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Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to question this strategy of purchasing commercial quantities of blue chip talent to improve your chances of winning games of football.
Sure, the concept holds some advantages – injections of gold-leaf standards of athletic ability, renewed optimism for stakeholders and further opportunities to confirm a new trainer invariably guarantees the ‘hardest pre-season ever’.
But besides that, the whole idea is mostly a heaving thwack of heartburn.
Take a look at Manly and the New Zealand Warriors. We haven’t even begun cannonballing for competition points yet and they’re already stuffed.
No club has free-wheeled more with the company Mastercard over the off-season and the PSI in their respective bubbles is already touching ‘bike seat at fat camp’ levels.
While us rational types are happy to afford some time while still reserving the right to enjoy delicious schadenfreude if it so presents, the club powerbrokers and the poison pens of the press have laid down a gentle ultimatum using the direct method of leaks and sensationalism.
Andrew McFadden and Trent Barrett need significant returns in 2016, and if they don’t, they are failures who are to be sent away to summer military camp for sit-ups and gruel.
Sadly and thankfully, this is modern rugby league. Someone has to be the bike seat for those calorific thighs of claustrophobia to close in around.
The key is how one withstands the surging fudginess.
OK, so I acknowledge that a fresh rookie like Barrett won’t be put out with the recycling anytime soon. On the other hand, McFadden will be.
The Warriors coach is being monitored on a minute-to-minute review cycle and reportedly could be sacked by the end of this sentence.
In reality, with the spine he’s been gifted for 2016 – plus the fact the club has hired and fired 10 coaches in their 20-year history- he’ll likely only survive if he can secure a premiership and a Grammy before Round 6.
History tells us this will require some almighty rare voodoo.
Despite the nigh-on impossibility of these questionable KPIs, the Warriors jersey possesses the impregnable power of a toasty doona for the way it can induce snooze in the most talented of footballers. So he’s really going to need his Vitamin B.
As for Barrett – the man who may just shade Wayne Bennett as the new sexiest coach in league – he’ll hardly be stretching out on the sun-bed and pumping out the zeds in sheer contentment either.
Despite the club acquiring impressively using the limited shrapnel left over from Daly Cherry-Evans’ riders, he’s operating inside a framework who’s definition of ‘time and patience’ isn’t dictionary-compliant.
As you can attest by last year’s cold-blooded discarding of club antiques, Scott Penn and company are the style of executive who wanted their two-minute noodles yesterday. As someone without a life membership and a grand final berth in the last 12 months, Barrett’s starting in the minuses.
But if it’s any consolation, at least the new Manly coach has one powerful club entity in his corner, even if the support is slightly over-zealous and a smidge creepy.
Jamie Lyon has leapt full-stretch in to supporting his new coach so much that it’s like he’s trying to get him out of the friend zone.
Apparently he’s the best coach he’s ever played under, despite nothing more than a pre-season’s sample to judge by. But hey, we know that if you’re going to coax a profound insight of deep truth from a footballer, it will be in the pre-season when everybody is training the house down.
So in summary, best of luck to the big-spending Barrett and McFadden, two of the 16 coaches that will feel fierce pressure in 2016.
You’ve both been given plenty of time to inflict total God Mode over a new batch of well-paid young people, as long as its immediately.