Eels Blogs

Article about current Catalan Dragons coach Steve McNamara. He is doing a good job over in South of France, but not sure about a coach who has only ever coached in Super League coming to the NRL for the first time. We have seen coaches go from assistants in Australia to HC in Super League then come back. But not sure on a coach with only ESL experience.

Here is a link to the article by Mike Mehall Wood

Coaching jobs in the NRL don’t get much bigger than South Sydney.

Jason Demetriou, sacked this week, knew that and accepted it at every turn, insisting to the last that it was his privilege to come to work at the club every day.

Now, with the hot seat open, the Bunnies have to box clever on what they want from the next guy, widely tipped to be a second helping of Wayne Bennett.

It is seen as a fait accompli, but that is far from the case.

Bennett would have loved to have returned alongside Shane Richardson, who subsequently signed long term at the Wests Tigers.

He might yet get an offer from Parramatta, too, with Brad Arthur is hanging from a thread at the Eels, who appear to be losing confidence after a slack start to the season, a consistent fall from the 2022 Grand Final heights and a feeling of staleness after a decade with the same coach.

The chance to bring a Premiership back to the club after so many years might motivate Bennett, as might the roster, as might a greater pay packet, should the Eels offer one.

Souths are in the box seat at the moment as they have a vacancy that needs to be filled, but even for them, they may well look at the situation, take a breath and ask if a 74-year-old is actually the answer.

The central question on the table at the board meeting will now winning now or winning later.

The club seem to have their heart set on Bennett, who presumably will come in with a designated assistant to take over, setting the succession plan into process again.

If that were to transpire, it would send the signal that Souths only seriously care about 2025 and 2026, when they will still have Cody Walker and Damien Cook, and that they think that their decline in the 2024 is poor form and not old age.

If their point is to look short term, then Bennett is the guy.

Wayne Bennett. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)

If not, then it has to be Steve McNamara.

The 52-year-old, who has been with Catalans Dragons in Super League since 2018, is the pre-eminent coach not to have already worked in the NRL, and should be top of mind to anyone looking for a new coach.

He took over the Dragons when they had just finished 10^th of 12 and narrowly avoiding dropping to the second tier after trailing at half time of the relegation playoff in 2017.

In his first year, they won the Challenge Cup, the first ever French side to do so, and have finished in the top four in each of the last four years, including two Grand Final appearances (2021 and 2023) and a Minor Premiership (2021).

Steve Mac has NRL experience, as an assistant at both the Roosters and Warriors, and was England coach for five years between 2010 and 2015.

On CV alone, he should be the top of anyone’s list for the next NRL head coaching job that becomes available and if McNamara had been born in Hurstville rather than Hull it wouldn’t even be a debate.

Blake Solly, who will make the decision, knows McNamara well from his time working in England, when the now-Souths CEO was at the Rugby Football League head office when Steve was England coach, based out of the same location in the Leeds suburbs.

McNamara is contracted to the Catalans and signed an extension in February, but this is rugby league. If Souths wanted their man, they’d get him.

If Souths were to look past McNamara, Parra should swoop and swoop fast.

Mitchell Pearce. (Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images)

The coaches market is not as deep as many expect, and there is no better candidate out there – for anyone willing to take the plunge on an English coach.

No club has since Mal Reilly left Newcastle in 1998, and the mental block that exists around anyone with that accent is massive.

It’s a massive inefficiency in the coaching market, too, because one of the best predictors of NRL success is Super League success and the best way to train to be a head coach in the NRL to be one somewhere else, which means Europe.

The last two coaches to move from the Catalans, Trent Robinson and Kevin Walters, go alright.

Everyone cites Kristian Woolf’s record at St Helens as proof of concept for his place in the Bennett succession plan at the Dolphins.

Justin Holbrook, who won multiple comps in the UK with Saints, is now widely seen as having been hardly done by at the Titans and is tipped to return to head coaching sooner rather than later.

Yet, by far, the best coach in Super League for the last five years has been McNamara – and he’s just as far away as he ever was.

The only person who come close is Wigan’s Matty Peet, who has only been in post since 2022.

It’s doubly ironic that McNamara isn’t talked up more given that the coaching pathway from the UK to the NRL is busier than it has been in years.

James Maloney is tackled by Agnatius Paasi and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook of St Helens during the Super League Grand Final. (Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images)

Lee Briers arrived in Brisbane and immediately became one of the best assistants on the scene, credited with making the Broncos one of the best attacking sides in the NRL.

Richard Agar is Webster’s right hand man throughout the Warriors’ resurgence and you could time Newcastle’s pick-up in fortunes almost exactly to when Brian McDermott, a Super League winner several times over with Leeds, stepped off the plane.

While the Super League isn’t as strong as the NRL, the fundamentals of coaching are the same.

In many ways, the structural issues in Europe that have led to Wigan, St Helens and Leeds monopolising the competition make the achievements of the Catalans under McNamara even more impressive.

Steve Mac has won consistently without the river of youth talent that keeps the big English clubs going, largely by using the best French players he can get and weaving in outsiders to create a coherent unit.

That part should certainly interest Souths. They don’t have the junior base that Penrith or Brisbane have – they’re Wigan and Saints in this analogy – but do have some juniors that they need to supplement with outsiders.

Super League lacks the star power of the NRL, too, but the Catalans are a little different.

They have always attracted big name players and Perpignan was once seen as a holiday camp for aging first graders, close to the beach and the bars of Barcelona.

Steve Mac completely upended that, creating a culture that turned some of the NRL’s most noted party animals – James Maloney, Mitchell Pearce and Greg Bird to name just three – into, by their own standards, sedate characters.

On the field, the standards around effort, particularly line speed and push supports, will be night and day to what South Sydney and Parramatta currently have.

The only thing tougher than being an NRL coach is being an unemployed NRL coach.

There’s 17 hot seats at any one time and a raft of people gunning for jobs, most of whom are still working in the game, either at clubs or in the media, while waiting for the phone to ring again.

(Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)

That’s fine, of course, and makes perfect sense.

Being head coach material makes you a superpowered assistant coach, much like Holbrook currently is at the Roosters and Michael Maguire was at Canberra before getting the NSW Blues gig.

It also qualifies you to speak about the game on TV, as Shane Flanagan did for years on Fox League ahead of his return to the NRL head coaching ranks with the Dragons, and as Benji Marshall did before committing to the Tigers staff.

When taken collectively, however, it can lead to a closed shop that rewards those already in the system and punishes those outside of it, which in turn diminishes the collective knowledge of the profession as fewer outside ideas filter in.

It disincentivises clubs to go beyond the established names on the circuit, who live in fear the ridicule of picking an outsider who fails, even if that means picking an insider who has already failed before.

Coaches, like players, tend to have managers and thus someone to put their name forward to the right people and arguments to make around who they might bring in if they were to get a job.

McNamara doesn’t have a manager and has nobody to fight his corner in the media, which is why he

The closed shop, however, does lead to recycled ideas and, ultimately, stasis.

Anthony Griffin, for example, was able to accumulate ten seasons in the NRL despite having a winning record in just three of them, because he was a known quantity, and Trent Barrett got five cracks with just one with a better than 50% record.

That Barrett is mentioned in connection with a third stint, moving up from his current assistant’s role at Parramatta, tells you everything.

The counterbalance to this is the club that picks someone from outside and immediately benefits, which is the braver, and thus rarer, decision.

Andrew Webster had essentially no public profile when he was named Warriors coach – he wasn’t even rugby league’s most prominent Andrew Webster – but had an instant impact and was named Dally M Coach of the Year in 2023, precisely because he brought something that other coaches didn’t.

Someone can get that with McNamara, and he’s far less of a punt than Webster was. Looking from 18 months on, that appointment seems like a stroke of genius.

The question now is whether Souths or Parra have the confidence to make that move for themselves. Whichever of the two doesn’t get Bennett will have a vacancy to be filled.