Eels Blogs

I haven’t said a lot on our post-Ricky coaching situation. To be honest, I feel like I’d be throwing out just another unqualified opinion. Is Neil Henry a good coach. JT? How do I really know whether one is better than the other, without talking with their former players, assistants, etc. Then I realised, that’s pretty much the problem. What follows is pretty much an essay - be warned it’s long even for my standards - but it comes after having a couple of lengthy chats today and really giving the subject some thought tonight.

I believe it would be a mistake for the board to appoint Neil Henry as head coach. Or Jason Taylor. Or indeed anyone.

The board has been afforded an opportunity to work from a near blank sheet of paper. With that comes the opportunity to totally re-think the structure of the club, which let’s face it, has been a complete debacle for the last four or five years.

Firstly, the club must make its appointments from the top down. That means, it has to get its CEO first. To appoint anyone into the club before you appoint a CEO, would be massively unfair to that person. In the end, the CEO is the person who needs to take responsibility for the overall performance of the club, and whoever takes over the CEO role needs to be consulted and agree with any hiring decisions that are made over the coming months.

However, once a CEO is appointed, the next step should be to appoint a head of football. Now you can call this position whatever you like. Football director; General Manager, Football Operations; whatever it may be, but I strongly believe that we must take this opportunity to introduce that role into our club.

At Parramatta, our most recent coaches have had unprecedented power. The former board removed the layer of management that has traditionally sat between the coach, and since then each coach has taken on progressively more power and responsibility. Daniel Anderson was our first coach for many years to report directly to Osborne, who as a former player and player manager, was at least a football operations-focused CEO. However, when Bob Bentley was appointed as Group CEO, Stephen Kearney was handed basically unfettered power as the club’s most senior football manager, really only working alongside Peter Nolan. And then of course we had Ricky, who hasn’t particularly worked alongside anyone and over-the-course of this year, has basically assumed responsibility for everything football-related. Again, with Ken Edwards, not having a football-related background, Stuart had basically complete freedom to hire, fire and run the Eels as he pleased.

I’ll be blunt when I say that is complete madness. An NRL Rugby League coach is a notoriously transient role. Coaches live and die by their results. If they fail - and at least four or five coaches in any season will be deemed failures - they must inevitably take the fall for team performance. Rugby League coach tenure is an oxymoron. Of course, no club knows this better than Parramatta - who have been through a coach at a rate or almost one per year over the past six or seven seasons.

In that situation when your coach is your kingpin on your football operations, a change in coach forces complete upheaval within your organisation. In this situation, an incoming coach is almost certainly going to jettison the existing coaching staff and bring in their own people. The way the club plays football will inevitably be re-invented all the way down through to the junior levels, with new defensive structures and footballing approaches. Basically, you start again from scratch and it necessitates complete re-building. A coach who is attracted to that level of power, you can almost be assured will have the type of ego, that will encourage them to take a scorched approach to the new club, and babies will get thrown out with the bathwater.

When you have a Director of Football, you treat is as a long-term position, with that person putting in the big picture ideas of what you want you want your football operations to look like. It should be the director of football who does most of the hiring - generally in consultation with the head coach - as well as working closely on areas like player recruitment, setting up your junior structures, and training approaches and facilities. You then hire your head coach into that system.

Firstly, this let’s your head coach focus on one thing. That is, football results and getting the best out of his players. Quite frankly, a coach who wants complete autonomy in regards to all footballing operations, should be avoided like the plague. That coach either has unrealistic expectations of what he can achieve or otherwise will stretch himself so thin that he won’t have the focus that you require to get football results. I don’t want my coach thinking about anything but winning the next week and what needs to be done to achieve that. I want a coach with laser-focus on winning, and who is not only happy to work under a Football Director but understands why it is one of the predominant trends in professional sport worldwide.

And if that coach doesn’t work out for whatever reason, you then simply swap them out and bring someone else into your system. You pick a coach who likes what you’re doing as a club but contributes to bettering that system. Not a coach who wants to burn the place to the ground and then re-build it in their image, as our last two coaches have done. In this situation, with a change of coach you don’t have to swap out half your squad to suit a new style, you don’t have to teach your up and coming juniors completely new systems and indeed if you’ve done your succession planning well, you should even have an assistant coach who is a ready candidate to step up.

It’s a model, that Penrith has largely put in place with Phil Gould, and which already shows sign of contributing to a pretty rapid turn-around in that club’s fortunes. It is a model that has already swept through the soccer world.

There are two ways to approach this position in our code. One is the Sydney Roosters model. They have a Group CEO who oversees both footballing and club operations, with Brian Canavan serving as Chief Operating Officer of Football. Canavan doesn’t have commercial responsibility, that’s handled by a Group Commercial Manager with responsibility across Football and Leagues Club. For Parramatta, that might mean hiring a very experience business executive as a Group CEO, putting in a specific Footballing Operations CEO/COO like Andrew Hill or Peter Parr and in that kind of structure you’re probably suited to an experienced coach like Neil Henry. Ironically, the model that the Roosters have turned to this year with such success is pretty much the model we had under Denis FItzgerald.

The second model suits a more commercially-focused CEO of the Rugby League, which allows for a more technical Director of Football. In this instance, you would look to a CEO with proven experience in running business operations and growing revenues, while you employ a football brain to drive the on-field operations. In this type of model you’d employ a Ron Gauchi-style of CEO with a former coach like Brian Smith or Tim Sheens setting up, and being responsible for your football operations. Both of these blokes have probably had their time as head coaches, but their tremendous football knowledge and experience would be well-served in this kind of role. I should point out, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a young coach, but it does allow for that to be an option and probably further future proofs your operations against ongoing upheaval in the future.

In the position that our club is in, I strongly favour the latter. I think when you’re at the bottom of the pile you need to look to people with proven turn-around experience. Brian Smith obviously has that, and his affinity with Parramatta is an attractive option. Some might see it as going backwards, but we were certainly a much stronger club in the Smith era, and indeed our club was viewed as being the benchmark for professionalism, facilities, junior structures, etc. Whether Smithy could come into that role and not be overbearing or seek to exert too much control over his head coach, is the big question in that respect. I also favour a commercial CEO who can help the club keep pace with the rapidly changing, and increasingly digitial business environment.

Decisions have to be made now, with the goal of immediate improvement. This club can’t afford to sit in the cellar re-building anymore. However, the people who come in need to be strong and definitive, and put in place a stable platform that facilitates healing, improvement and progression. We want people who can come in and take what we have, fix what is broken and year-in, year-out keep taking us forward. We should strive to be better next year, and then better still the year after-that and so on.

Unfortunately, what is happening at our club right now, is a tonne of unreasonable pressure from parties with vested interests in our club not moving forward, that I fear could cause decisions to be made without the right longer-term objectives in mind, or that are hurried out of perceived pressure to resolve the issues.

As such, I urge the board to not even think about a coach, at this point. Send the boys off on their off-season break. Work out the club’s ongoing structure first. You might consider forming a subcommittee or get external advice on what makes sense in that respect. Then appoint your CEO. Then recruit your head of football and let those two people select their head coach and present it to the board for approval. We’re largely in the mess we’re in right now, because board members with no experience in running a football club have taken big bets, largely uninformed, on coaches and then handed them the keys to the city. Our current board does at least have football experience on it, but someone who has recently been in the game at NRL level like a Brian Smith, is going to have far more insight into what is going to work for Parramatta. And given that Ken Edwards, Ricky and his coach staff were all so well compensated, there would certainly be budget for the extra layer of management at the football level.

All of our upheaval, gives us the opportunity to quickly and painlessly move from having the game’s worst Rugby League organisational structure to moving to one that is ahead of the curve and in keeping with worldwide professional sporting trends. On the other hand, simply swapping deckchairs on a sinking ship, is going to have limited, if any impact, on our ability to reverse recent fortunes.

Cheers to Muttman, who was one of the people I had a long chat too today, and who as usual have a lot of great thoughts on this, and who certainly influenced much of this point of view.