Maybe in a slightly perverse way the combination may be successful???? As in, David Kidwell has been through the Storm system, has also coached Souths to an NYC Grand Final, and has coached the Junior Kiwis successfully... he always struck me as a leader. I think his short fall is obviously experience. Elliott's been around for 20 odd years since his time at Bradford. He did a pretty reasonable job bringing that club to the top of Super League. Perhaps in a weird way him acting as a mentor to a young bloke like Kidwell would work.
Cons, well, there's a heap of them. Kidwell has no NRL experience. Elliott does, but his record is fairly ordinary at best, (well thats being kind, its straight out diabolical). In a strange way, we'll be picking up the dude who was sacked and replaced by our best coach, which seems to be a poor decision. Another big con is that they said they wanted the best and would do anything for it. What this has inevitably proved is that even stragglers like Sheens who have been sacked don't want to come here. Thats a pretty sad state of affairs. You can extend that onto players. The value of an experienced and proven coach is wanting to come and work with them. Who really wants to work for Elliott? I suppose though, aside from Bellamy and Bennett, the experienced coaches in the NRL struggle to get their teams up for the big prize. Hasler was pretty good from the get-go. Flanagan was a far better bet at Cronulla than Stuart. Maybe Kidwell's inexperience in that sense plays into his favour. Perhaps he has a culture and a structure that fits the organisation well...
Frankly, all I want out of it is a hard nut who is going to flog this mob in the off season, cut out the off field nonsense, tell it how it is, select who deserves to be selected, and doesn't buy into the last two years of we'll let 6 blokes go, and replace them with 2 blokes from NYC type strategy. In key positions we still need good old fashioned Australian experience and skill. Make sure we have enough specialist, full time coaches. Not do favours for mates. We need a full timer who knows how to coach defence, thats not necessarily the bloke who was great at defence himself. The fact we were exposed badly through the same plays in the centres speaks volumes about how poor that structure worked. Time for the Warriors to get hardcore, and bring back the mongrel to Auckland. Hopefully if Kidwell's selected he's the man to provide that. Given his hit on Willie Mason, I have some hope that he is.
