Eels Blogs

I’m a big believer in the mantra that every failure is a step closer towards success. That is of course, as long as you learn from the experience and don’t make the same mistake again. In a game and business like Rugby League, you simply cannot predict the future. You can never know how the incredible array of factors at play will gel to effect what result. I’ll put my hand up to say that I thought Kearney would be a good fit for the club. Quite clearly, I stand on record as being wrong. However, I do believe there is good we can take from the experience because Kearney to a fairly significant degree was an experiment. And experiments while risky, can also yield insight. I’ve spent a lot of tonight since I heard the news pondering what it all means. What follows is the big lessons that I think I’ve learnt over his time at the club, maybe a bit of what Stephen Kearney has (or should have) learnt and also some of what I hope the club can learn if we are to turn our fortunes around and be better going forward. [Warning: It’s ended up being long so just skip it if you don’t like my long rants.]

Lesson One: People are hard to change

Last year, I spoke to both Stephen Kearney and his assistant Brad Arthurs last year about their desire to change the Parramatta culture. They both kind of acknowledged that it would be tough but then pretty much shrugged off the question as if to say “we’ll get there”.

It is one of mankind’s persistent foibles, to think that we can so easily bend the will of other men. So much of who we are is either hard-wired or learnt behaviour over a lifetime, that change does not come quickly or easily. It’s a lesson that quite frankly I had to learn the hard-way in running a business. You like to think that with just a little guidance, a little push in the right direction that somehow you can get that square peg into the round hole. It just doesn’t happen.

I actually think Kearney did quite an admirable job last season of bringing a bit of much-needed discipline to the side. But then after a full-year of laying the ground-work and shedding players who didn’t fit the plan, the club went and recruited players who were arguably even more wrong for the plan than the existing crew. Chris Sandow, Ben Roberts, Esi and Wilie Tonga, all had problems at their previous clubs. It was naive for Kearney and co. to believe they could bring those players in and not go through all the same “change pain” that they went through the year prior. I’m sure Kearney sees this now - the fact that this year we have targeted players from Melbourne and Manly - clubs with similar cultures to what Kearney was wanting to create suggests to me, that the lesson has been belatedly learnt. Some mistakes you just can’t come back from, though.

I still believe Kearney’s big idea - that Parramatta had to get rid of its soft underbelly and its propensity for taking the easy way out to win a game was a strong objective. However, what is all too often underestimated is that cultural change requires time, has to be gradual and also requires a sophisticated degree of sensitivity to what you believe wasn’t working prior.

Lesson Two: Recruitment is tough

I’m sure part of the reason we made the signings we made last year, was because we just didn’t have many other options available to us. When you’re a club who is not expected to challenge for a title, it’s not easy to woo the very best players. If you’re a rep quality player, you look to clubs that will enhance your chances of playing rep football. That’s not Parramatta at the moment. Tony Williams publicly stated that fact had a major bearing on him deciding to sign with the Bulldogs.

Which only makes big change so much harder. To change the character of a roster, cannot be done overnight. It is probably at a minimum a three-year process and that assumes you don’t make mistakes along the way. If Kearney had of been able to bring in players like James Maloney, Jeremy Smith, Ryan Hinchcliffe - players who would have taken him closer to his end-vision of his ideal roster, we might have seen the improvement I’m sure Kearney would have been hoping for this year. But getting those players aren’t easy. It’s even more difficult when you’re using somebody else’s playbook like Kearney has, because the whole world knows what has made those playbooks work and those players that fit into it are subsequently in high demand.

So while you can, and should work towards a longer-term plan, you’ve also got to work with the squad you have and play to their strengths, because you can’t change a gameplan without the right players and when you’re not coming from a position of strength (or wealth) you can’t bank on getting those right players.

Lesson Three: Parramatta requires an exceptional man manager

You might not think that Daniel Anderson and Stephen Kearney had much in common. However in the end I believe they both fell into the same trap.

Daniel Anderson is a fine coach with his kind of cattle. He’s a technical coach and generally appears to get along with, and gets results, from players whose greatest attributes are their work ethic and attitudes. But his sudden falls from grace at both the Warriors and Parramatta showed that there were certain players he just didn’t manage well. Speaking to those working with the juniors at the time, there were definitely a style of player Anderson wanted at the club and if he’d been given another two or three years he may have got there. We will never know.

Stephen Kearney has been famously working to a longer-term plan. You look at the players he has pushed through the grades and there are a lot of great, dynamic athletes. Right now, he doesn’t have enough great athletes in his current squad to carry out the kind of gameplan that has succeeded at Melbourne. Maybe in two or three years, he may have got there. We will never know.

What do we know then? Firstly, let’s accept the fact that nobody is going to get the opportunity to “re-build” at Parramatta. The fans are too demanding, the media attention is too glaring and the administrators are too soft for any coach to have consecutive years of under-achievement. But if I have one great take away from the last five years it’s that Parramatta is probably not a club where you are going to be successful in trying to “build” anything. It’s certainly not Melbourne where you get to start with a blank slate.

One of the defining characteristics of Parramatta is the diversity of the population that the area envelops. The demographics of the Hills District is very different to the Greystanes/Merrylands area and then different again as you head towards Fairfield and Cabramatta. As such, it’s almost certainly going to be a mistake coming to Parramatta with too firm a view on the style of game that you want to play, or the type of player you want to keep hold of because you just don’t know what our junior system is going to throw at you.

Parramatta’s coach needs to be a manager of all men. Someone who can keep the players in line but at the same time instill confidence. And you probably need to tactically savvy enough and perhaps innovative enough to accommodate a squad that is almost certain to sway and waver in its characteristics and personalities.

Lesson Four: Given how hard it is, planning is critical

In short, Parramatta is not a job for the feint-hearted or the inexperienced. If coaching in the NRL is tough then coaching at Parramatta is doubly so. And as such, any endeavour of such ilk needs to set upon with careful regard to risk mitigation and management. A plan without a backup plan is really not any plan at all.

I’m fearful that Parramatta will lurch from one impulsive, reactive decision to the next without any real appreciation for the extremity of the job in the hand. Many Eels fans are celebrating tonight, I’m not. I’m just worried. Because I’ve not seen any evidence to date that might suggest to me that as a club, we do learn from past mistakes, yet without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I hope we take the opportunity to pause, work out what we need to retain and keep developing from the Kearney era, work out what didn’t work and needs to be moved on from, and then leave no stone unturned in formulating a plan to get us to the destination we’re aiming to arrive at.