- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
OK, the gloves are off. Ricky Stuart you are fair game – come and fight if you can. Your Canberra team’s showing against the New Zealand Warriors on Sunday was Z-grade.
Embarrassing, bordering on laughable for an NRL team. No heart in defence, hardly a clue in attack.
You have been with these guys since October last year. They have not improved one iota. Not one jot.
How can you justify even one more season in charge of the Green Machine? It is time to cut your losses (and there are many) and go.
Sure, there have been sporadic wins this year against Souths, North Queensland and even the Melbourne Storm, but every dog has his day. Last Sunday certainly wasn’t that day. Your team played like mongrels and got slayed 54-18. The Warriors registered the half-century easily against your so-called defence. In reality, that could have been 70-plus.
I cannot see any improvement in the Canberra team since you took the helm from David Furner.
You arrived at the club having overseen Parramatta’s second wooden spoon in a row, and after inglorious exits from Easts and Cronulla as forerunners.
Ricky: Do you honestly think you and your coaching methods are working in this day and age? The stats show that coach R. Stuart is down among the dead men, suggesting there is little to be enthused about in 2015 and beyond. NRL footballers struggle to understand your methods. If not, they don’t really want to play for you.
Perhaps it’s your trademark discipline. Maybe it’s your game plans that might sound grandiose but end up in grunge. I don’t know, but as an outside observer, nothing is working with you at the top.
There are other reasons why you should be copping the tip and opting out of the coaching caper, and maybe chasing some sort of a career in the media or even something completely foreign to rugby league.
A procession of ‘gun’ players have been courted by the Raiders but have spurned big-money offers to stay where they are. Why is this so? The answer seems obvious: they don’t want to play with you, or for you.
Canberra’s board of directors will surely be meeting sooner rather than later to analyse the disastrous season that is 2014. They will look closely at the statistics and they won’t be pretty. The Raiders are way, way down in virtually every area.
The wooden spoon is beckoning and the man in charge, a wonderful player in his day and clearly one of the club’s favourite sons, is on a handsome wage. Reports have that salary at around $750,000 per annum. That is tantamount to scandal.
The board can’t afford to put 2014 down as ‘first year with the new coach’. There are signs that next season might be the same, or even worse if that is possible.
If they are fair dinkum in what they are about, the Raiders’ board will take the only action possible after such a horrific year. Their club cannot afford another like it.
Bye bye, Ricky. You are a favoured son in the ACT, but the prodigal thing just hasn’t worked.
Canberra needs a winning football coach, a winning culture. They signed you from Parramatta but got precious little of the above.
Reckon you can pick the winning team? Build your own dream team with Draftstars daily fantasy and compete on any match. For great odds on the NRL head on over to PlayUp. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.