This “the players should be able to do X every week without the coach needing to tell them” **** is just the wrong way to look at it, it really is. Players aren’t robots and there are all sorts of things which can affect motivation and performance.
Everyone has had a lot of sympathy for Clifford’s poor performances recently once they heard the *rumour* that his wife has taken his kid away from him and decamped back to North Queensland. So there clearly is some understanding that performance can be affected and it’s not purely an effort thing.
Here’s some hypothetical other things which can affect you I reckon. Just some hypotheticals:
- You have a really rigid, domineering & technical coach who demands sets are structured in a very specific way and that if you run very specific lines/plays at specific times, you will score points… and you do what he says but your attack is just gobbled up by the defence like it’s child’s play, and he blames you for not doing it right.
- You do some stuff in attack which does produce points, but the coach gets mad at you for not running HIS plays, not playing HIS way…
- You feel overloaded with too much information when you go onto the field and focus in really hard on the stuff the coach has been drilling into you, consequently you or your teammates let some core tenets fall by the wayside and you end up with big defensive issues.
- You witness your coach have a blow up at a player and you don’t think they deserved it, or you cop the hair dryer treatment and you don’t think it’s justified.
- So you come into work every day to take orders from a boss you don’t respect but have to kowtow to, do a bunch of stuff on the field you don’t believe is gonna work, and then cop a pasting from the coach for not doing the stuff he said you should do even though you were and the stuff is just crap, it doesn’t work.
- Kurt Mann is playing lock and keeps getting run over in defence, taking everyone’s space away in attack, and generally ****ing up. You don’t think he should be in the run-on team but the coach has his favourites, he’s one of them and you’re not.
Not saying all of this is exactly what’s happening but my read is that at least some of it definitely is.
This is exactly what happened with Seibold and with a coach who’s really rigid and specific and technical like it seems like AOB is, it always gets worse than it does with a your “just go out there and RIP IN” passion merchants like Kevvy Walters.
I just keep going back to the degeneration of the attack year on year and the total lack of any capacity to do good yardage sets as these two things that are gonna kill any faith in the coach hey. Like it’s a really really hard game when a huge cohort of the players doesn’t have belief in what they’re doing. If you’ve ever worked under a boss you thought was an idiot who was focusing on the wrong things and giving dumb direction and feedback, you know the feeling, you know how enervating it is. Does it not seem like that’s what’s happening with the players? And then when there’s a lack of belief, a lack of trust, doesn’t matter how much effort there is - effort in the same direction is amplified (see Melbourne; Penrith) and in different directions is diffused (see: Newcastle; Wests).
