END OF AN ERA
The turmoil surrounding the handling of the coach’s future led to the uprising that ended Dib’s reign at the Bulldogs.
The Andersons, led by Peter Moore’s daughter Lynne and her husband Chris, put together a ticket that overthrew six of the seven board members, including Dib. It led to George Peponis resigning as chairman of the leagues club.
“There were a lot of people with their own agendas and there was a lot of backstabbing going in. I had enough of it,” he says.
“I think there are good times ahead. They are heading in the right direction now, but it had been a pretty lean patch.”
The magnitude of the politics at Canterbury stunned legendary All Blacks coach Steve Hansen when he arrived at Belmore last year in a consultancy role.
“One of the things I see is that the constitution allows the board to be changed every two years,” Hansen had told the
Herald.
“I don’t think that creates stability. I think the fans have to vote to change that. Once they get stability in the boardroom, they get a lot of people making decisions that are right for the club, rather than right for survival to come back into the boardroom.”
The Andersons used the perceived wrongful treatment of Hasler as ammunition to turn members against Dib, who had just appointed coach Dean Pay and chief executive Andrew Hill.
When the dust settled on a volatile and spiteful election campaign, which culminated in Hasler receiving his full payout and the Bulldogs receiving $300,000 from the insurance policy Dib had taken out, the aftermath was almost as ugly.
“I was at Cronulla when all the ASADA stuff went down in one of the biggest rugby league scandals in history,” Lichaa says. “But the noise around the Bulldogs was just as loud all the time, if not worse. There’s nothing like it.”
The Bulldogs went about trying to rebuild a roster that was completely lopsided, largely thanks to a host of back-ended deals, including the $1 million-a-season purchase of a broken down Kieran Foran and the $800,000 acquisition of Aaron Woods.
The Bulldogs paid the price for estimating the salary cap would rise to $10 million in 2018, despite being told to work off a figure that was $1 million less.
“We just kept saying to Raelene: you have salary cap problems coming,” Greenberg, who had been elevated to NRL chief executive at the time, recalls.
“Having seen how the salary caps work, I could see there was going to be a car crash at some point with some bad ramifications. I like Raelene, but I could always see problems coming with a salary cap, with the Bulldogs spend being significantly higher than what we had forecast.”
That job was left to Lynne Anderson, who had given authority to her husband, Chris – a two-time premiership-winning coach with the Bulldogs and Melbourne Storm in the 1990s – to infiltrate the football program.
On the outside, the noise was deafening. “Great bloke, can’t coach,” was often bandied around about Pay.
On the surface, it seemed only beneficial to have someone of Chris’ stature alongside a rookie coach, especially given Pay had played under Anderson at the Bulldogs two decades earlier.
But the relationship deteriorated to the point where the coach did everything possible to avoid his one-time mentor, often phoning staff members to see if Anderson was at Belmore before returning from lunch.
Pay believed the game had passed Anderson by. When Pay discovered Chris Anderson had met with Semi Radradra’s agent, George Christodoulou, without his knowledge, the meddling infuriated him.
When they refused to allow Pay to sign Josh Reynolds for $150,000, it became clear he wasn’t going to call the shots while the Andersons were around.
Chris’ presence became a burden until he eventually removed himself from the club when the Australian Taxation Office came knocking for millions in alleged unpaid tax and superannuation contributions by Chris and brother-in-law Kevin Moore.
“Chris thought he could value add to Dean’s coaching,” Hill recalls. “But Dean saw it as a big shadow watching over him. I saw the good in what the relationship could be. But what it became was a stress.
“I never thought Chris wanted to coach. Lend his assistance were his words. Because of the public perception that Chris was more involved than what he was, it started to put enormous pressure on Dean and, at times, Dean wanted some more space.”
DOING IT LIKE DAD
The Andersons wanted to go back to doing things “the Bulldogs way”, despite the club enjoying relative success moving away from that philosophy under Hasler.
Lynne, according to those she spoke to, often said: “This is how Dad ran the club, and this is how we will run the club”.
“Dad” is club patriarch Peter “Bullfrog” Moore.
David Klemmer also had issues with newly appointed director Paul Dunn, who criticised the prop forward at a Kangaroos reunion in Sydney a few months before winning a seat on the board.
Klemmer was already disgruntled, having lost a lucrative third-party deal that dissipated following the departure of Dib, which contributed to his defection to Newcastle.
“There were a lot of promises there that I don’t think were kept,” Josh Morris says of the Andersons rolling Dib at the polls.
“I get that the fans wanted a change to see if that would help, but I don’t think it really worked. The whole time I was there, Ray did a good job and brought a lot of potential third parties with him as well, which makes you stronger as a club, but the fans wanted to see the family link return.
“Sometimes you think change will give you a better option, but was Lynne’s tenure successful? I’m not sure you can say that. I would have liked to have seen Ray given a chance to fix what he built.”
Even those who fought so hard alongside Lynne and Chris Anderson began to see the error of their ways.
“We made big promises, and I was getting called out by members on those promises we made,” current chairman John Khoury, who was on the Andersons’ ticket, says.
“A lot of them are my friends. You have to be true to your promises.”
The Andersons, alongside John Ballesty and Dunn, called all the shots. Sponsors questioned why certain board members were being separated into distant corporate boxes at matches and were told it was for COVID-19 social distancing reasons.
The members, former players and sponsors became disgruntled. They believed the leaders of the club were out of touch with the times and the community.
An extraordinary general meeting was soon called, which led to the resignation of the chairwoman and her two most trusted directors.
“I would often give Lynne frank feedback on behalf of the members, some of it critical,” Khoury says.
“She would acknowledge it and tell me she would deal with it, but tell me, ‘Keep focusing on junior league’. I stayed loyal to the very end, but I must admit I found it disappointing when I compare this to my previous experiences in reporting to a board of a large corporation.
“I was very open in calling out concerns. I feel if Lynne had listened more to a handful of people, she would still be the chair today. What we do in these clubs is all temporary. It’s what you leave behind, that’s how people remember you.”
