Thanks for the memories but enough is enough.
Piss poor roster and player management coupled in with very shit tactics, this has been coming since 2017 IMO. That GF plastered over all the cracks in the club unfortunately and gave him unwarranted ammo to hold the club to ransom. The way his contract negotiations dragged on in 2018 were also a tell tale sign for mine he thought he was bigger than the club itself.
He held onto older players for far too long, I said it earlier but Matt Scott should have been pulled aside when he did his knee in rd2 2017 and told ‘we think you’re time is up, if you want to play again then it will be for someone else, retire and you have a job at the club for life’. He is the type of guy that would excel at either corporate hosting and/or forward coaching. His softly spoken nature goes over well in a more conservative part of the world, business would clamber over having host in their boxes at the new stadium. He resonates well with the common man up there because of his rural background and upbringing.
Throw in roster management and holding onto players like Gavin Cooper, Justin O’neill, Hampton, Granville, Hess. All have turned into absolute plodders and we have on the books for more years to come (Cooper excluded). There is no way John Asiata or Francis Molo should be leaving but it seems they are. Those 2 players alone should be priorities to sign. This obsession with letting Lolo wear the 13 and masquerade as a ‘lock’ is f**king infuriating. He is a front rower end of story. Wear the 13 for f**ks sake, fine, but let Asiata be the starting ball playing lock he is meant to be and watch us improve out of sight. The forwards we have are so f**king vanilla excluding Lolo, teams don’t need to be on alert for a cheeky offload because we play so much ‘money ball’ safe shit. If you are going to do that, you will want your forwards to at least have some footwork in their game to put a smidge of doubt into the opposition.
His inconsistent approach to blooding juniors was astounding. The first 3 years he seemed very willing to let the youth come in, he blooded Ponga on the wing in a semi in vs Brisbane for f**ks sake. Hess was let play at 19 against a monster NZ forward pack. But then he started to show a massive reluctance to let the youth come through instead relying on the old heads to get it done. They did that for a while but fast forward to 2018, it was pretty clear from about rd3 onwards he wasn’t prepared to change and we have been quite f**king poor ever since. Constantly playing his Wynumn boy Granville is a prime example, halfway through 2018 it is clear he is well below the standards required but he still persisted playing him. Oh and then he lets him extend this sub par 9 for another 3 years. Thanks merkin.
I hate to see anyone lose their job, when he first got to NQ his attitude of ‘stop the excuses, make you own destiny, don’t let the refs do it for you’ was refreshing. I’ve been a cowboys fan since day one, but we have been an excuse riddled club since the start, always looking for the easy way out and happy to pass blame to a ref blunder instead of manning up and admitting it was our fault. The shit old school NQ footy attitude crept in to Greenys game early 2018, for mine this should have been the sign to f**k him off and get someone else in, his bleating in the post match pressers was embarrassing and a complete 180 from his attitude at the start of his tenure up there. I get it would have been hard moving him on seeing as though he had just taken an injury riddled side to the GF but sometimes you need to make these hard decisions.
He will always be the first premiership coach of NQ but he inherited a decent set up thanks to Neil Henry and Graham Murray (RIP). Muzz will always be the best coach we had all things considered. He got JT and Matt Scott to the club, inherited a complete f**k fight and turned us into a force. He left under shit circumstances that I won’t go into on here, but we are back to 2002 when he took over bar a couple of ‘name‘ players we currently have.
It will take the next coach 2 more season to get us out of this mess, the complete spuds we have on our books for at least one more season will take a while to get over.
It’s a damn shame it ended like this, he even had me fooled at the start and I was more than man enough to eat humble shit pie post 2015 as I thought he was the wrong choice when he was announced and was against it but he proved the doubters wrong that year. But 2015 is a long time ago now and a lot of water has passed under that bridge.
What sort of club hires a guy to coach that as a player, was a complete over paid fraud in his time there and sued the ass off the same said club when fired?
A complete shit one does.
(apologies on the length of this post)
