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Ricky should listen to Groucho Marx

Ricky Stuart is bringing his usual dose of good luck to Canberra. (illustration by David Green Cartoonist)
Roar Rookie
25th June, 2014
9

During the Raiders’ loss to the Bulldogs on Friday night, Ricky Stuart may have been pondering Groucho Marx’s famous line about spurning any club that would have him as a member.

The game was to have been part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the Green Machine’s 1994 grand final win over Canterbury – a Raiders premiership to which Stuart was a key contributor.

Instead, Canterbury rained on his parade, while another Green Machine alumni was on the brink of canonisation after handing NSW a breakthrough Origin series win over Mal Meninga’s men (the very breakthrough Stuart himself failed to deliver).

It was a rough week for Ricky that ended with him considering yet another unwanted honorary ‘club’ membership. Having steered the Eels to a calamitous last place in 2013, he could now become the first coach in NRL history to achieve consecutive wooden spoons with two different clubs.

Only Wayne Bennett’s tragedy-marred Knights and the controversy-plagued basketcase that is the Sharks (coincidentally another of Ricky’s former club disasters) currently stand between Stuart and this latest unwanted distinction.

Indeed, it has been some time since Ricky was offered membership to any club he’d wish to be a part of. Or, for that matter, any club he’d wish to remember being a part of. Even Stuart’s haters must acknowledge that it never seems to end well for him.

You might think 2002 would bring back happy memories. It was of course the year Sticky, already a member of the ‘Legion of Dual Internationals’, joined the exclusive ‘Confederacy of Player/Coach Premiership Winners’ in just his first year as a senior coach.

He subsequently backed this up by leading the Roosters to a World Club Challenge win – an obscure but worthy clique of Australian based coaches in itself.

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But Ricky must have felt uncomfortable with his meteoric rise, as he surprised all by using this platform to spend the following two years founding the ‘Losing Coach in Consecutive NRL Grand Finals Club’.

He remains its sole member, with Des Hasler and Craig Bellamy having both since declined their invitations to join.

Stuart bounced back in 2005, albeit briefly, joining Wayne Pearce and Paul Vautin in their exclusive ‘Association of Origin-Series winning Player/Coaches’.
However, this association was later disbanded after Mal Meninga ruined it for everybody.

Ricky would eventually gain entrance to the prestigious ‘Order of Former Champion Kangaroos Who Have Earned International Success as Coach’. But to date, this remains the last desirable rugby league pantheon to which he has been admitted. And sadly, as always for Ricky it seems, even that membership was revoked when he led the side to a World Cup final loss in 2008 (just three other Australian teams have failed to win their World Cup bids – the previous one being Harry Bath’s 1972 squad).

With his Kangaroo credentials up in smoke, a bitter Stuart decided to renew his membership in the lowly ‘Society of Coaches Who At Least We Beat the Wooden Spooners That Year’. He did this while at the wheel of the Sharks in 2009 – presumably having decided that when things aren’t going well, small victories and old friends can sometimes be comforting.

He’d first joined these ranks following the Roosters’ calamitous 2006 campaign, which also led to his induction into the ever-growing ‘Support Group for Sacked Coaches’.

Stuart might do well to look further back than the past dozen or so years, perhaps even as far as his playing career, to find some glory days that have been left unsullied by time (but perhaps not at the ’94 premiership – still seems too soon).

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If that fails, then Ricky may take some solace in knowing that alongside Graham Murray, Craig Bellamy and himself, Laurie Daley will forever be a member in the alliance of Blues coaches who unintentionally helped his former Green Machine skipper to build ‘Club Origin Dynasty’.

Even Daley might struggle to join Mal in that lonely clubhouse.

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