Adam O'Brien replacement?
- Thread starter jamesgould
- Start date
I’d be happy with John Morris, I think. Did good things at Cronulla with a squad that was hampered due to salary cap penalties. Played hard every week, successfully brought through young players and got the best out of someone like Shaun Johnson, which no other coach has managed. Could he do the same with Ponga?
Johnson talks about him pushing standards every day which is totally what we need.
Question marks are around his record vs top four sides - I think they lost a couple of those due to goalkicking though. And whether him as coach could attract talent to the club. Well we can’t do that anyway haha.
Best option for us right now, I think.
Johnson talks about him pushing standards every day which is totally what we need.
Question marks are around his record vs top four sides - I think they lost a couple of those due to goalkicking though. And whether him as coach could attract talent to the club. Well we can’t do that anyway haha.
Best option for us right now, I think.
In this day and age I think a coach coming from the UK would have to have experience assistant coaching at NRL level at least to be in the running for a head coach role.
Superleague is a very different beast to the NRL … don’t think we’ve seen any coaches come straight from there and be successful since Mal Reilly, and he’d been here as a player … and the gap wasn’t as big back then.
Grandpa Joe
Danny 'Bedsy' Buderus
Only flanagan fits the brief, we need someone with a proven track record.
HarVeeGee13
Danny 'Bedsy' Buderus
Yeah I’d be happy with this too. Former Knights player and by all reports a good bloke too, which isn’t the main thing, I’d be cool with a pantomime villain like Flanagan if we won, but it certainly helps players & fans give a bit more rope if you have a down run of form.
KnightsUnite
Banned
AOB wont be gone just yet
Coaches are paid to get results and produce winning teams. Regardless of injuries our team does not perform at a decent NRL level in way too many areas, line speed is really slow, we cant seem to stop offloads, we find it hard to put the opposition player on the ground, we don't number up in defence, we don't support the ball carrier so if someone actually makes a break or offloads no one is ready, our backs don't chase the opposition if they get through our line. All these things are coached and are expected of any first grader regardless of experience or talent.
Isn't everything you mentioned the basic things every rugby league player with a will and desire to win should be doing every single game?
Maybe the coach isn't the problem as that isn't something you need to coach players.
The problem is pretty much the whole team is not doing the basics, not just one or two players. I don't see this lackluster attitude by any player in the top teams
HarVeeGee13
Danny 'Bedsy' Buderus
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 are 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 a lot of our 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).
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How can the coach be the problem when we have been pathetic for over 10 years.
Don't know what it is about the knights, but something is seriously wrong with this club.
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Billy
Danny 'Bedsy' Buderus
I've been saying it for years.
That podcast with Ben Darwin yesterday said it.
Andrew Johns has talked about it.
Phil Gould is always talking about it.
In last week's Toohey podcast Allan Bell was on about it.
The thing that works for most successful clubs, and the only thing that has ever won the Knights a premiership, is to put together a side that comes through the grades together and is playing for more than money.
We have been trying to buy a premiership since the day Brian Smith walked through the door, with a spectacular lack of success.
Half the posts on here are about which reject from another club is going to be the answer to all our problems for a million bucks - and the answer is none of them - they'll all just take the money, go through the motions, and go to France for a working holiday.
We have been guilty of trying to buy premierships by bringing in all these players from different clubs but cannot get them to play consistently as a team.
You are 100% right, the only way is to bring a group through the lower grades same way Penrith has, only problem with that is it takes time. If we didn't waste the last 10 years and actually invested heavily in our juniors we would have seen some success.
HarVeeGee13
Danny 'Bedsy' Buderus
You need the kids born in the region to actually be good though, and getting even 4 or 5 first graders born in the same area within 1-2 years of each other is a miracle. I find Darwin’s almost total rejection of the notion that some players are just way more talented than others fairly laughable tbh. Like good on them for nurturing their talent, but Nathan Cleary, Jarome Luai, Brian To’o, Liam Martin, Dylan Edwards, James Fisher-Harris and Moses Leota all being on the same NYC roster, there is a lot of luck involved in that as surely as it was lucky that the best player ever was born in Cessnock.
Anyway there’s as many counter-examples to Darwin’s models as there are examples confirming it. A friend of mine who works in sports analytics crunched the numbers on which teams came into this year with the highest cohesion numbers according to Darwin’s model. Interesting to note that some of the teams near the top are having or had down seasons, or some of their worst seasons in a long time.
The most consistently great team in the NRL era does it with a mixture of picking the eyes out of other juniors systems & stashing blokes in QCup and shrewd pickups of underappreciated/overlooked players at other clubs, many of them coming to the club pretty old. So clearly there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
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HarVeeGee13
Danny 'Bedsy' Buderus
Not that I’m saying the pathways at the club don’t need improvement - clearly they do. But sometimes you just get a bunch of duds lol. You can’t guarantee a golden generation and you don’t just manufacture one purely because some of the kids in the system happen to be brothers or neighbours or whatever.
Big thing for me is that the head coach shouldn’t have a say in how all that stuff is run. All they should be worried about is coaching the first grade team, get the 17 on the field each weekend playing to the strengths of the players selected & get them playing near their best with reasonable consistency. If they can’t do that, onto the next one, and the juniors pathways continue to operate as they have been before. It’s making the head coach the head of all football-related decision-making at the club which causes dramas and knocks the cart off the rails every time someone needs to be moved on, in comes a new boss with a totally different direction for the entire club and you’re back to square one all over again. Note that Penrith sacked Anthony Griffin and re-hired Ivan Cleary in 2018/19. Doesn’t seem to have done them any harm or changed a lot about how the club as a whole operates…
Big thing for me is that the head coach shouldn’t have a say in how all that stuff is run. All they should be worried about is coaching the first grade team, get the 17 on the field each weekend playing to the strengths of the players selected & get them playing near their best with reasonable consistency. If they can’t do that, onto the next one, and the juniors pathways continue to operate as they have been before. It’s making the head coach the head of all football-related decision-making at the club which causes dramas and knocks the cart off the rails every time someone needs to be moved on, in comes a new boss with a totally different direction for the entire club and you’re back to square one all over again. Note that Penrith sacked Anthony Griffin and re-hired Ivan Cleary in 2018/19. Doesn’t seem to have done them any harm or changed a lot about how the club as a whole operates…