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Despite the joint-venture's undoubted popularity, it is now the NRL's No.1 basket case. Just when Wests Tigers fans believed life couldn't sink any lower comes this sobering news - former coach Tim Sheens has this week started suing his former club. Last month, the Tigers stopped paying Sheens after sacking him late last year with two more seasons to run on his $450,000-a-year contract. Unwilling and unable to pay him out because of the club's crippling debt, he has been receiving payments each month, but last month it stopped. The July payment has not been received.
Subsequently, the coach commenced legal proceedings at the start of this week. Sheens could not be contacted for comment on the matter, and chairman Mike Bailey sounded like he'd just taken a call from the Grim Reaper when asked for a response. "I'm not in a position to comment on that particular matter at the moment," he said, directing inquiries to chief executive Grant Mayer, who did not return Fairfax Media's calls. Simply not paying the former coach appears a novel way for the Tigers to escape the comical situation that confronts them with his replacement, Mick Potter, certain to be brutally scalped after just one season. How absurd: paying three head coaches - Sheens, Potter, and the masochist prepared to come in next - at the one time.
Sheens might be in dispute with his former club, but one thing cannot be challenged. For all the faults facing Parramatta, and the uncertainty surrounding Cronulla, the Wests Tigers are certainly on the podium as the NRL's leading basket case. There is no escaping it. The Eels still have money to burn and do. The Sharks have rarely walked on solid ground. The Tigers are one of the most popular clubs in history, yet they are drowning in $2 million of debt and juvenile infighting is starting to bury them. Their saving grace is an abundance of emerging stars, but they won't arrive soon enough to save Potter.
He is said to have "lost the dressing room". They said the same thing about Sheens. Maybe they need to start looking at the dressing room instead of the coach. If Potter is the dead man walking we all keep reading about, his long-time manager Steve Gillis doesn't know. He's heard nothing from Mayer, or any official from the club.
"They're a very frustrating club to deal with, because everything is played out in the papers," Gillis said. "When I walk into that club, I have to wear a raincoat and put up an umbrella, it leaks so much." Maybe Potter has to go.
As he said early into his tenure, Potter took over "a smart, well coached side" from Sheens. Heading into last night's game against the Eels, which threatened to be as ugly as a Game of Thrones torture scene, they'd won six games. When asked about sacking coaches midway through their deals, the late Jack Gibson often said: "You're better off getting rid of them now - before they can f--- it up any more than they have."
Yet it would be naive to ignore that Potter had inherited deeper problems; ones that were not of Sheens' doing.
The major issue at the Tigers is a salary cap so scrambled you could make an omelette. Moving players on to accommodate the under-performing Adam Blair has strangled both their first- and second-tier salary caps.
Prop Bryce Gibbs is into his second season at the Sharks, but some of his contract is still paid by the Tigers. Can you see a pattern emerging here? For all the excrement some throw at Sheens, it is too easily forgotten that he had personally stepped in to ensure rising star Luke Brooks stayed at the Tigers after Andrew Johns did his best to lure him to the Knights.
Of course, the issues at Wests Tigers do not start and end in the coach's office. A fish always rots from the head, and the Tigers board has been as dysfunctional as any since their stormy marriage in 2000. The Balmain side of the merger once held the power, but now they have no money that has swung in favour of Western Suburbs. So Western Suburbs think.
Bailey (Wests) and deputy chairman Nick di Girolamo (Balmain) met with chief executive of the Australian Rugby League Commission Dave Smith in May, asking for financial assistance. It is understood Smith told them a unified board with independent directors would be required if they expected any handout from the league.
Bailey said on Friday: "We discussed a number of issues with the rugby league at that time, and the rugby league has put forward some of those ideas, which we are in the process of considering." This column put it to Bailey that his board appeared to be in turmoil; torn apart by old factions, power struggles and an undermining of the coach. Benji Marshall is gone. Stephen Humphreys is gone. Dave Trodden is gone.
"The unfortunate thing about that is that the board is working better than the board at Wests Tigers has in a long time, in terms of trying to march in the right way," he replied. "However, what often happens is that a lot of baggage from the past takes some time to float to the surface. We're getting a lot of flak from the media, as a whole, that has a genesis that goes back to the past."
Maybe. But good luck to any coach who wants to climb aboard for the future.
