By Adrian Warren
July 12th 2009 @ 6:34am
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Taylor takes tough approach at Souths
South Sydney rugby league coach Jason Taylor is determined to maintain his new hardline attitude towards his players in a bid to extract the full potential out of his frustratingly inconsistent side.
The Rabbitohs climbed within three points of eighth-placed Penrith after a 36-12 win over the Panthers at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium on Friday night.
It was Souths’ first win in six games and Taylor and captain Roy Asotasi subsequently revealed the amount of soul-searching they had done at Redfern since the previous week’s embarrassing 54-20 thrashing by Wests Tigers.
Taylor said he had undergone an epiphany of sorts regards the direction of his coaching career.
While stressing he didn’t consider his job to be under threat, Taylor said he was forced to consider which direction it was heading and realised he needed to get more out of his players.
“I think I’ve learnt an enormous amount and the boys have too and I think over the next few weeks they are going to realise how much we’ve learnt, because I’m going to make sure of that,” Taylor said.
In a candid press conference, Taylor said his players had been mentally weak over the previous five weeks and they had to make an attitude adjustment heading into Friday’s clash with Penrith.
“One of the things I’m learning that is if you don’t push people hard they are not going to reach their potential, that’s a real key lesson for me,” Taylor said.
“You want to do well, but they need to be pushed in order where they can get to. I need to push them harder.”
Five-eighth John Sutton, who sparked the Rabbitohs’ attack against Penrith, recognised the change in Taylor’s attitude this week.
“I guess he was a little more bit intense and I think the guys responded and stepped it up at training this week because we needed to,” Sutton said.
“It’s only one week. We’ve got to do this every week.”
Key forward Asotasi stressed some plain speaking by the Rabbitohs during the week had helped them to produce a much improved performance.
“We had meetings with the players and talked about the stuff we needed to do and we really needed to get ourselves up for the games,” Asotasi said.
“The boys responded and we really got into each other and spoke about what we needed to do.
“It showed tonight that we can work together and we just need to be honest with each other.”
He said Taylor had “really got into us” for the first time this year following their embarrassing capitulation to the Tigers.
Taylor said he had made a “heap” of adjustments to the Rabbitohs’ preparations and routine this week, and it has been a case of realising the team had not fulfilled its potential.
“We’ve had to work on pushing each other harder because we’d been accepting near enough is good enough from each other and I’ve been accepting it from the players at times and near enough is not good enough,” he said.
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