a round 18 victory against the Dragons at WIN Stadium, then came a heavy defeat over the then in-form Roosters at home, after which Carney went on his rampaging tour of Canberra nightspots.
Canberra police were called to five incidents that evening and Carney was involved in four, yet only the altercation where he urinated on a fellow drinker was made public. On the eve of their next match, the Raiders' board stood Carney down and the playing group endorsed the decision with a thumping of the Titans.
The Raiders' leadership group, led by the inspirational Alan Tongue, presented Carney with a five-point plan of rehabilitation, including an alcohol ban. Carney refused and since his banishment from the club, the Raiders have won four games and lost two.
Most young coaches are guilty of 180-degree turns, responding to a run of losses with a "let's get on the drink" solution. Yet Henry has behaved liked a Wayne Bennett or Brian Smith, refusing to be distracted from his course, despite frustrations and injuries which would cause a monk to chew on a church pew.
Asked if he was aware of Carney's rap sheet, Henry said: "I didn't know about the number. He certainly had a file before I got here." Yet, even now, he has sympathy for Carney, while conceding the leadership group was "pretty resilient".
"The decision they made on Todd was to say, 'You've got a problem with alcohol and you're not in the team until you get over the problem'."
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