With Jarryd Hayne out for the foreseeable future, it’s worth asking how much the Titans really need him.
Granted, they lost without him on Saturday afternoon – worse still is that they were the first team to lose to the Knights since round six last year – but the strongest moments for the team occurred after Hayne had been taken from the field. The spectacular team try at the 48th minute emphatically demonstrated how unified Gold Coast could be without Hayne. It reminded me of Peter Wallace’s try against the Bulldogs in the first weeks of finals last year.
For much of the second half the Titans were more vibrant than they have been since before the Hayne era. They were less consistent as well, perhaps, but that’s to be expected following the departure of David Mead.
When Hayne is on the field, it feels as if all the action has to revolve around him. That’s partly a fullback’s prerogative, but also because of his star power and the pressure on Gold Coast to make good on their investment. Yet in his absence other players seemed to have more room to breathe, with Ash Taylor in particular putting in a prodigious kicking game – in many ways Taylor is the anti-Hayne: brilliantly gifted but level-headed and devoid of the slightest whiff of attitude or entitlement.
As many commentators have noted, one of the key challenges for the Titans in 2017 is depth in the backline. Konrad Hurrell may have come into his own over the last year, but he’s still no substitute for Mead and Roberts. Still, I wonder how much Hayne will actually fix that.
In his early days at Parramatta he was often treated as a backline unto himself, and the results weren’t always amazing. In fact treating Hayne as the backline could actually be counter-productive. What the Titans need to do now is to continue to rebuild the team following the departure of two of their most prominent players and the arrival of a host of fresh faces. Yet Hayne’s presence seems inimical to that.
Even taking into account media beat-ups it seems possible that there’s some concern from both players and staff about his relationship with the Gold Coast team as a whole. While they may have missed him in his absence, the Titans felt more like a team without him.
So my question is: do they actually need him to win? Or have they got a better shot in the long term with the Hayne plane grounded?
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