BUT plenty of players do.
Indeed they do, but those aren't the players that cause problems in a club. They're also the players most likely to have a healthy respect for authority
just because.
For those players I doubt they have any particular respect for Smith, but rather, they respect his job as coach of the club.
More respect him than disrespect him I would imagine.
Yeah maybe. But it only takes a few bad apples, and especially, a few very influential bad apples, to ruin all that hard work and club unity.
You don't coach in the top grade for as long as he has if you don't have respect.
Once again true, but you can't look past the two far-too-big coincidences of:
a. Never won a premiership in all those years of coaching first grade, and
b. The overwhelming anti-Smith sentiment amongst so many players over the years.
I believe these two factors are linked. It seems Brian Smith has never been able to build a team around the kinds of players required to win a premiership - dominant personalities, i.e. leaders.
He has never managed to sign one of these players from another club. He might have arrived at clubs that had them, or even developed them from youngsters, but they have always wanted to get away from him, even if it meant sitting out entire seasons of their first grade careers.
Those who don't respect him, I would suspect, are those who can't hack the pace...
Tallis and Lyon, I'm sure, aren't the only ones who would disagree.
