Eels Blogs

Stephen Kearney’s future doesn’t look bright. The club has called in the consultants. This is a course of action, often used within the business community, to give you an excuse to drop the axe. It’s especially useful because it lets you do so, and still gives you someone to blame, if things don’t pan out.

The fact is that everyone at the top of the club got themselves into this mess. And right now, some of them are scrambling like hell to weedle themselves out of it. Certainly, from where I sit, all the messaging I see is about preparing the guillotine.

The leaked stories in both Sunday papers, both quote Eels CEO Bob Bentley as saying the board has given Kearney full control and of course the Herald story not so bluntly screams “The buck stops at Kearney”.

In other words: “Hey, it’s not our fault, it’s all his”.

Right now, the club is leaking like a sieve. Everything that should be taking place behind boardroom doors is being played out in the media. Why, the hell are we going public on all this stuff. Why is Bentley confirming a “review” to journalists, when it only serves to put more pressure on a coach on the eve of what is an enormous game for him and his team.

Clearly, it’s because those same journalists are going particularly easy on the board. The Sun Herald’s Adrian Proszenko has been constantly fed leaks this past month - it was he who reported that both Taylor and then Lowe had been put forward in coaching director roles. In his piece this weekend, he conveniently dropped into this story: “Parramatta's position at the bottom of the ladder has put Bentley and his board in a difficult position. The club is in a sound state off the field and the leagues club has posted solid financial results”. That’s been a recurring mantra hasn’t it - “Well, at least we aren’t going broke”.

But it’s hard to go past this Bentley quote in The Telegraph: "The board deserve a fair bit of credit for providing him with all the resources to get this current team to perform. They haven't denied him anything and we'll continue to offer him any resource he requires."

This is akin to saying the parent deserves credit because he didn’t interfere with his kid playing with the fireworks that blew his hand off. “If only he’d of asked, we would have told him not to light the match,” the parent said before adding “ultimately the buck stops with Little Johnny doesn’t it”.

The facts are that that since 2009, the Parramatta Eels footballing operation has been “restructured”, in moves that have improved the bottom line but it must be said hasn’t done a lot for the club’s on-field results. We’ll leave the ridiculously under-resourced back-office alone for the moment, but let’s look at the top of the Eels hierarchy.

In 2004, the Eels administration looked like this: Group CEO Denis Fitzgerald; General Manager of Football Sports, Greg Mitchell; Football Manager, Tony Zappia and Head Coach Brian Smith. Sitting above Brian Smith, one of the most experienced coaches in the game were three managers - all with significant experience in football operations. That was pared back under Fitzgerald’s latter years to just a sole football director which prior to the 3P upheaval was Andrew Hill. Still at that stage, you had an experienced coach Daniel Anderson with two superiors with plentiful football experience. When 3P took charge, they made Hill redundant and combined his role with that of Paul Osborne as Football CEO. Now I know for a fact, having spoken to Osborne that he often struggled with that workload, so I was astonished when all of his responsibilities were folded in under Bob Bentley as Group CEO earlier this year.

The structure we went into this year with, was Kearney reporting directly to Bob Bentley - a manager with no prior football experience - while Peter Nolan sits underneath Kearney with a kind of merged recruitment manager/football manager position. And that’s pretty much it.

Now my understanding is that Kearney has been agreeable to this structure - indeed he demanded it according to your media reports - so in the end he has to cop whatever comes his way. If you demand great power, then you must also make yourself subject to the accountability that comes with not having anyone else to blame.

However, it is not good enough for the board to simply let the blame rest with the kid with the firecracker in his hand. It made the decision to centralise all footballing administration around Paul Osborne, and it made the decision to then throw out one coach and appoint an inexperienced replacement and then in turn replace Osborne with a manager who not only has to split his time between the Leagues club and the footballing operations, but who went into the job with no zero football administration experience. When I tried to raise this issue at the AGM, there was no recognition of what should be painfully obvious - that having a rookie coach reporting to a rookie CEO is a pretty risky management structure. Yes, it’s certainly cost-effective and we keep hearing how well those books are being maintained, but it was just plain and simply the wrong structure - especially coming off the back of a year where we had narrowly avoided the spoon and had made some pretty risky recruitment decisions.

So please spare me the board deserves credit malarky. The reality is the board are rookies at this too. And it’s simply a truism that when you put rookies in place, you have to expect mistakes and some bad decisions. When the Parramatta membership voted in a board with no prior experience in the role - or indeed any similar role - it made an equally risky collective decision for which it too must now accept accountability for. And of course if you’re a supporter, and not a voting member, than accept accountability that you let others make these decisions for you. So there is no one who can shy away from not having played their part in this.

But as Jack Gibson always said, success begins in the front office. Over the past five years - and this started prior to 3P - Parramatta has done nothing but to cut costs in both the front and back office. And now we’re set to do what all organisations do when they’ve run out of ideas - they call in consultants to “review” what’s gone wrong. And what’s going to be the upshot of all this? Likely starting all over - the baby will be tossed out with the bathwater, and nothing will be done to fix the key structural issues that make it impossible for this club to ever run as professionally and capably as it should.