Love Kearney or dislike him, I feel someone in the NRL forum made a very, very valid point regarding why it can take time to rebuild a club from the top down. Essentially, the crux of this person's argument was that to rebuild a club, you face two obstacles:
(1) changing the culture of the entire organisation;
and
(2) managing the salary cap.
Point number one is straightforward enough - changing a club's culture can take a week or a year (maybe even more). But it is a tough task.
The interesting point made was about managing the cap. In general terms, teams that struggle must usually either rely on junior talent to pull them through slumps, or attract new players to the club. Any new recruits, if they are serious about fixing the issues, need to be of a decent calibre - and this becomes the big problem.
A struggling club will almost always have to pay overs to attract the type of quality players that they deem most likely to help lift a club out of the bottom of the table. Successful players would rather get paid less and stay at a successful club than get paid a lot and play for a struggling club (generally speaking). And this tends to spiral out of control - you pay overs to attract one or two above average players (or even elite level talent, if you're lucky) and must spend the rest of your cap buying average or below average players as you have little cap space left. This continues for years until you can maintain a sustained period of success, whereby you can normally attract great players more easily and for less money.
I think it is a very tangible point, and it illustrates why it may take some time to fix the root of the problems with the club. I think it sucks that we keep struggling on the field, but I think we need a guy who is ready, willing and able to roll up his sleeves and do the dirty work (and, really - what could be "dirtier" than not giving club legends like Burt and Hindmarsh the chance to re-sign their contracts for one more year? It was a tough call, but Kearney made it) to get us back to the top again.
