Like most of you, I read the interview in Friday’s Daily Telegraph during which Manly power-broker Scott Penn addressed the bountiful rumours that Geoff Toovey, under fire after a disastrous start to the season for the Manly Sea Eagles, and basically indicated that rugby league is a results-based business, and that Toovey needs results – read: wins – to keep his job.
Under any other circumstances, I’d agree whole-heartedly with that notion, but there are extenuating circumstances in 2015 that Penn, rather worryingly, didn’t mention. Toovey’s gig has gotten exponentially harder with every passing week as more and more important players are sent to the sideline. In fact, in a game, Manly’s All Injured team could probably trouble the team that’s currently on the field.
Promising youngster Clinton Gutherson did his ACL inside the first twenty minutes in Manly’s season opener against Parramatta, opening a floodgate of injuries. In recent weeks, Steve Matai and Jamie Lyon – an undoubted talisman for the team – have spent time on the sidelines, joining key forward Feleti Mateo, Josh Starling and Brenton Lawrence. Brett Stewart is now facing an undisclosed number of weeks on the sideline, and Saturday night’s loss to Penrith saw gun rookie Tom Trbojevic and Jesse Sene-Lefao did not return in the second half with an ankle sprain and shoulder injury respectively. Where I come from, that’s called being ‘ravaged’ with injury.
Say what you will of the brittleness of Manly’s forward pack and the disinterest from it’s halves pairing, chalking up wins in the ultra-competitive world that the NRL in 2015 most definitely has become isn’t easy at the best of times, and it’s damn near impossible when some of your best talent is sitting on the sidelines, and destined to be there for an extended period of time.
No coach, not Wayne Bennett or Michael Maguire or Trent Robinson, would fare much better than Toovey has under the current situation. It’s going to get worse for Manly, who will be without Stewart for about a month, and there’s no telling whether Trbojevic or Sene-Lefao will front up next Friday against the Bulldogs. Jamie Lyon hasn’t trained since his injury, so the veteran captain is probably at long odds for this coming weekend, too.
A loss on Friday night at ANZ Stadium will drop Manly to 1-6 on the season, and Toovey’s hot seat will probably start to roast him. Unfairly, if you ask me. Of course, there is more going on at Manly than just a simple matter of wins and losses. Politics has infected the goings-on at the club, and there appear to be forces at play who want to see the back end of Toovey.
To those people, I say this: firing Toovey now, with the extent of the injury crisis, is going to alienate a massive chunk of the loyal Manly fan base. Things are undeniably grim at the moment, and the inglorious jettisoning of a club legend in the midst of a bad season isn’t going to make things better. If anything, the club is going to lose more face with it’s fans. Most importantly, Toovey deserves better.
It’s not like Toovey has been a horrible coach before. He coached the squad to a Grand Final in 2013, and into the finals, once more, in 2014. This year was always going to be a defining one for the club, following the losses of Anthony Watmough, Glenn Stewart and Jason King from the forward pack, and the uncertainty surrounding the future of Daly Cherry-Evans and Kieran Foran, and had Manly been as horrible as they are now with a full complement of players, then I’d probably be advocating – or, at least leaning towards – getting rid of Toovey.
Fact of the matter is, there are far too many players on the sidelines to get a fair indication of where Toovey might’ve coached the team this season. Cooler heads need to prevail here, despite the board’s apparent loggerheads situation with their coach. It’s unfair to Toovey, an undisputed Manly legend, to make him the scapegoat for a year that’s been cruelled by an injury toll that’s as bad as any I can remember in recent memory.
There will be plenty of change in 2016. Foran and Cherry-Evans will be gone, with new halves in their place, and hopefully some of the money saved from the departure Foran and DCE will be used to buy some better forwards to complement what’s still a pretty dangerous backline, and then we’ll have a better idea what Toovey is capable of, a fairer assessment of his ability to get the most out of his best players. Pretty hard to do that at the moment, when the bulk of his best players are sitting in the stands, watching on, basically helpless to do anything about the team’s plight.
To pull the trigger and fire a Manly legend during the club’s toughest patch in a decade or more would make the board room operators down at Brookvale less popular than they already are, and it would send a pretty clear signal to fans that the boardroom was, as the rumours have suggested, indeed pursuing a vendetta against a loyal servant of the club who, this season, has done his level best under the most difficult and trying of circumstances. I wonder if Toovey’s replacement could realistically do any better, confronted with the same injury list. In fact, I highly doubt it.
Toovey needs to be given a chance in 2016. To fire him any sooner would be close to a travesty. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail…but this is Manly, where cooler heads don’t often operate, so I’m worried.
Somewhere about 6:30pm Saturday evening, I looked up at the scoreboard at ANZ Stadium, and the score didn’t make for happy reading. The Swans were getting thumped at every contest, and if not for some poor kicking by Essendon might’ve been similarly thumped on the big board. Then, for some – hopeful – solace, I looked at my phone. I was hoping to see that Manly were winning in Albury. They weren’t, and footy depression began to set in. It looked like being one of those nights.
As things turned out, the Swans got up in sensational circumstances, but Manly, despite a late comeback bid, lost to the lowly Raiders, to sleep even further into the NRL abyss. It’s the Sea Eagles’ worst start to a season since 2009, when they lost their first four games in a row. At least Manly has one win on the board this year.
I’m not so naïve as to think that this is just a small speed bump this year. The season, for all purposes, is probably over. The Sea Eagles, much as I hate to say it, don’t look like troubling anyone. Yes, last night’s loss came with a host of star power on the sidelines – Steve Matai and Jamie Lyon chief amongst them, talismans both – but I’m still concerned by the apparent lack of application by departing halved Daly Cherry-Evans and Kieran Foran, and that lack of offensive touch.
Most concerning, however, is the inability of the pack to do their job. Manly went from, say, a top-5 forward unit last year to one that now languishes in the bottom five. Losing Jason King, Anthony Watmough and Glenn Stewart in the off-season didn’t help matters, and the problem is that their replacements are either ineffective or part of an injury list that’s longer than the team sheet. Manly aren’t getting any real go-forward, and it’s hard to watch.
The one shining light from the Albury road trip disaster was the promising debut of youngster Tom Trbojevic, whom Andrew Johns, a fairly astute judge of talent, thinks will one day represent Australia. Right now, Manly fans will settle for Trbojevic settling into this Manly squad and, one day, taking over the fullback mantle held currently by the Prince of Brookvale, Brett Stewart.
Recently, Trbojevic has dominated the national youth Toyota Cup ompetition, and is one half of the two-brother tandem that have us Manly fans salivating when considering the future. In many ways, Tom and big brother Jake Trbojevic seem like they’re the second coming of the Stewart brothers. Not only are they juniors, who bleed maroon and white and have shunned offers from other clubs – leave ‘em alone, Dessy Hasler! – because they only want to play for Manly (loyalty – wonderful!), but one is a flashy fullback and the other toils away in the pack.
Eighteen-year-old Trbojevic, measuring in at 192cm and 96kg, scored his first try at the top grade inside two minutes, and added another one later in the second half. It was a better debut than even the most ardent Sea Eagles fan could possibly have hoped for. Scoring tries against under-20’s opposition is one thing, and to be able to bring that scoring touch up to first grade is no small accomplishment. Granted, some of Canberra’s defence was shoddy, but Trbojevic will still be buoyed by his debut.
The ceiling for this kid is pretty high. As noted by the FOX broadcast, he looked dangerous whenever he had the football, standing out amongst the rest of the team, whose offensive ineptitude was on show for much of the eight minutes on Saturday night. Not so for Trbojevic, who ran for 190m on twenty three runs.
In a season that will likely see Manly not qualify for their eleventh successive finals series, a lot of interested eyes will be focused on Tom Trbojevic every time he’s in the starting line-up, and based on last night’s performance, it’ll be hard for Geoff Toovey to not give him another run.
Yes, Manly fans, there’s going to be some short-term pain in the coming few seasons as the team moves into a new generation without some of their biggest recent stars, but if Tom Trbojevic is a sign of things to come at Fortress Brookvale, I can’t wait!a
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a Manly fan, so this issue has, in the last few weeks and months, affected me a little more closely than before, but the business of players transferring in and around the National Rugby League has perplexed me for a while now.
The NRL has been guilty of doing some strange things that no other football code seems to do in this day and age – a schedule where times are set by broadcasters just a few weeks ahead of the given round, and delayed broadcasts stacked with commercial interruption when social media makes it damn near impossible (or, at least, requires a concerted effort) to avoid scores – and the transfer rules are right at the top.
Good on Dave Smith for fixing the schedule so that it’s set in stone before the season, and getting live Sunday afternoon football. Now, he has to work on the ugly business of transferring players. No other sporting league allows this practice. We’ve seen it really rear it’s ugly head this off-season, with the constant speculation on the futures of Sea Eagles halves Daly Cherry Evans and Kieran Foran. It’s been confirmed that Cherry Evans is leaving Manly, and Foran appears to be following suit.
I’m absolutely disappointed, but that’s not why I wrote this article. The fact that players seem to be able to negotiate publically a year or more in advance of their contact ending is wrong. If they decide to move on from their current club, what does that mean for the final year(s) on their contract? Manly is looking at something of a dead rubber season with two of it’s most important players on the way out at the end of the year.
Football, of course, is a team sport, and it’s hard enough to win a premiership when everyone in the dressing room is on the same page and united. When you have guys announcing a year in advance that they’re off to a new club, it does absolutely nothing for the morale of the players around them. Manly, last night, played like a team divided. As much as I hate to agree with Phil Gould, he pointed out that there was little talk amongst teammates, and that’s a recipe for disaster.
No matter what the canned and clichéd press releases say, a player who signs to a new club a year ahead of his current contract actually expiring does not have a sole focus on closing out their career with a premiership at their current club. Does anyone believe that tired old statement? Your teammates aren’t going to be happy that you’re bolting, and have announced it a year before, derailing the season almost before it’s begun.
Imagine how South Sydney players might feel, with this talk of Greg Inglis being shopped around to rugby both here and abroad? His contract doesn’t end until 2017, and already he’s making front-page news for what he might possibly do. It’s ludicrous, and just might be the biggest blight on the game right now.
Take the NFL, for example. They have a specified time where off-contract players can decide upon a new contract with their current team, or sign a new one. I understand the EPL has a similar setup. The NFL’s designated period is during the off-season. That generally restricts contract talk until then. Yes, there is still speculation about a particular players, but it doesn’t completely hijack the actual game as the Manly pair’s rumoured movements has largely done.
In the weeks before the 2015 NRL season when we should be talking about what a wonderful year we have in store, there’ve been two narratives: off-field behavioural issues stretching from drug-related drama to Arizona night club drama, and the contractual status of Cherry Evans and Foran. There’s scarcely been talk of football. Imagine how much better things would be if we were actually talking about the on-field product!
The NRL needs to go to an NFL-type system where there’s a designated window for player transfers, and make sure it’s in the offseason. The sooner it happens, the better. Yes, I know sport is a business, but the business side shouldn’t overpower what happens on the park every weekend. You can’t stop players from thinking about their future (and I don’t blame them for securing a future in a career that is definitely a finite one) but the NRL can stop them from making contact with other clubs during the tenure of their current contract.
I know it won’t completely cut out conjecture on television, social media and in newspapers about where particular players might be heading at the end of their contracted term, but it should be less of a major talking point – speculation will die after a while – when we don’t see images of players like Cherry Evans visibly shopping himself from club to club. No matter what player or team is doing that, it’s a bad look, giving a sort of mercenary look to the game. It’s in bad taste, and it sends a message that that player believes himself to be bigger than the team. In a sport like rugby league, that’s can be a season’s death knell.
David Smith can quickly end what’s becoming a circus by following the lead of other sporting leagues around the world. Bring in a trade window as soon as he possibly can, and let’s try to get the focus back on football, because the on-field product is pretty damn good!
