At the end of the day they're just assistants, plenty of teams have just-retired players in similar roles. Hagan was long retired and was still unable to drop players so there's not necessarily a correlation.
Bedsy would be a bad choice for say a head coach role but perhaps an assistant is a good middle ground. It's not like the players don't respond to him.
If Stone is going to make a real go of it this time the buck stops with him when it comes to team selections.
They're certainly not "just assistants". Gone are the days of the head coach running everything. Successful sides have a whole coaching team around them. And with the amount of assistants that end up progressing into the head coaching role these days it's very realistic that in two years time Bedsy (who was playing with these blokes this time last year!) or Sandernuff (that got sacked because he couldn't coach in an inferior competition) could be our head coach.
The bigger issue though is how they (and Stone, Gidley, Chief, etc) got the positions to begin with. Once again the club is just giving roles to "one of the boys" over those that may actually be better applicants. Does anyone actually think that Sandercock or Bedsy would be better candidates for this role than Daniel Anderson or even Mick Crawley? I don't think so. To be honest I reckon that's why we don't actually interview anyone for positions: if the credentials of blokes we selected actually got put up against others they'd fail miserably. Once again it's who you know not what you know with this club.
I get Stone's reasoning. His mate Sandercock just got sacked and he worked okay with him first time around...but after getting so close last year "okay" isn't enough for me anymore. I want change, not a club that's happy to settle for less than the best as long as their mates are all in a job.
