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Really Manly? Gut the joint to keep DCE happy?

10th February, 2016
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So many of Manly's recruitment and retention issues were blamed on DCE. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)
Expert
10th February, 2016
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One of the oldest sayings in sport is “No individual is bigger than the club”. That saying no longer rings true at Manly.

In an interview with Fairfax Media, Manly owner Scott Penn said the club basically took a ‘whatever it takes’ approach to keeping Daly Cherry-Evans, after the halfback announced after Round 1 last year that he was taking his talents to Southport.

“We had to paint a picture for the future that was going to be exciting enough for him to stay. Other clubs were putting forward compelling alternatives to what we were,” Penn said.

The Sea Eagles owner tried to make out DCE and Kieran Foran’s departure as a symptom of a broader problem.

“It was an indictment on the structure we had at the time. We weren’t giving Daly and Kieran the hope we were going to be the long-term successful organisation we wanted to be. That’s pretty damning when you can’t retain your marquees because they can’t see where the club is going.”

If you want to know where someone (or something, like a football club) is going, it’s generally a good idea to look at where they’ve been.

And Manly had been at the top – for ages. After the Northern Eagles debacle, Des Hasler took over and restored the Sea Eagles to the on-field powerhouse they had been known as for most of their history, winning premierships in 2008 and 2011.

Club legend Geoff Toovey took over in 2012, and under his stewardship Manly had three top-four finishes and qualified for a grand final.

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Yet at the start of 2015, Penn claimed the club were in trouble on the field.

“I remember meeting with Geoff before the start of the season and I said to him ‘I’m happy to leave it in your hands, but we need to make significant changes’,” Penn said.

“I was absolutely clear and said ‘I don’t want to be having this conversation in seven weeks time when we’re zero and seven or one and six because it’s going to be a really difficult conversation’. I said those exact words to him and literally seven weeks later we were one and six. And nothing had changed.”

Nothing had changed? That’s not entirely true, Toovey’s starting halfback had dropped a bombshell after Round 1, announcing he was moving to the Gold Coast. Five-eighth Kieran Foran said a few days after that he too was leaving the Northern Beaches.

That’s some serious white-anting to a team’s prospects, and in this day and age recruitment and retention is increasingly about the front office rather than the head coach.

The whole interview was some great PR – blaming previous problems on the board being dysfunctional before he took over, or the coach being unable to retain players who were got better offers elsewhere.

But really, all that’s happened is a mountain of pressure has been heaped on Manly’s million dollar man, Cherry-Evans. If the team doesn’t perform – even if DCE does – it will be the halfback’s fault, because the whole joint sounds like it was re-made in his image.

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