Smith wrong fit for Knights
By Paul Kent
June 04, 2007 12:00
A NEVER-told-before story that reveals why the Newcastle Knights will never again be the same club under Brian Smith:
It was a few years back, during a casual conversation with a Knights player, and he was talking about the lead-up to the 2001 grand final.
The Knights were up against it that year, playing a Parramatta side that had just come off a record season, scoring more points than any team before it.
The Eels needed only to top it off with a grand final victory to cap one of the great seasons.
Halfway through the week, Smith took his Parramatta players into camp near Wollongong in an attempt to get them away from the grand final circus in Sydney and help them to relax.
The players threw frisbees on the beach. There are photographs of it.
The Eels returned for the grand final breakfast that Thursday and as the two teams waited outside the ballroom to be introduced, the players nodded to each other and struck up a general, but cautious, conversation.
"How's the week been for you?", one of the Knights players asked.
The Parramatta player's response surprised the Newcastle players. He spoke of nerves and how intense the week was.
And then he said how, in a way, he would be glad when the week was over.
When the Newcastle players were alone, they said, "What about that?"
They left breakfast that morning convinced they were going to win.
Besides their own confidence, the Knights were convinced Parramatta was struggling with the pressure.
And for their own part they were having the time of their lives. More than one has said that grand final week and the entire week, not just playing the grand final was the best week of their lives. Seeing Parramatta walk around as tight as a drum emboldened them.
As Smith knows, players read a coach's attitude and soon reflect it. St George Illawarra coach Nathan Brown confirmed as much last year while speaking about his own failure from the season before.
If the coach is relaxed, the players pick up on it and stay relaxed themselves.
Smith who admits privately that he can get too intense had tried to protect his players by putting them in a relaxing environment but, as he found out, he couldn't remove the Eels from himself.
The sidenote, as Newcastle fans will fondly recall, is that Parramatta played exactly as the Knights expected, tense and tight, and trailed 24-0 at halftime. With nothing left to lose when they resumed, they just went out and played and, with this attitude, went down 30-24.
It was a performance that spoke of what might have been.
Like it or lump it, what Newcastle fans will have to accept from now on is that the Knights won't be the same.
That grand final showed how wrong the fit is.
True, they will more than likely still be successful under Smith. They could even win a premiership but it will never be the same team that they fell in love with.
The pity about it is that throughout its history the team has always reflected its city.
Honest and straightforward.
Smith is a very good coach.
He took Parramatta from a rabble and made them successful, if not winners.
But he can do it only his way. He has a style he coaches to and his players have to fit that style.
They are not always happy with it.
Smith's newspaper column describing Jarrod Mullen as not even the best halfback at the Knights, at the time of Mullen's State of Origin call-up, is not even half of the mind games being employed at Newcastle.
Before Andrew Johns retired, Smith told him that Mullen was a better passer.
He told Danny Buderus he was not the best hooker at the club.
This is designed to sting their pride and spur them to even greater heights "I'll show you" but they are also the same kind of tricks that wore down many Parramatta players, though not all, before Smith was eventually released.
It fits Newcastle's culture about as well as a fat kid's school shirt.
Already in the wake of the past week's bloodletting, with the promise of more to come, some sponsors are asking each other whether this guy is the right fit for their club.
The answer is he is not.
Not as the club is now.
Knights fans need to know Smith will change them he is already doing so and he may even make them more successful.
Understand that.
But the club will no longer have the same sense of spirit.
Newcastle was the last of the old footy clubs.
They have used this old-fashioned sense of self to win premierships against better teams and bigger clubs.
They used it to take on these slick new "franchises" with their media-managed images and homogenous players who slotted in and out of the club's roster with seemingly little disruption.
They were underdogs, and their city loved them for it.
Not for much longer.
