Well it hasn't taken long to turn on the coach. Fraction more than half a season.
Oh! well - the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A lot of predictable wrist slitting.
See when a team is highly competitive for about 10 rounds, then much less competitive for 10 rounds, who is to blame? Is it the coach's fault for not getting the players up each and every week over 24 rounds? Or is it the player's fault for not being able to produce consistent performances week in and out.
I find it very hard to believe that a coach who got the team to 5-1 in the first 6 weeks suddenly doesn't know how to coach or build a roster. How can the strategy and game management that played so well for the first half of the year suddenly not work any more?
To me that falls on the players. There are systems in place that help us play well, defend and play tough, but they aren't being followed the past 8-10 weeks. To be smashed by Canberra and limply fall to Titans in 2 weeks separated by a bye, I can't really put that on the coach. Getting beat is one thing, getting hammered and having no fight is another, and usually that's about the players.
The real question for me is why do the players fall away? It's not the same team year on year, though we've brought a few oldies back in 2018\. Sheens, Taylor, Potter, Cleary, Pearce, Lamb - that's a lot of coaches managing to follow the same game plan - start well early, finish poorly, finish just outside the finals (or worse).
I don’t think that many teams have demonstrated winning consistency. Ones that do have developed a team culture mixed with a core group of top line players.
Never in my 50+ years of watching NRL have I seen a inexperienced team such as 2018 WT are (cobbled together with a mixture of good, average and bad) reach any great heights.
So did not and do not expect much more than we have achieved this year ….. improvement!
For all those dreamers and critics ..... ease off learn how to be patient .... and learn how to LOSE!
You ask some interesting questions jirskyr! You're a smart bloke and you'd know that winning changes everything. Yet that's hard to do and we've hardly ever done it because we have repeated the same mistakes over and over.
Why don't we win consistently? It's lack of talent and lack of confidence working hand-in-hand. We all know that we have a team that is comparatively low on talent to nearly all other teams. So, our margin for error is low and unfortunately we make a stack of errors. Injuries have lowered our talent level further. All that can be countered somewhat by intelligence across the park, most notably earlier on with Marshall in a few games. The fact that players like Taylor, Thompson and MWZ have played so much this year is partly due to their smarts too. But we lack talent and generally always have throughout our existence.
The fall-off in performances, especially effort, is mental. New seasons are a chance to see if your off-season of training has taken your ability to a new level and the training produces confidence. We all know what confidence does for us and does against your opposition and the results backed it up. However, very few of our players have had consistent success or playing time (injuries, depth at better clubs, being part of our poo for a few years) at NRL level and the confidence is quick to be knocked. A few losses did that. Our lack of improvement is also fatal for morale; a season this long allows you to form pretty firm judgements of your team mates and I doubt many of them have confidence in each other when attacking the opposition's line at this stage. And when you're not scoring and show no signs of remedying this, compounding it with mistakes, then your resolve starts to waver during the tough stuff like defense or hit-ups. And then the belief in your defense starts to waver and then…oh boy.
Plus, our team is/was poor financially and the day-to-day reality of that eg. not getting paid your TPA, buying your own tape, lowers self-esteem. That's the same in everyday life as it is for sport. We tried to fix this twice by paying big bucks to a relatively star players in Tuqiri and Blair with fairly disastrous results, plus this hid our bigger, long-term business problems. However everyone can see that our business is being handled way better now and that has led to Mbye and Reynolds joining us. More importantly it will lead to players staying with us and being attracted to us. Nearly all of our good juniors have left for perceived better-run, more secure options.
The best players aren't just talented, they think they're better than everyone else and may actually be able to prove it. Reynolds and Mbye aren't quite at that level but we haven't recruited many of those guys in our history at all; Gareth Ellis and Tuqiri being the few. In fact our juniors have always been our most successful means of obtaining our best talent and that is simply a process that has rarely worked in the NRL due to the losses a team incurs developing those blokes and the inevitable picking of talent by richer clubs with no return to the poorer ones.
Last, we've never addressed our forward pack issues. Injuries, lack of talent, mental application, all plague us every year in that category.
