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Paul Kent: The simple ingredient Knights coach Adam O’Brien lacks as he fights for job
Mick Potter’s pre-game explanation for how Canterbury might beat Newcastle on Sunday was frighteningly simple, and perfectly delivered in straight footy-speak.
Potter, he made clear, is one of those kick to the seagulls type coaches.
“We look at how tight they are in D and in yardage and we have a look at the spaces in good ball and just where there’s some dents in their line and we try and find the space, really,” Potter said.
“Sometimes it will appear and sometimes they will run into a brick wall.”
In a loose translation, run where they aren’t.
It was a marked difference from his rival after the game, once the game was decided in Canterbury’s favour and Knights fans were offering a little more voice to their disappointment, and Newcastle coach Adam O’Brien was in all sorts of knots breaking down what happened in the previous 80 minutes.
O’Brien recognised the result for what it was; that this is how coaching careers can end, beginning with the murmurs in the crowd.
So he took the front foot, controlling the narrative.
Yet the moment he began talking was the moment he should have stayed quiet.
“Previous to getting this job here I was involved in four grand finals,” O’Brien said.
“I know how the teams prepared. I know the systems that they used defensively.
“You don’t unlearn that knowledge.”
O’Brien presents as a bare knuckle scrapper and his tenacity is admirable but it was an overshare moment.
In a bid to show how much he understood what it took to coach he revealed how much more he still has to learn about coaching.
The Knights have barely improved in three years, for one. How much more time is he asking for?
O’Brien seems to be looking at the end result and overlooking the reality of now.
Potter’s philosophy is simple in explanation and execution.
It revealed one of the great unspoken truths of coaching, the difference between head coaching and assistant coaching.
So many assistants are powerpoint professionals, the kind that can sit and talk attacking theory until your head starts to turn to dough, or defensive strategy until your ears go numb, which means not a dot if they can’t get the players to perform on the field.
Coaching isn’t about how well you know the game; it’s how well you can win.
The world’s best gameplan is useless if the players are incapable of delivering it, or don’t quite understand it, or too often get caught trying to think their way through it.
Old time coaches used to say you don’t really know if you can coach until you have gone through four straight losses.
While most aspiring coaches strive to take the assistant coaching jobs at a big club to do their apprenticeship the more rounded coaches generally seem to have done head coaching jobs in other competitions, learning to think their way through problems like four straight losses can bring.
Potter, for instance, has done it the hard way in recent years. He was promoted to be head coach at Wests Tigers in 2013 and lasted two seasons before the Tigers moved in another direction.
Coaching in England before that, he has floated around coaching various junior rep sides or assistant jobs since until he parachuted into Canterbury after Barrett left.
Simplifying Canterbury’s game plan has freed the players. Rather than trying to think their way through the game since Trent Barrett was fired they simply play.
Conscious thinking slows the action, instinct brings speed. And the Dogs are simply playing, reacting with what they know.
The Knights seem burdened, unable to deliver a gameplan some of those premiership teams O’Brien worked with might have been capable of delivering, but which this mob clearly are not.
They attacked on Sunday like their big play was going to be the next play, all game.
“Applying it and getting it ingrained is going to take some time, clearly,” O’Brien said.
“Week in, week out we can talk about one area of that defence and we can fix it in seven days but then we will let another area of our defence down.
“It is going to take a lot of time.
“I know that some people don’t want to wait that long but it’s …”
His sentence drifted off, unfinished.
The difference in both teams was in their coaches on Sunday.
O’Brien is tight, believing the answer might be more hard work when it appears the players already believe they are working hard enough. Certainly they don’t appear to be handling what is already coming their way.
Potter has the freedom of no pressure.
Canterbury is on the verge of announcing Cameron Ciraldo as the coach for next year and the Bulldogs had no hope of making the finals when he took over the job.
Potter took it as an opportunity to free the players and his players have responded.
There’s nothing like a little hardship to make a coach realise what works and what doesn’t.
