On Sunday, NRL fans around the world will witness a titanic clash between the two best sides of 2012, the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs and the Melbourne Storm.
Fans of the code won’t need too much introduction to these highly successful and feared clubs. ‘Battle of the salary cap cheats’ is what you’re probably thinking, and rightly so.
If we can tear our attention away from all of that, there’s a very interesting sideshow to be observed here.
Since Jack Gibson revolutionised professional rugby league (basically by professionalising it), the roles of the coach as figurehead, tactician, father-figure, spiritual advisor, taskmaster, human shield and researcher have been thoroughly unpacked, analysed and judged.
Coaches have always been compared to their contemporaries and to past masters, but since Gibson distilled the great game to a science, we fans have had some genuine metrics to measure the performance of our club’s (and state’s) coach.
Being lazy, I am going to ignore all of them and simply suggest this weekend’s match will either usher in a new coach-of-the-era, or will continue the reign of the incumbent.
Each half-decade or more is seemingly dominated by a coach. Let’s ignore the fact some coaches get lucky with a certain great player who hits form at the right time and makes the coach’s record look better than it should.
This is a whisper that sometimes follows Ricky Stuart, who won his premiership with Brad Fittler playing at the height of his powers. It’s an echoing shout when the same logic is applied to the Hagan/Johns combo.
Let’s start with Gibson. This is the man who gave rugby league the ‘up and under’ method of attack, introduced video and computer analysis of opposition teams and players and employed the skin-fold test to torture the rubbery flesh of players returning to work after a long off-season’s partying.
If that’s not enough, he also gave us the spectacle of players running around with shoe polish smeared under their eyes to ‘cut down the glare’. Oh, and he made sable coats for men properly sexy.
Gibson admirer Warren Ryan would prove to be the next big thing in coaching. Ryan-coached sides loved to tackle. They would smash, crush, bash and snuff, outside-in and inside-out. If you had the ball, you’d soon know about it.
He introduced a team tackling technique called ‘up-and-in’, which sounds kind of sexy until you had to face one of his rushing defence lines. He also forced a rugby league rule change for the attacking bomb, after his Bulldogs relentlessly bombed St George fullback Glen Burgess, reducing the poor fellow to a thick, smeared paste in his own in-goal.
Phil Gould is hailed as probably the greatest motivator of football players in recent memory. The passion he wears on his sleeve is still evident when he commentates and it’s not hard to imagine getting fired up when being personally addressed by him.
Wayne Bennett should need no introduction to most NRL fans. Building a club and culture from scratch that’s either the most envied or hated in the league (same thing really), as well as collecting armfuls of Premierships at two clubs is no small achievement.
Bennett was also the best at adapting to the constant rule changes of the 1990s-2000s, thanks mainly to the influence of Super League. Bennett-coached teams play simple and direct, with high tempo and low mistake rates.
This humble man reminded the comp that it’s a simple game. His Lockyer/Hunt backline sweep play to the second man is used by every team today. He’s probably not the author of this move, but he’s the master of it.
Bennett protégé Craig Bellamy has been lauded as the coach to be followed in the last five or more seasons. Seemingly born to be a football coach, Bellamy has forged strong ties with AFL clubs in order to trade notes and ideas.
He is probably known as the man who refined the wrestle in the ruck. At a time when league is faster than ever, with the emphasis on attacking football, Bellamy showed how to best sail close to the wind and slow proceedings down with subtlety and guile.
This is not popular with fans but is very popular with his rival coaches. Every team wants to play like a Bellamy team, because Bellamy’s team wins most matches.
Well, nearly every team. Des Hasler has emerged as the man with the answer to the Bellamy problem. His method of short passes among the big forwards has renewed interest of all rivals in the lost art of the offload.
He somehow adds a measure of skill to big men and a measure of toughness to his backs. He also has the knack of coaching a side to premiership favouritism at the same time as convincing everyone his team is under the radar. Thus every match against Hasler-coached teams is an ambush.
So this grand final will either confirm the passing of the ‘coach of the era’ torch from Bellamy to Hasler, or Bellamy will maintain his grip on it like a Cameron Smith headlock.
We can’t wait to find out.
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