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Lyall Gorman will immediately provide the Cronulla Sharks with a polished exterior, but the club will only begin shining from the inside if the other people there are smart enough to go with him.
Some of them still have lessons to learn, judging by coach Shane Flanagan’s performance at a media conference on Monday.
The media’s questioning of Flanagan was reasonable. Provocative, sure, most hard questions are, but reasonable.
There are a number of questions about Cronulla, related to the ASADA investigation, that still haven’t been satisfactorily answered. Just because some time has passed it doesn’t mean the media has lost the right to ask those questions.
Surely Flanagan was anticipating being asked questions he wasn’t going to like. Whatever the case, he didn’t handle the situation well and the club came out of it looking bad.
After the announcement yesterday of his appointment as Cronulla’s new group chief executive, Gorman was asked about the run-in between Flanagan and the media.
He answered. “There is not a moment in anyone’s lives where they haven’t felt the pressure of the moment. But relations with the media are fundamental to the success of any professional sporting club.
“I’ll be working very hard to build on that and we look forward to working with the media . . . and realise that you won’t write always what we want you to write.”
It was a typically clever answer from Gorman in which, while indicating a level of understanding about why the coach reacted that way, he made it clear it wouldn’t be his way of doing things. No doubt the pair will have a private discussion about what occurred and the best way forward from that.
Gorman is a smooth operator. He understands the key elements of how a football club needs to work if it wants to be successful, such as quality branding, community engagement, and how to generate a genuine love for the jumper by the people directly involved.
He oozes charm and confidence and is just as much at ease talking to the big end of town as he is the average punter.
Gorman proved all of this as executive chairman of Western Sydney Wanderers, where he played an integral role in attracting major sponsors such as NRMA Insurance.
I interviewed Gorman many times in one of my other roles as a football writer and it was always an interesting experience.
He ‘gets’ the critical importance of recruiting quality people to clubs. There wasn’t a proclaimed ‘no dickhead’ policy to speak of at the Wanderers, but there is certainly an acute shortage of dickheads there.
He also ‘gets’ the media. That doesn’t mean he bows down to it, but rather he knows how to interact with it to the best advantage of his organisation.
But, perhaps most importantly, when it comes to the Sharks, Gorman is an expert at managing people and situations. He has a calm, reassuring and ultimately convincing manner that makes people want to believe in his methods and follow him.
The Wanderers became a real club in a real hurry. It was no fluke. It was due to the quality of the people involved, all the way down the line.
That brings me to my final point, which is to identify that if Gorman is going to get the job done and turn Cronulla around, he is going to need expert assistance.
At the Wanderers, he had the then football manager, John Tsatsimas, as his right-hand man in operations, and of course Tony Popovic as coach.
Tsatsimas is an excellent administrator as well, and following Gorman’s departure from the club he was appointed its chief executive.
Gorman has an all-encompassing role at Cronulla, overseeing the football club, the leagues club and its commercial development of nearby land.
It’s a big job, so he’s going to need the right people working under him in the football club administration, which has been under-manned at times in the past.
Gorman must decide whether those people are already there, or whether new blood is needed.
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