However one thing to me is clear. The dynamics in the club are busted. Daniel Anderson doesn’t have the full support of the board and he doesn’t have the full support of his players. There is a clash of cultures and a clashing of responsibilities and egos.
While it may seem that the castle has come tumbling down as our season slowly crumbled, in reality I don’t believe it has ever been as well fortified as our golden run last year might have led us all to believe. I was told last year by a person working within the organisation that Daniel Anderson wouldn’t be a long-term coach at Parramatta. Given we’d just made the grand final it seemed a strange thing to say. However, his observation was that Anderson was very much a manager who wanted things done his way and that was already causing friction within the club.
Now, Anderson has an impressive track records as a coach. He took the Warriors to their first grand final, dominated English Super League with St Helens and in his first year with Parramatta achieved another grand final appearance. Given that track record, it’s hard to argue he can’t coach. So what happened in 2010. How did a successful coach lead the pre-season favourites to a miserable finish in the bottom third of the ladder?
I believe the answer is much bigger than Daniel Anderson and the heart of it, is the club’s culture. It’s the culture that has seen us go nearly a quarter of a century without a premiership and a culture that Daniel Anderson tried to challenge and fail.
Trying to put a finger on the culture that underpins the Parramatta Eels is extremely difficult, because we’re a club of paradoxes and contradictions. Here is a club that expects success but which for so many years has failed to bring home the bacon. The results of its NRL side swing wildly from week-to-week, never mind year-to-year. Last year, Daniel Anderson described his squad as being enigmatic and said that’s the last thing, he wanted his football team to be.
If you want to try and understand the Parramatta Eels, you have to start at the start. In the juniors. It is one of the biggest and best junior Rugby League nurseries in the world, and it has always been perennially successful. However, on one level I believe Parramatta is a victim of its own junior success. It’s young talents are used to winning. They get talent scouted early, given the best coaching and those that are really good - who are probably going to go on to play NRL - can often get by on sheer talent. So when they hit the big-time and they come up against that top tier of players who are just as talented as they are, the work ethic and killer instinct that comes from having scrapped your way to the top doesn’t always seem to be there. I don’t think its unfair to say that our players through all grades are relatively pampered.
It’s pretty obvious that’s a culture Daniel Anderson wanted to change. His big early recruitment decisions were to not aggressively chase the signatures of either Feleti Mateo and Krisnan Inu, both incredibly talented but neither have ever been regarded as hard workers. His selection decisions always favoured the brave and courageous over the bold and classy. He elevated the likes of Jeff Robson and Daniel Mortimer, both tenacious scrappers, over the likes of Mateo and Kris Keating, two players capable of coming up with big plays but neither have been known for their reliability or ability to follow a gameplan.
He has a reputation for ripping into players when they don’t deliver to his expectations. The biggest criticisms I hear of his people management is that if he could be more nurturing and better communicate his expectations. I imagine Anderson’s coaching style works best with experienced, hard-nuts who enjoy exchanging barbs and can take a dressing down and then get on with trying to do better. However, for those players who might be less confident and who might need a more nurturing approach, you can see pretty plainly how Anderson’s approach may result in division or at least resentment. You can also see how once things start to go downhill, they are just as likely to spiral out of control. A rev-up can affect change only so many times, it’s not sustainable over a longer term.
For Anderson to succeed at Parramatta he had to change the culture to fit his way of coaching and management. He needed a player clean-out, for one. However, all he managed to do was tweak the roster. Whether, that’s of his own doing or not, is open to conjecture but we will go onto 2011 with much the same roster as 2010 - minus a bit of class.
I believe Anderson failed to appreciate how important skill is to succeeding in the NRL. The quality is so high, defences so impenetrable that you need those special players to create points. Courage over class may be a formula than Anderson likes, but it’s not an equation that will lead to NRL success.
Also working against Anderson were obvious clashes with board members and administrators. Anderson’s way is dictatorial - Parramatta resembles more of a socialist collective. He never had the power to execute the kind of sweeping changes that would result in culture change.
And even if he did, I don’t think it’s possible to effect that kind of sustainable change from the top. It’s worth noting that many of Parramatta’s most successful seasons came as the result of bringing in senior players from outside of the club like the Bulldogs brigade that turned the club around in the late nineties and the recruitment of the likes of Glenn Morrison, Mark Riddell and Timanat Tahu in 2005. But they’re band-aid measures that fizzle out over time. Culture needs to be changed from the bottom up and it needs to be in harmony with the inherent characteristics of your organisation.
In short, the pieces of the puzzle just haven’t fit. If Daniel Anderson is to coach next year, he is going to have to try and modify his ways as much as he tries to effect change in his squad and within the club. I understand he met individually with his players this week and asked for open and frank feedback. Just as his demise at the Warriors probably made him a better coach, there are certainly many lessons from this awful year that can make Daniel Anderson a better mentor (and I use that word very deliberately). The question is whether bridges can be mended, or if its going to be simply better to knock down what’s there and start again.
If we have a change of coach, then the club needs to be midful of the lessons of 2010 and it needs to make an appointment with the big picture in mind. It needs to define itself, understands its strengths and weaknesses and start to re-build a culture around the things it has the most control over. But that my fellow Eels supporters, is the subject of another blog at another time.
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I guess for 2011, we just have to hope that certain things gel, so that the club can get off to a better start to the year.
It looks as though Ando had try to harden them up and instil a culture change at the top in a short space of time. Unfortunately there's very few coaches who command such immediate respect to probably do that. Bennet is one. Gibson was one too. I remember reading he moved they're training down to Granville where the facilities were much worse. Had the team meetings on an old rickety bus.told the players from day one he didn't care about they're scrapbooks. I applaud Ando for trying, I really do.
I hope he does get another chance, otherwise all the pain of 2010 might be for nothing. What's to say a new coach will be any different? I hope the perceived culture issue is off the mark and we can turn things around in 2011, we need to keep all the new members who joined 2010 for years to come.
I think the things about Bennett and Gibson, is they're always described as father-figure people. I think if players know that when you're tough on them, you're making decisions for their own good, that's when you get those sustainable, long-term results.
Obviously ando thinks he will be the coach if he trying to sort out any player disenchantment
I have made comments on here in the past about how i think Parra get it wrong in the way they pick there junior teams by picking teams that will win comps in the juniors rather than teams that will produce players that will win NRL comps.
Can ask ask Eugene, with the junior clubs are they working in line with the Eels structure with developing 1st graders rather than junior champions, or could they be doing a better job? Is it some junior clubs with that mentality or are they all pretty much the same. I'm really curious to know?
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