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****

Communication Breakdown Causes Great Divide (2017)

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”

In recent years the media has complained about not getting the sort of access to NRL players and officials enjoyed by media personnel in other sports and countries.

And they were right. But the problem isn’t that they don’t have the same access, it’s a distrust in the media by clubs, players and officials caused by the denigrating reporting and attitude of the media in recent years towards the game.

Many mainstream media personnel simply don’t like or respect the game and it’s players anywhere near enough and, in turn, the game doesn’t respect them. It’s the most backwards and ignorant attitude to have from people who want to be rugby league reporters. For some of these people, they are out to get a scoop and try and get famous instead of doing their job properly.

A quick look to how the media and the sport of AFL work together shows just how good it could be. But instead the vicious circle of heaping hatred and distrust upon each other in Rugby League is only going to be detrimental to both the media and the game.

Last weekend the Wests Tigers suffered a heavy defeat. The post-match press conference, however, inevitably saw the coach and captain pummelled with questions about deregistered player Tim Simona. Jason Taylor stated that he nor Aaron Woods would be answering questions about Simona until the next week. He was then asked a few more questions before have to again assert that no comment was going to be made about the Simona situation. After a brief period of talking about the game, another question about Simona came up, after which Taylor and Woods just stood up and left.

Naturally, the media focussed on the departure from the press conference. This is only the most recent incident where the media try to manufacture negative news about the game. One of the best examples came in 2012 when the Bulldogs held their Mad Monday celebrations behind locked doors at Belmore Sports Ground. What transpired was Channel 9 sending a helicopter over the venue to get images of what was going on, while sending a crime reporter to the venue to ask questions. She was obscenely and wrongly abused by some of the people inside the venue. But if the media hadn’t turned up and prodded them with a stick, then the attacks wouldn’t have happened. But they did and the media had a story to cover about the poor woman and the arsehole rugby league players.

This nasty incident showed brilliantly this distrust and arguably hatred between the two. It surfaced again publicly in 2014 when South Sydney player Ben Te’o refused to take questions from Danny Weidler, then footage showed Te’o speaking to Weidler after the presser, telling him to never ask him questions before calling him a germ.

When you also consider the hostile relationship between News Ltd columnist, the late Rebecca Wilson and rugby league fans as well, you can see that the animosity has spread into the wider rugby league community.

You can find countless more examples, but at the end of the day what needs to be sought is some sort of truce between the two. If the mainstream media can stop doing what it can to dig up filth about the game and then drag it out ad nauseum, opting to be reasonable and respectable about stories, good and bad, then the NRL will be more inclined to trust the media and be more open to allowing players and officials a wider media exposure, which will benefit both parties much more.

 ****This article appeared on Commentary Box Sports website on  March 15, 2017****