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I’m sitting here watching the Tigers play Manly, and I’m wondering how this vibrant club has been dismantled so dismally.
If I was a Tigers fan, my hairline would have gone from recession to full blown emergency retreat many months ago. This club is a shambles, lurching from disaster to disaster as the brains trust in the suits steer the club off the road.
It started last year with the decision to start cutting players. This was a club who had finished fourth the previous season, and were experiencing an injury that which was holding them back in the present season.
It was a not club in need of a clean out. Yet a clean out they got.
Chris Heighington, Andrew Fifita and Beau Ryan were forced out to accommodate signing of the milennium Adam Blair. Hasn’t that gone well?
Ryan is still doing a reliable job on the wing, Heighington is scrapping and fighting and tackling and generally keeping things tight in the middle of the park, and Fifita is playing like Optimus Prime.
The decision to cut him loose is most damning obviously. Here we have a bloke who was forced out by the Tigers, and yet this year was picked by popular demand for New South Wales.
But don’t worry, Heighington is a big loss too. The Tigers side this season has so lacked starch and resolution in the middle, a fellow who hurls himself about, makes plenty of tackles and carts it up strongly might have been a tiny bit useful.
Don’t forget Bryce Gibbs either; his sturdy and uncomplicated front row play would have been helpful this season and last. Instead the Tigers recruiting gurus have served up Eddy Pettybourne, Braith Anasta and Bodene Thompson. Oh, and Adam Blair.
A lot of that lack of application might be traced to the coach and the morale he has created, which brings me to the sacking of Tim Sheens. Only one coach has won more premiership games than Sheens, and that’s Wayne Bennett.
When he took over in 2003, the merger club had never made the finals. Within a couple of years, they were a side full of flair, regularly creating excitement and occasionally eliciting pure joy.
In his third season they were premiers. Prior to Sheens taking over they averaged between nine and 12,000 people to every game. From his second season on they never got below 16,000. He took them to the finals three times in ten seasons.
This may sound less than impressive, but you have to look beyond the stats a little bit in this regard. Of the sixteen sides in the NRL, most of them play the same way.
Up the middle, up the middle, dummy half, spread, kick to the corner. It’s safe, and it’ll get you to the finals every other year.
Sheens’ Tigers defied all that. They made the finals less often than many others, but were far better placed to do something when they did get there. What’s the point of playing a generic style, coming seventh and going out in week one or two of the finals?
The decision to sack him and replace him with Mick Potter is showing itself now to be absurd. The colour of movement of last season still flares occasionally, but there is a lot of sludge in between.
That sharp, snapping attack which typified Sheens’ team, with Farah and the fullback acting as auxiliary halfbacks, was replaced by a sort of dottering, confused strolling around.
Potter cannot take all the blame, he has inherited a patchwork quilt side who are used to a certain pattern. However the team, and at times the coach himself, has shown a worrying lack of self belief this season.
Think the 54-10 routing by Souths.
The side also lack organisation. Sheens’ team was unpredictable, but they had structure and every player knew what they were doing. In the present side there are often forwards in the way, passes going to ground and plays executed without precision or clarity.
This was regularly on show against Manly last night.
It’s not just the players and the coach. There’s also the shameful attempt by the Tigers’ board, in collusion with the State Government and the NRL, to get rid of Leichhardt Oval as an NRL venue.
This is one of the great examples of the suits who run sport not understanding it. If the facilities at Lechhardt Oval are so poor, why do the fans keep turning up?
I live in the Hunter Valley and don’t follow the Tigers, but twice this year I’ve driven two hours down to Sydney, once in peak hour traffic, just to experience rugby league as it should be.
I would never have travelled all that way to see the Tigers play Parramatta at the SFS, I can assure you.
Yet they want it gone. The administrators and legislators’ dream of playing all Sydney matches at Homebush and the SFS means that Leichhardt is fighting for its existence beyond this season.
They fail to recognise that Leichhardt Oval makes the Tigers unique to every other club in the competition. It is the reason people like myself will drive for hours to see a game between teams they don’t even follow.
At the risk of sounding like a tin hat conspiracy theorist, my suspicion is that the NRL and the Tigers have deliberately scheduled less desirable games for Leichhardt this year (Parramatta, North Queensland, Melbourne and the Warriors, all at night time), to weaken the argument that the fans love Leichhardt.
If this has been their intention, it has succeeded, the crowds at the spiritual home have been well down this year, although the weather has played a part in that.
The Benji Marshall saga is another example of the pigheaded groupthink lunacy which has infected the club, and turned it from a team full of character and vibrance to an also-ran.
Benji Marshall is the other thing that makes them unique. The reasons for his departure are cloudy, but it is clear that it has not been of his making alone.
From a side which finished in the top four two years in a row, the Tigers have been completely dismantled by people in suits.
As someone who has enjoyed their style over the past ten years, it is frustrating. For their fans it must be frustrating beyond words.
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