TheRam
Coach
- Messages
- 13,911
Sleepiness makes cowards of us all.
But I have praised him on occasion before be it so less often. He has some ability, but his abilities are limited and his greatest weakness is his inability to change or pivot fast enough or at times unless it is forced upon him quick enough to make rapid and positive adjustments to the weaknesses of the roster.
His current failure and it is a major one, is he has had one of the best rosters in the league for what 4-5 years now but other then one season he has failed miserably to consistently get them to defend well. Even that one season I would argue if you looked at it carefully there were many games that we leaked points to easily at times that you just scratched your head. It was hardly a season of defensive strength or patterns of connectivity like say the Storm of old or Panthers at the moment, which you know will carry on from year to year if the main personnel stay together.
No it was and is very desperate defense that if the opposition have a good run with the ball you know that we will end up folding and we 9 out of 10 times do. So why hasn't this merkin moved Heaven and earth to fix the problem? Does he even know what the problem is. Is it the defensive coach or is it two or three of the players? Is it our fitness or is it our attitude? Or is it a combination of all or some of these things?
But he has had more time then most NRL coaches get careers to fix it and he hasn't made even a slight impression, in fact he has gone backward this season spectacularly.
My take on it is a combo of the 2 or 3 players problem and the defensive coach problem. He has failed to bite the bullet and cut the two or three players that are a defensive liability the most. Add to that his reactive not proactive recruitments of this year and it is a recipe for disaster. On top of that whoever the defensive coach is hasn't been able to get them to be mongrel like in defense even when the roster has been at its strongest.
On the players, how many seasons have I and others been screaming about speed? Speed not only sharpens your attack but dramatically improves your defense if the said speedy player has an understanding and mindset to defend. Look at Ado-Carr, in a quality roster he isn't a liability in defense, but actually an asset because with his exceptional speed he allows you to compress your line as he did at Mel and if you think you have the overlap on him he soon makes you realise it was a mirage and hunts you down.
So why has Potato Head(PH) not cut the dead wood and busted a testy to get some freaking speed? Or why has he not cut the dead wood and bought solely for defensive capabilities first when analyzing for potential recruits? Why did he panic and buy a wounded old fart that many here all screamed at the time was going to be a liability and probably wouldn't make it unscathed? Again he should have seen this coming and known that Hodges was always going to be a massive problem in defense, especially the way he likes his DH's to play? I mean I could, so why couldn't he?
Footy isn't rocket science. We all know what probably is the oldest adage in the game, that defense wins games. So he has failed on this massively and he has been here for ten freakin years with just one fleeting season in the barely pass mark range and he is going to be here for at least 2 more seasons. Talk about epic failure by our administration to recognise what winning looks like.
See from now on, if I was running the club I would be telling any coach that the main KPI that they will be judged by is the defensive record of the team from season to season. Anything less then in the top 3 once the the coach has more or less the players he wants then it is a fail mark and grounds for dismissal. I mean fancy going into a season with the backline we had this year and thinking things were going to turn out ok, once an injury or two set in. Both in offense and defense that backline offers very little to the rest of the team and PH and Co should have been all over it. But instead what did they do? They panicked and wasted valuable salary cap space on more plodders that the club can't afford to have.
We as a club are the laughing joke premiership draught kings and we aren't even close to changing that unless defense becomes the mantra we live in and the only way to really kick that into gear is abundant high end junior development, but that's another novella away.
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I do hope you run speech-to-text software or something...
