Sadly, we need a couple (more) floggings in succession. That's what forced the club to sack Price. It's our only hope of sacking Mr DUI and moving forward. Short term pain
Unfortunately, it might take a fair bit more than a few consecutive floggings before sanity prevails.
For a start, they waited until Price's winning percentage had fallen to 38% before they decided to act and Mary is sitting at 48%......that's a lot more heartache before he starts equaling Prices stats. In fact, we would have to lose the next 13 games straight for Mary to have a 38% win rate:shock:
Then there's the power struggle at play between Saints and Illawarra hierarchy. Mid season 2014, we were within a bees penis from re signing Bennett for 2015 and beyond and while these negotiations were underway, board member Sean O'Connor (1 of 4 Illawarra members on the board) was telling anyone in the Wollongong media who would listen that Mary was our preferred man. Now you can take this any way you choose, but to me, it was a deliberate attempt to derail negotiations with Bennett by giving the impression of an unstable board/club and as a "shot across the bow" of the establishment after the decision to take 2 games away from the Gong pissed off the Steelers contingency as that decision triggered interest payments (for breach of agreement) be made immediately to Bruce Gordon for a loan he gave the club. Also, if Bennett was signed, Mary (the Gongs favourite son) would have had to exit stage left (Bennett wouldn't of let him near the place) and certain Illawarra factions were feeling as though they were being dictated to by big brother. When Bennett gave us the flick, Mary was quickly given a 3 year deal and i believe this was a "peace offering" of sorts, designed to settle the unrest between the 2 JV organisations.............a weak and reactive decision in my opinion.
And then there's the DUI incident. If there was a genuine consideration by the powers to be to send Mary packing mid season, surely they had the perfect opportunity to set the wheels in motion when he was done for DUI. They could have taken that opportunity to stand Mary down for a couple of weeks (which is exactly what would of happened if one of our players were caught for DUI) and bring in Jason Demetriou to take over the side during this period and tell him he had an open license to put his stamp on the side and do what he saw fit. This would of at least given an opportunity to see what life looked like without Mary. But instead, we told him we were disappointed in him, gave him a fine (did we really:roll
and told him to carry on regardless. Why this approach? why the double standards? Did the imminent Gordon deal negotiations have an impact on our decision to turn a blind eye? Was there some "if you do that i will do this" going on here? Unless you are part of the inner sanctum i guess you will never know, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.......
We appear to be on a highway to nowhere at the moment and i just don't see any attempt to program the GPS towards a destination. We are floundering as a playing unit with very little team growth week in and week out, in fact, most of our players are going backwards, we don't experiment, we play like we are coached to perform exactly the same game plan regardless of who our opposition is, our coach appears to be selfish and is putting his job before the team by being happy to grind to a close win or a close loss so as to finish in a spot on the ladder that is not low enough to sack him, but as a consequence not high enough to be a real finals contender, and the powers to be, the people who can change all this in an instant, seem to be too preoccupied in their own little power struggle and jockeying for position to have the time or inclination to make the tough decisions that need to be made in order to give us a fighting chance of success.
This is obviously only my opinion and might seem like total BS and a misinformed nonfactual hypothesis to most, but this shite is just too much like ground hog day to just be a speed bump on the highway to success. It's more like a mountain that has no peak, in fact, it's a freakin virus that just keeps on crippling. The longer virus is left to wreak havoc without treatment, the longer the road to recovery........Hope we all live long enough to see it, but i for one can't wait another 31 years.
