Club in crisis as Dragons coach Flanagan inches ever closer to sword
ANDREW WEBSTER AUSTRALIA’S PREMIER SPORT COLUMNIST
On a muggy Sydney day in late January, St George Illawarra and Manly held their annual pre-season scrimmage at Kogarah Jubilee Oval. The full-contact session allows coaches and players to gauge how their teams are tracking a month out from the first round.
“Let’s trust our halves to get us to the right spot on the field,” Dragons co-captain Clint Gutherson told his teammates huddled around him. “Kick long. Focus on our ‘D’. Kick-chase. We put so much effort in over the summer, boys. This is the fun part.”
As the session went on, some Sea Eagles players noticed how it didn’t look too fun for Dragons players at all as their coach, Shane Flanagan, barked instructions and angrily hooked players from the field – including his son Kyle and recruit Daniel Atkinson.
“Imagine playing for this guy?” a Manly player quietly remarked, a sentiment shared by some of his younger teammates. Remember, their coach was Anthony Seibold, who had lost the dressing room long before this sultry Sydney day.
Some of the Manly players didn’t have to imagine. Flanagan was an assistant in Seibold’s first year at Manly in 2023, before he accepted the head coaching role at the Dragons. Senior Manly players contacted by The Australian said they noticed nothing out of the ordinary from Flanagan that day.
“That’s just who he is,” said one.
That might be all we need to know when searching for reasons why Flanagan is fighting for his job after a winless start to the season.
Older players appreciate a coach who talks directly. Many of the younger ones do not.
With every painful loss, Flanagan doesn’t just look like a broken coach searching for answers. He looks like a coach who is struggling with a game that has passed him by, no matter how much he knows and how much winning means to him.
Flanagan’s side hosts Manly at WIN Stadium in Wollongong on Friday and a heavy loss will put pressure on the board to sack him.
St George Illawarra have felt less like a joint venture between two football clubs in recent times than a subsidiary of WIN Corporation, the media company privately owned by 97-year-old Bruce Gordon that bought out Illawarra’s stake in 2018. The Dragons’ new high-performance centre, which Anthony Albanese will officially open next month, bears Gordon’s name.
WIN chief executive Andrew Lancaster has been the Dragons chairman since 2023. Because he’s not answerable to shareholders, Lancaster isn’t one to panic. The problem for Lancaster and his board is the shareholders of a football club are its members and fans, and if the losses keep coming, it won’t be long before the focus shifts from the coach to the board, if it hasn’t already.
There are no firm deadlines in place for Flanagan to turn the beat around, but of this you can be assured: he won’t be the only one packing up his desk if his contract, which was extended last August for two years until the end of 2028, is torn up. Most have assumed 2010 premiership winner Dean Young would be Flanagan’s successor when the time came. As assistant to Flanagan, he’s in the firing line as much as the head coach. So, too, football general manager Ben Haran.
The board extended Flanagan for the sole reason of at least looking like a stable club when recruiting and retaining players. At the same time, they had lured Daniel Anderson from the Roosters to head their recruitment.
The Dragons won’t have to pay out Flanagan’s entire contract if they sack him, protected by termination clauses in the deal. But any semblance of stability has been eroded from 10 consecutive NRL losses – the worst run in the joint venture’s history.
Worse than that, some of their big-name recruits – Gutherson, Valentine Holmes and Damien Cook – are starting to look like the champion boxer who ages in the space of one round. The younger players look locked in one minute, jaded and waiting for the siren the next. Collectively, they’re the hardest team to watch in the NRL.
The recruitment blunder that will define the final days of Flanagan’s tenure will be Atkinson, who he lured from Cronulla on cheap money with the idea of turning him into the organising halfback he clearly wasn’t born to be.
Two weeks ago, before the diabolic loss to the Gold Coast Titans, Flanagan called for patience in a pre-match interview with Fox Sports. “He’s only played 10 NRL games at halfback,” he said.
The coach’s patience lasted two more games. For Friday night’s match against Manly, Atkinson will play five-eighth, while Kyle Flanagan returns from concussion to start at halfback. It’s the same sort of panicked selection seen in the final weeks of Flanagan’s predecessor, Anthony Griffin.
“I don’t go pick Kyle because of his surname, he’s got to do a job and he is within our top three or four players, competitive-wise, week in, week out,” Flanagan said on Thursday. “He’s our best halfback in the club at the moment.”
As much as the frustrated Dragons supporter base wants 20- year-old rookie Kade Reed to start instead of Flanagan’s son, it would be a mistake. His skills might be ready for NRL, but his 78kg body is not, especially with hulking Sea Eagles backrower Haumole Olakau’atu running at him all night.
It says everything about the dysfunction at the Dragons that this is the best halves combination the club can conjure. The club has struggled for decades to find an organising half, despite having one of the most fertile junior nurseries in the game. An entirely separate analysis is needed to examine the inventive ways in which the Dragons have burned through their playmakers over the past decade, but the line from the club that “there are no halves out there” is fooling nobody.
Flanagan was desperate to return to coaching after a long hiatus from the game. The NRL had torn up his registration in December 2018 after it found he had violated the conditions of a previous ban from 2014 for his role in the 2011 supplements scandal at Cronulla.The Dragons gave him his second chance because Griffin turned out to be the mistake some of us predicted it to be. Flanagan has been another one, despite his best intentions. Those close to the 60-year-old worry about his health, knowing how much he invests in his football team and believes in his son. But it’s clear this is no longer fun. For anyone
