It's long, but this is it (part one) without the pictures.
As the Western Suburbs coach of the century, Roy Masters is uniquely positioned to examine the problems that haunt the joint venture.
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Wests Tigers living in the past, looking at the future, but ignoring the present
As the Western Suburbs coach of the century, Roy Masters is uniquely positioned to examine the problems that trouble the joint venture.
By
Roy Masters
July 14, 2023
The problem with Wests Tigers is too much of the Scarlett O’Hara “I’ll think about it tomorrow” philosophy.
Most people on the Wests side of the joint-venture NRL club admit their future is at Campbelltown but despite Balmain having only one director on the eight-person board, the decision to move westward is persistently delayed, just as Scarlett vacillated in Margaret Mitchell’s iconic book
Gone With The Wind.
West Tigers’ spiritual past is Lidcombe and Leichhardt; the pragmatic present is a $40 million new training hub at Concord and a wealthy Leagues Club at Ashfield, together with some home games at Parramatta and Homebush.
But its future is an hour down the expressway to the rich vein of youthful playing talent at Campbelltown.
The most recent controversial decision – hiring Scott Fulton as chief recruiter – is an implied admission of the inevitable. Fulton, the son of Immortal Bob Fulton, has actively recruited players from Sydney’s outer west for the Sea Eagles, as have Canterbury. (In a 2021 under-17 representative match between Wests and Manly, six lads from each team gathered for a combined photo. All 12 were mates from Sydney’s south-west).
Fulton’s appointment is partly designed to identify western Sydney talent for West Tigers and stem its flow to inner-city clubs. Yet the
manner in which his appointment was communicated to the Wests Tigers coaching staff further reflects Scarlett O’Hara thinking. The recommendation to appoint Fulton came from club management, headed by chief executive Justin Pascoe. The board, after some reservations, agreed on the Friday evening before a match against the Panthers in Bathurst, while insisting head coach Tim Sheens be told before the media learned of the decision.
Management opted to inform Sheens on the Monday and it leaked in the interim. When quizzed by some directors on the management delay, the response was, in effect, “We didn’t want to interfere with Tim’s preparation of the team.”
Sheens, a premiership winner at two clubs, is a professional. He would have blown up about not being consulted on the Fulton appointment but would never have let it impact on the team. He would have argued the club’s existing recruitment head, Warren McDonnell, had comprehensive knowledge of all the talent in the outer west.
It was McDonnell’s recruitment team which signed the three Campbelltown players – Luke Laulilii, Lachlan Galvin and Heath Mason – selected last weekend in the Australian Schoolboys team. McDonnell has since left the club, and it is not clear whether Wests Tigers will go through with the contractual offers he made to other talent in the south-west.
When the Wests Tigers board heard that Fulton may revoke the McDonnell offers, they instructed Pascoe to ensure this doesn’t happen. This is the same board whom former broadcaster
Alan Jones recently called upon to resign, using the hackneyed cliche, “a fish rots from the head.” So, if the players identified by McDonnell and the very capable deputy Shannon Gallant are cut from Wests Tigers pathways and development program, is it the fault of the board, or another example of management delay?
There are remarkable similarities between the background and skills of the CEOs of the NRL’s two joint-venture clubs, with the Dragons also anchored to the bottom of the premiership ladder. Both Pascoe and St George Illawarra’s Ryan Webb were educated in Melbourne, were employed at the same AFL club, the Western Bulldogs, and worked together at Wests Tigers, where Webb was chief operating officer between 2015 and 2019. Their expertise is in marketing and finance, with Pascoe credited for securing a fixed price outcome for the Zurich Centre of Excellence.
The Concord headquarters, with its highly publicised barber’s shop, would suit the players, with few living at Campbelltown. Contrast that with the pre-club merger era when Tommy Raudonikis coached the Magpies and lived at Campbelltown.
Ahead of a home game, he stood on the back of a utility, loud hailer in hand, yelling in a throaty voice, “Come to the game”, as the vehicle rolled around Campbelltown on Saturday mornings. He once left his mobile phone on the cabin roof of the utility and it rolled off. Two youngsters found the phone and returned it to Tommy, yet the same community has the unkind reputation of removing hubcaps from cars driving too slowly past.
It’s not as if Wests Tigers are wedded to Concord. I visited, admittedly on a Monday, to do a podcast and it was almost empty, certainly not the buzz you see at the Storm’s Melbourne headquarters, even on a non-training day.
The Storm are 25 years old, almost the same as the Wests Tigers joint venture between the 1908 foundation clubs. Their separate histories are proudly and equally displayed at Concord but the black, white and gold colours of the joint venture dominate.
A new generation has grown up supporting Wests Tigers and, while the Magpies control the board, the ARLC would never allow the licence to be renamed Magpies.
