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Are you a super-duper league mentor who has just successfully cleaned up someone else’s mess at the first attempt? If so, congratulations! Consider your sense of reality severely clouded.
Driving a doldrums team to a premiership in your first year as an NRL coach feels fantastic, not only for the toasty sense of achievement and the imminent weeks of drinking to follow, but because you are hallucinating inside a crazy fantasy universe.
What I’m saying may sound loco, but it’s actually correcto. Think about it; what do you call a magical make-believe wonderland where your unheralded team wins the majority of their games, nobody gets injured and your troopers gladly commit to season-long booze bans?
Certainly not reality, that’s for sure.
Now I’m not here to deny you that well deserved winners cheque and the plaudits that it brings. All I’m saying is that you can put it all in the corner next to Santa and the unicorns because if you think that footy is all electrolyte-baisted Armani suits and top-of-the-pops adulation that runs forever like Summer of ’69 on long-play, then you’re wrong.
Want to know why?
Because long-play died with the VCR era, Summer of ’69 was bog standard and most importantly, coaching will always be a heartless wench that will eventually find you out, repeatedly torment you and then fill you with hatred for rugby league.
If you want a fresh example, just ask Trent Robinson – the ‘man of the hour, too sweet to be sour’ of 2013 tri-coloured title fame. He could probably chew your ears off about the subject right about now.
After taking the Roosters on an unlikely magical carpet ride from the garbage tip to the goldmine last year, season 2014 thus far has been like that irritating plastic bag on American Beauty – floating agonisingly, ready to launch at any moment but the bloody thing just won’t take off. After a year of Chookball that was as visually satisfying as Mena Suvari in a bathtub of rose petals, in comparison it’s not much chop.
Despite the boss keeping that big schnozz to the coaching grindstone and having all of the trimmings that come with the role at Easts, things just aren’t running as smoothly for his team in his second year. So what’s bustin’ his chops?
Firstly, he’s juggling an injury ward. Boyd Cordner, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Michael Jennings have all spent time there, and now they are looking at further absenteeism with Sonny Bill-Williams, Mitch Aubusson and Daniel Tupou.
Secondly, there’s the neck albatross of the super-annoying ‘Chook Handicap’ – the playing group’s uncanny knack of losing penalty counts nearly every weekend. Last year it was a quirky stat that elevated the team’s achievements, but now it’s just developing Robinson’s neck vein in to a second head.
Thirdly, it’s an upstairs thing. That intangible two per cent drop in desire from his cattle. Yes, there is amateur psychoanalysis on its way, but I implore you to trust me. I know how brains work. I can even email you my psychology degree if you like, provided you don’t have an email address.
You know that feeling when you clocked Alex Kidd on the Sega? Your paranoia about never finishing the thing subsides, you regain full movement in your controller thumb and ultimately, you lose that hard gamer’s edge that made you the envy of your dorky flock. So what do you do?
You go and buy a Nintendo or get a girlfriend or start missing tackles. It’s a proven fact.
Okay, so while players certainly don’t totally let themselves go and turn up for training looking like Diego Maradona and will gladly state they still harbour the desire the go all the way again, there’s something in the subconscious that slightly dies with a scaling of a summit.
It’s a fractured lust for wins for the Chooks that manifested itself in the lost unloseables against Cronulla and Newcastle; games dropped by a mentally patchy side that would’ve been banked in 2013 even with an off-chops Maradona playing at halfback.
So how does the Rooster supercoach fix all of these bugbears on his plate?
Put simply, unless he encases his players inside individual Pope Mobiles, bans Jared Waerea Hargreaves from listening to loud aggressive music or exhumes Sigmund Freud (not impossible – Nick Politis can arrange almost anything), then it’s something he’s just going to have to deal with. This is the harsh reality of a bumpy coaching stint and he’s living it in the NRL for the first time.
And without wanting to place too much pressure on the defending premiership coach, he had better hurry up and get Uncle Nick on that shovel real soon. With the Roosters run home to September including dates with Souths, Melbourne and the Warriors, he needs a lift in performance if he wants his side in a worthy state to defend their title at the business end.
As for tonight? It’s a reborn Dragons side who are Hail Marying their way to Allianz Stadium for a game that has suddenly morphed from a gift two in to a potential oil slick for Robinson’s crew.
So Roarers. Can the injury-affected, out-of-form, reality-ridden Roosters deal with actuality? And is their winter of 2014 spluttering or is this recent bobble just a blip?