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SportsSeptember 22, 2015

Sports: Pushing in the Right Direction – Why This Disastrous Warriors Season Was Different

Guest writer
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Rugby league author Will Evans looks back on yet another terrible Warriors season and finds a different origin, one which might – finally – lead to a different result in 2016.

Déjà vu isn’t a strong enough term. Recurring nightmare sums it up more accurately.

The Warriors’ 2015 campaign – after familiar pre-season tough-talk – was effectively a carbon copy of the previous three: a slow start, a mid-season surge that had many spruiking them as title contenders, and a diabolical finish that saw the club flunk out of finals contention.

That last element was exaggerated even more than usual. In 2013 and ’14, the Warriors were still in the top-eight race heading into Round 26. This year, breaking under the burden of a terrible injury toll, they lost their last eight games to finish 13th. The 20-year celebrations descended into a funeral procession.

But it was the way they lost those games that made it an all-time low for the Warriors’ long-suffering fans. In the six rounds after Shaun Johnson’s gut-wrenching broken ankle, the Warriors scored the opening try on four occasions – twice building double-figure leads – but crumbled to lose every time. They conceded 50 points in consecutive weeks, and averaged 32.5 points conceded from Rounds 19-26.

Usually when the Warriors are struggling, we can at least count on them finding the try-line. Not so during this slump. They scored just over 11 points per game, and were held to nil twice – a fate that had befallen the club just four times in its previous 20 seasons.

The mid-season euphoria and dreams of premiership grandeur that followed the acquisition of Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Issac Luke for 2016 has dissipated into scepticism and negativity amongst the Warriors’ faithful. Someone has to be held accountable, and in professional sports – and certainly in the NRL and at the Warriors – that’s usually the coach. Unsurprisingly, Andrew McFadden’s position at the helm has come under intense scrutiny.

Rumours abounded recently that the club’s 2011 grand final mentor Ivan Cleary, who endured a similarly disappointing and injury-ravaged campaign with Penrith this year, was on the outs with Panthers general manager Phil Gould and on his way back to Penrose.

Then earlier this week, Brisbane’s Triple M journo Ben Dobbin sent New Zealand into a frenzy by declaring on TV show NRL360 that McFadden won’t last the off-season, and the Warriors are chasing Stephen Kearney. CEO Jim Doyle, in that irresistibly nonchalant Scottish accent, rubbished the report and reaffirmed the club’s support of ‘Cappy’. (Dobbin, it should be noted, is regularly ribbed by NRL360‘s co-hosts about the low conversion rate of his ‘scoops’.)

The romanticism of Cleary, the Warriors’ most successful coach, or Kearney, a Warriors foundation player and all-conquering Kiwi Test coach, is tough to deny. But the best option is sticking with McFadden.

Unlike his ill-fated predecessors, soft touch Brian McClennan and the overtly spiritual Matt Elliott, ‘Cappy’ has no qualms in taking a tough line with the Warriors. He has already spoken candidly about the unprofessional, unacceptable culture that has permeated the club for years. He’ll tear it all down and start again if he needs to. 

While it’s no justification for their meek late-season surrender, not enough weight has been afforded to the worst injury crisis in the club’s history. Thomas Leuluai, Ben Henry and Ngani Laumape were rubbed out early on, the mercurial Shaun Johnson – who had recently found the elusive consistency and game-management to go with his unparalleled attacking genius – and Manu Vatuvei failed to finish the season. Additionally, Sam Tomkins, Konrad Hurrell, Ryan Hoffman and David Fusitua all missed significant chunks of 2015. A staggering six rookies played in the Warriors’ final match; four of those made 18 or more appearances in their first year in the big time.   

McFadden deserves the opportunity to atone for this year’s failure with a team he has put together, rather than the one he inherited. Plenty of deadwood has been moved on, while he was instrumental in luring Tuivasa-Sheck and Luke back home – not to mention getting Hoffman over here 12 months ago. He’ll have Johnson back on deck, and he’ll bear the fruits of blooding so many youngsters this year.

It’s also about time we debunked a clichéd Warriors myth. The notion that the club’s talented roster dictates they should have won several premierships by now is garbage. Yes, they’ve underachieved  – often embarrassingly – but the overall strength of their squad have been significantly overstated.

The Warriors have only intermittently possessed world-class players in the key ‘spine’ positions – and rarely more than one at the same time. There’s always been a couple of glaring weaknesses in their full-strength line-up. That all changes in 2016 when three-quarters of the world-beating Kiwi Test spine will combine on the same NRL team-sheet – and, consequently, the excuses will run out. It’s unquestionably a top-four roster now and McFadden won’t survive another non-finals finish, a fate he will surely accept as reasonable.

More support will be provided for the coach; former All Blacks mentor Wayne Smith has been sounded out, and someone of his calibre would be a tremendous asset for McFadden and the club. Obviously more needs to change at the club than simply putting together a line-up that resembles a Fantasy League enthusiast’s wet dream. The issue of culture – however vague that may seem to rest of us – is apparently being addressed, and tied in with that is instilling the requisite mental toughness to compete on a weekly basis.

Fans want to see their heroes hurt rather than upbeat after a narrow loss. Ashamed rather than bewildered after a 30-point defeat. Shoddy edge defence or poor ball-security can be rectified with practice, but a hard-nosed attitude is more difficult to learn. The perception of the Australian media is that for all their talent and potential, the Warriors turn to water when the heat is applied. Unfortunately, that’s not  a case of customary Kiwi-bashing – they’re bang on the mark.

The ‘actions not words’ leadership style of the unassuming Simon Mannering – arguably the club’s second-greatest player after Stacey Jones – came under fire during the Warriors’ losing streak, with Hoffman, Johnson and Luke mooted as possible replacements. But McFadden nipped any prospect of a captaincy change in the bud.

“We’ll be reviewing everything, but one thing I can say is Simon Mannering will still be captain,” the coach said pointedly. “In these circumstances, when times are tough, you really find out about people. He left it all on the park and he was an inspiration to his teammates. That’s how he leads, so nothing’s going to change there.”

The strength of McFadden’s conviction is admirable, but there’s an overriding feeling he could be missing a trick by keeping the status quo in that department. As Cleary did by stripping the captaincy from the revered Steve Price in 2010 and handing it to a 23-year-old Mannering, McFadden could revitalise the Warriors by putting the (c) next to Johnson’s name.

Chief playmakers such as Allan Langer, Laurie Daley, Brad Fittler, Andrew Johns, Darren Lockyer, Johnathan Thurston and Cameron Smith all took on captaincy roles at a similar stage of their careers, and all but Daley and Thurston have led their clubs to a grand final win. The 25-year-old Johnson is a shot-caller of the same ilk, while his burgeoning maturity on and off the field has been as eye-catching as his footwork.  

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Nevertheless, in the shape of Johnson, Mannering, Tuivasa-Sheck, Luke and Hoffman, along with stalwarts like Ben Matulino, Jacob Lillyman and Manu Vatuvei, the Warriors are laced with leaders and winners. Seeing the suspended Luke in tears after South Sydney’s finals exit last Sunday should be more exciting for Warriors fans than his peerless dummy-half work. The team desperately needs that level of passion.

It’s a difficult concept to grasp given recent results and several years of disappointment (against a backdrop of two decades of unfulfilled prophecies) but the positives far outweigh the negatives heading into 2016.

It doesn’t bear thinking about where the club goes from here if the latest strategy crashes and burns. And perhaps the Warriors don’t deserve our blind faith after so many broken promises. But do you really want to be on the outside looking in if the Doyle-McFadden combination steers them to the promised land?

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SportsSeptember 21, 2015

Sports: Q&A – Georgian Coach Milton Haig on His Journey from Invercargill to Eastern Europe

Guest writer
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Alexander Bisley has a soft spot for the Lelos, the Georgian national rugby team. And now, thanks to a first up victory over Tonga, so does most of the rugby world. Here The Spinoff’s man-at-large at the Rugby World Cup chats to their kiwi coach Milton Haig about shovelling snow, learning the lingo, lazy bastards, and heavy drinking.

So, is rugby pretty much Georgia’s national sport now?

It’s considered by a lot of people as the national sport because it’s been the most successful team sport for ages now. Their soccer’s not that great here and it’s full of corruption. Because rugby’s got great values behind the game the Georgian people have really taken to it. It’s become really, really popular.

Your Lelos play and train in some cold, elemental weather?

My first week in Tblisi we were training in the snow. I said to the manager, “there’s a foot of snow out there”. He replied, “Oh, that won’t matter.” Next minute, there were about thirty people with shovels [laughs].

It’s cool see Kiwi coaches doing well with teams all around the world – seven of the 20 teams at RWC2015 have kiwi coaches.

We have such an understanding of the game and New Zealand Rugby does a very good job of investing in certain people. They understand that they can’t hold everybody; that sometimes it’s actually necessary to let them go, get experience overseas and hopefully then they’ll bring that overseas experience back.

Your prime examples already are Graham Henry, Shag [Steve Hansen] and Wayne Smith. That’s how you pick up your skill-sets, your understanding of different cultures. When people don’t speak your language and you’ve got to coach rugby then you’ve got to find some other skill-sets that help you get your point across.

It’s not just the big teams. Marty Davis was with Luxembourg twelve years. Then you’ve got the top end with the likes of Vern Cotter and Joe Schmidt and Warren Gatland. So we’re everywhere, because we have that innate understanding of the game. As soon as we’re born we’ve got a rugby ball in our hands, haven’t we?

Tell me about what Mareb Sharikadze, Georgia’s second-five and player of 2014, represents?

Mareb’s 22 and he’s played 30-something games for the national team. He’s the forerunner of what we want from Georgia, a back that’s smart, understands rugby well, is professional about what he’s doing – he plays in France.

We’ve always had pretty good forwards. When we looked at Georgia in 2011, they competed for a large degree with people like Scotland, Argentina and England, who were in their pool. But their game was pretty one-dimensional, forward-based and they didn’t use their backs a lot.

So the whole plan of coming here was get a bit more expansive to beat these teams. Our whole idea was to build some backs, and get some blitz in our game through our backline.

It’s about giving the boys out the back a bit of self-belief. I told them that rather than holding a teacup and having a smoke they were going to be busy now. The backs lapped it up, and said, “Glory, thank you very much”. Now they’re pretty good at it, and it’s quite exciting because our better players coming through our younger age grades are backs.

We’ve still got our traditional forward base boys coming through as well. I said, “If we’re going to beat teams like Samoa and Japan who we’ve never beaten before –we have to have a bit more to our game, boys.” We beat Samoa and Japan during the last couple of years.

I’m impressed with your Georgian language skills, Milton.

Yeah [laughs]. Look, I’ve been learning it for over two and a half years. It’s a really difficult language to learn to speak, because it’s got so many different little tongue twisters that you’ve got to get your mouth and tongue around.

It helps you within the community, gets respect. It’s good for our children to speak different languages and to listen to different languages and different cultures. It’s been tough, but I’ve got a good grasp of it now. I probably shouldn’t say that [laughs].

I understand pretty much 80 per cent of it when people are talking to me. Rugby stuff I know and I can speak it. General conversations are pretty good, but there are times when guys are speaking to me and I’ve got no idea what they’re saying at all because they’ve got a different dialect, or because they speak so fast.

So your language study is like an intense daily gym session?

It is [laughs]. Definitely! At 1.30pm everyday it’s “In you go and don’t come out for an hour.”

You’re Maori—father Ngati Porou (East Coast), mother Ngati Maniapoto (King Country)—but raised in Invercargill, with limited opportunity to learn the Reo?

I was born on the East Coast; I was just a young tacker, only six months old, when we moved to Invercargill. There weren’t too many Maori back in Invercargill in those days [laughs] – a bit too cold. Dad never brought us up in a Maori environment; it was basically a European environment that we grew up in. So he never taught us the language or anything, although he was fluent. It was a generation that lost it.

Another thing about you C.V. that interests me is you worked in the media industry?

I started off at the Bay of Plenty Times in Tauranga. A guy from the rugby club, said, “I’ve got a job as general manager at Bay of Plenty Times”. I said, “Mate, I don’t know anything about bloody newspapers apart from I used to deliver them when I was a kid in Invercargill.”

I spent nearly fourteen years there in the industry because I absolutely loved it. As somebody told me, “Once you get ink in your blood, it’ll never leave.”

Both rugby and journalism, at their best there’s a real camaraderie to them, isn’t there?

Absolutely. I get on really well with journos. It’s like, “Ok, I know what you’re looking for; I can give you some of it, but I can’t give you all of it, you know?” Some of them are lazy bastards, as with any industry… knowing that there are certain boundaries that you can’t cross from the coach’s perspective and also from the journalist’s perspective. Just respect each other and what you do. You do get pricks in both jobs. Not all coaches are good blokes, there’s some absolute arseholes that do the job. Again, it’s just a matter of having that mutual respect.

Georgia’s been so dominant in the European Nations Cup for seven years. How about the Lelos joining an expanded Seven Nations?

We’re asking them to let us in. From a rugby perspective we can add value. We mightn’t compete in the first year, but we certainly know that we’d probably be able to compete in the second and third if you give us a crack.  Commercially, we know that we can’t add as much value as some of those other big countries that certainly have better financial backers than we would ever have. But if it’s money, then tell us that that’s what it is and tell us the amount. The Georgian government are very great supporters of ours and we have a couple of other big benefactors.

The Lelos aren’t going to beat the All Blacks in Cardiff are they?

We’re not afraid of any team but obviously the All Blacks are the All Blacks and that’s going to be a massive – we’re not even entertaining the notion that we’ll beat them, because to do that they’re going to have to have 10 people on the field and we’re going to have to have 20 [laughs].

But certainly we’ve got our eyes on all those remaining pool games. Our goal is to qualify automatically for Japan 2019. To do that you’re going to have to win at least two games and end up third in our pool. If we can develop some momentum, who knows what else can happen?

I heard you had to tell some of the boys to cut back on their drinking. If you qualify for Japan will you be OK with them having a few vodkas?

[laughs] If they do that, mate, that can have a bottle each, I don’t care. I’ll help them celebrate, don’t worry.

 

Alexander Bisley is covering the Rugby World Cup for The Spinoff and other UK-based publications.