Expansion: Yes. Relocation: No. (2017)

This week Phil Rothfield, who is laughably billed by the Daily Telegraph as ‘League’s most feared critic’, decided to sling some mud at the Wests Tigers by suggesting they should be canned to make way for an expansion side.

The Tigers (along with Parramatta and Penrith) are competing with the AFL’s Greater Western Sydney Giants for control and dominance of the Western Sydney corridor. Last year Rothfield was singing the praises of the Giants amidst the salary cap scandal surrounding Parramatta. He wrote the piece completely focusing on the scandals around the Eels and completely ignoring any negatives about GWS.

This alone leads one to consider if Rothfield has a hidden, pro-AFL agenda. He’s entitled to that stance if he likes. This piece has no intention of rubbishing the AFL.

There have been calls from the same small group of commentators for years suggesting there’s too many Sydney clubs. The only thing that changes is which team – and it’s generally whichever side is performing poorly at the time. The loudest and most recent were directed at Rothfiled’s beloved Cronulla Sharks during their string of scandals. Now, Wests Tigers are in the firing line.

But fans should not be concerned. These are merely tactics from the media to create future stories to essentially keep themselves employed. Rothfield’s opinion now has several follow-up pieces on the Daily Telegraph website; one where he produces the results of his poll about which team should get booted and another, a retort to the suggestion by the Tiger’ boss Justin Pascoe, who said, “We are not going anywhere” – which could be a reference to their 2017 campaign as well.

All that aside, it’s time to address this constant talk of relocation and call the concept for what it is: utter stupidity.

Sporting teams are unique. Their players will come from all corners of the globe, but their fans are largely situated in the same place. Furthermore, it doesn't matter where fans relocate to, they'll always support the same team.

Relocating a team alienates the vast majority of their fans, who can no longer attend their games because they no longer play in the area they once represented (ie - near the residence of a majority of fans). Those fans will be angry and disillusioned and are very likely to stop following the game with the same passion. That’s a cornered market of customers who have all been lost.

Then there’s the issue of where they are relocated to. If a location without a team is keen to be involved in the competition, it will be to support their own local side. Trying to get these people to support a team that doesn’t represent them is doomed to fail.

Even if they do accept the team and follow it, you have achieved very little. You haven’t necessarily increased the population of league followers, because the new followers just replace the lost ones.

The AFL understands this. They have nine Melbourne-based teams in a similarly populated city, across a smaller geographical area than the Sydney clubs in the NRL, yet there has not been the continued calls to cull those sides or suggestions there’s too many.

South Melbourne relocated to Sydney in 1982, around the same time the NSWRL axed Newtown (and, briefly, Western Suburbs), while Fitzroy merged with Brisbane in 1996, a couple of years before a the three new NRL merged entities in Sydney and the two-year expulsion of Souths.

The AFL realises the obvious point, that expansion without culling teams actually increases your supporter base.

This is a mindset the NRL must adopt. There is nothing wrong with expanding the competition to 18 teams – but they have to do it without killing or relocating any existing sides. Furthermore, the NRL should be looking to new markets for expansion, not existing ones. It would be entirely hypocritical if they were to cull a Sydney side because there are too many teams in the existing Sydney market, only to introduce a new team in another existing market.

Sydney can cope with nine teams. It had 12 Sydney sides in 1967, cut down to 11 in 1984, and wasn’t reduced again until after the Super League war. Given the population growth in Sydney in the last 50 years, nine teams is comfortably sustainable. Like Melbourne, Sydney also has a Rugby Union team in Super Rugby, 2 A League teams and a team from the rival code playing in the heart of the city.

****This article appeared on Commentary Box Sports website on  June 28, 2017****

Woods' "Exit Interview" Reveals Gross Contradictions (2017)

Yesterday Wests Tigers captain Aaron Woods move to Canterbury at the end of the year was finally confirmed. He also gave a brief interview with James Hooper, detailing his decision.

The interview isn’t very long, and considerably shorter if you remove all the times he ‘ummed’ and said “ya know”. He made a few statements that went a long way to showing that he’s something of a hypocrite and not much of a leader.

He made mention of the controversies at the club taking their toll.

“We’re forever in the media,” Woods told Hooper.

“You wanna go in there and pay footy, but there’s always something happening outside of the club that’s out of our control.”

The silly thing is, that giving this interview has only worsened that problem and not helped to minimise it. He also stated how he was disappointed with the leadership at the club – but the fact he took pot-shots at the club in this interview shows a complete lack of leadership on his behalf.

Rather surprisingly, he also said, “If you had’ve asked me at the start of the year, I would’ve said ‘mate, I’ll be a one club player at the Wests Tigers.’”

What makes this surprising is that prior to that he said, “We didn’t know who the long-term coach was going to be and they want us to sign a three- or four-year deal.”

The thing is though, Aaron, your new, long-term coach was appointed two weeks prior to your offer from the Tigers being removed. So you did know. He introduced himself to you and you stated at the time that you couldn’t believe how much he looked like his son.

The fact you did actually knew who the long-term coach was all but proves that this comment is bollocks.

This is also further proven given that you said you’d be willing to be a Tiger for life at the start of the year, despite knowing that then-coach Jason Taylor would likely have his contract end at the completion of this season anyway.

So you were keen to stay a Tiger under a coach whose contract was ending in a few months’ time, but couldn’t commit when you got what you wanted, a long-term coach. Come on Aaron, pull the other one mate.

You ended the interview by saying you just wanted to put all of this behind you. Well, giving that interview surely hasn’t gone any way towards ensuring that will happen. Genius.

So let’s tell it how it is.

You could have signed an extension to your contract last year. You could have signed an extension this year when you were allegedly willing to stay a Tiger for life. You could have also accepted the offer the Tigers had on the table for you, after you got confirmation of your new long-term coach.

This all points to you having decided, in your own mind, that you were leaving the club long ago.

All of this drivel in your interview was just a pathetic swipe at the club. You claim you’re tired of all the drama around the place, yet you just heaped more on it.

That’s not the actions of a leader, but rather the actions of an immature man.

 
That is why you get booed – and why you deserve to be booed – by your own (soon-to-be former) club’s fans.

 ****This article appeared on Commentary Box Sports website on  May 1, 2017****

Clueless Tigers Repeating Same Old Mistakes (2017)

On Monday the Wests Tigers board decided to sack their head coach Jason Taylor. It’s a decision the club has made twice before in less than five years when it terminated Tim Sheens’ lucrative contract in the 2012 offseason and then foolishly removed Michael Potter at the end of 2014, just as he was making progress.

The fact is the people appointing the coaches have got it wrong twice now and it has had a big impact on the development of the improperly labelled ‘Big 4’ of James Tedesco, Aaron Woods, Mitchell Moses and Luke Brooks. If anything they should be labelled ‘the Big 2 and 2 passengers.’

The Tigers have admitted their salary cap has been a mess for a number of years and have done very little to amend that. They provided zero support for Michael Potter and gave him little control of the roster. Despite this, Potter was slowly making headway before the club panicked over a silly story aired by Gorden Tallis about an off-the-record comment Farah had made 18 months earlier. The club didn’t try any mediation between captain and coach. They let the story drag on and entirely derail their campaign.

The club then opted to remove Potter, which was seen as the board’s backing of Farah – despite both parties saying there was no issue between them.

Two years later the joint venture turned its back on Farah and allowed his legacy and reputation at the club to be dragged through the slime and be completely destroyed, opting to side with coach Jason Taylor.

Now they’ve knifed Taylor. It’s a hasty decision made with no apparent replacement in sight. It’s a decision made under the guise of perceived business acumen, to fix the club. What it is though is yet another clueless decision by a clueless board that have proven, on multiple occasions and across multiple facets of running a sporting team, to be clueless.

While Taylor needed to go, the issue is that he should never have been hired. Who hires an unproven NRL coach to take over a team of relative rookies in a rebuilding phase?

The Tigers’ recruitment and retention team has long been a laughing stock of the competition. It seems they are hellbent on trying to recreate the sort of team that won the 2005 premiership, without realising that the game has changed so much since then, to the point that small teams have zero advantage.

The club under Taylor has continually gotten worse. In 2017 they have zero depth at all to work with, made no worthwhile purchases in the off season, and yet are still at the cap ceiling. They’re paying over a $1 million to people no longer at the joint.

The last two weeks has seen the NRL side lose 36-2 against a Penrith side who were flogged in their previous match and then 46-6 against a Canberra side who were also flogged in their previous match.

The Holden Cup side lost 36-4 to Penrith and 54-10 to Canberra, while the Intrust Super Premiership side lost 52-12 to Penrith and 36-0 against the Warriors.

That’s a total of six losses in six games, scoring 34 points and conceding 260, an average scoreline of 43-5 across all three grades.

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This shows that while Jason Taylor was part of the problem, he wasn’t the whole problem.

Marina Go, the Wests Tigers chairperson, stated in yesterday’s press conference, “from the board down we all take responsibility for where we sit today.”

Yet what transpired was the board taking very little responsibility, throwing the easy target under the bus while addressing none of the issues that they are entirely responsible for.

How is the club at its cap ceiling?

Why is there zero depth at the club?

Why are all three sides being flogged?

Why did the club agree to have its ‘Big 2 and 2 passengers’ all come off contract at the same time?
Why did no one know about Tim Simona’s off-field antics?

The board hired Taylor and proceeded to sack him. That shows the board is simply not good enough to be running a football club. If the Wests Tigers are going to enact genuine change, then the decision-makers above the coach all have to go as well. You cannot change culture by removing one person. The decisions to sack/not retain Sheens, Potter, Benji Marshall and Farah have all proven that.

At what point does the club stop ridding itself of coaches and players to try fix their many issues, and instead start to look inward and realise that the issue lies in the front office and the boardroom?

****This article appeared on Commentary Box Sports website on  March 21, 2017****