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Rebuilding the Reds (part I)

Roar Guru
13th July, 2014
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Quade Cooper's Reds career looks done and dusted. (AAP Image/Tertius Pickard)
Roar Guru
13th July, 2014
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2917 Reads

While most of the Australian rugby community is hoping that the Waratahs will be hosting the Super Rugby final at ANZ Stadium on August 2, the season is already over for the Reds.

This is the first of my two-part ‘Rebuilding the Reds’ article. The first part today will focus on the coaching, while second part tomorrow will focus on the playing roster.

When Ewen McKenzie joined the Reds, they had just finished 13th in the 2009 Super 14 competition and posted their seventh-straight losing season, with a less than 30 per cent winning record of 25 wins from 85 matches since 2003.

With McKenzie at the helm, the Reds recorded four-straight winning seasons at a touch over 67 per cent (44 wins from 65 matches) finishing fifth (just outside the finals) in 2010, and making the finals in each subsequent year, including topping the table and winning the title in 2011.

It is a pretty sad indictment of the organisation that just three years after being champions and in the wake of their much vaunted succession plan, the Reds need such a revival all over again.

The Reds’ 2014 season has been woeful, finishing just above the wooden spoon with 5 wins from 16 games, in the bottom third of the ladder.

Jim Tucker noted in his piece on July 6 that “The upside is that powerful two-year plans turned the Brumbies into finalists last year and the NSW Waratahs into minor premiers this year.”

What Tucker failed to mention was that in both cases the change was affected by a strong coach, Jake White at the Brumbies and Michael Cheika at the Waratahs. Similar to Ewen McKenzie at the Reds, both men came in with a clear vision of not just what was required in a rugby sense, but also the cultural shift that needed to happen within the team.

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A common refrain from people who shy away from assigning blame to coaches is that it is the players on the field who are missing tackles, dropping passes and losing the game, not the coach.

That is an incredibly naive and simplistic statement that while factually accurate reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of the effect that both good and bad coaching has on any team.

Good coaches do more than just run training sessions and make game plans week to week – they create an environment in which the talent of their team is encouraged to flourish. A good coach is what makes a team greater than the sum of its parts.

The elephant in the room of course is whether or not Richard Graham is capable of being such a coach. Despite the fact he has worked as an assistant under John Connolly, Robbie Deans, John Mitchell, and Ewen McKenzie, Graham appears to have learned very little about winning rugby.

His record in charge of Super Rugby teams speaks for itself. At the Force he posted 7 wins from 24 matches (29 per cent). At the Reds it stands at five wins from 16 matches (31per cent)

The hard truth of professional sports is that the buck stops with the person in charge. Whether or not a coach is the root cause of any problem within a team – fixing those problems is the coach’s responsibility, and any known problems that are not fixed are the coach’s fault.

Graham is a capable coach. While he was defensive coordinator of the Reds in 2013 the team boasted one of the best defences in the competition, conceding only 23 tries (a record bettered only by the Stormers).

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However that came while Ewen McKenzie was in overall control of the rugby program (with the title Director of Rugby to Graham’s Head Coach), taking care of the hundred other details that are the responsibility of the manager of a professional sporting side. Once Graham had to take over in his own right, the defence suffered. The Reds let in 52 tries this year – Graham still looks after the defence, with Nick Stiles replacing McKenzie looking after the forwards and Steve Meehan replacing Jim McKay looking after the attack.

It isn’t particularly difficult to determine what is wrong with the Reds when watching them play. They have a passive and porous defensive line, a lack of physicality and accuracy at the breakdown leading to slow ball recycle, and tame attacking structure lacking basic features such as bodies in motion, multiple options running different angles, and support players following the ball in a position to accept an offload.

Essentially three of the four main areas of the game find the Reds lacking. About the only facet of play in which the team holds its own is at set piece time, where the 2014 Reds have rarely been dominated.

Similarly, it is not particularly difficult to articulate solutions to these problems. The team needs to take a leaf out of the Waratahs’ book and remember what they themselves did in 2010 before they tasted success in 2011.

How do they do it? 1. Get fitter. Both the 2011 Reds and the 2014 Waratahs were the fittest teams in the competition. 2. Focus on physicality at the breakdown, and once this has been established, complement it with accuracy and then speed. 3. Strip the game plan back to basics: a fast and heavy hitting line on defence; and quickly recycled clean ball played through the hands on attack. Build the basics first. Add the finesse later.

Few, if any, Reds fans have faith that Richard Graham is the man to fix the team’s problems and reclaim “Fortress Suncorp”.

Whether or not Graham is replaced, and I judge it unlikely, coaching is only part of the puzzle, albeit the major one. In Part Two of this article tomorrow, I will cast an eye over the squad and identify how the Reds can strengthen their playing roster for next season.

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