Trent Barrett has been sold a lemon. His 2016 Manly-Warringah is a disaster on wheels that he should dump before it permanently parks him on the NRL coaching sidelines.
Poor old Baz, the former Dragons and Sharks playmaker efficiently shed his one-time bar dancing ways for the pen and clipboard some time ago, and was rewarded in 2016 with the head coaching role at the Sea Eagles.
The Sea Eagles were going through a bit of tune-up when Barrett was appointed. The club had turned over half its roster from 2015, shedding some tired and excess passengers from the squad’s bus, which had seen the Eagles miss the finals for the first time since 2004.
The club also decided it needed a new driver; a man to shape the team’s new recruits and parachute some of the old guard into retirement.
As a consequence, club legend Geoff Toovey was sent packing and the keys were given to Barrett for what has turned out to be a bumpy and rickety ride ever since.
Geoff Toovey (AAP Image/Paul Miller)
Back in 2015, Barrett’s name was linked to any team bottoming out on the NRL ladder. As it so happened, Bob Fulton was the man to snare the then-Penrith assistant to Manly.
Fulton was the architect of the club’s rebuild and he had picked Barrett to take the wheel. But like all good salesmen, ‘Bozo’ was able to cover the blemishes, dings and potential traps of the product he was selling.
The offer surely seemed attractive; Manly was going to seemingly skip a lengthy roster rebuilding phase, which most clubs are forced to go through from time to time. Daly Cherry-Evans had decided to stay with the club after backflipping on the Titans, plus the club had experienced a decent amount of success over the past 20 years.
The end decision was a no-brainer for newcomer Barrett.
Or was it?
Trent didn’t have the eyes of a seasoned professional, so when he looked under the hood of the Manly operation, the rookie didn’t pick up that the club had a few crossed wires, a bit of corrosion around the cap, some rusty nuts hanging to its internal walls, and some false entries in its log books.
Consequently, 2016 saw the team splutter and fail to get out of second gear. Rumblings of unrest surfaced. Match-fixing allegations, ownership frictions and rumours of connections with ‘colourful’ Sydney characters seeped into gossip columns and social media posts.
What should have been relatively straightforward start for Barrett’s coaching career turned out to be clunky and in the end messy.
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By the end of 2016, all Manly did was blow a lot of black smoke, limping meekly to 13th position.
However, 2017 was better for the Sea Eagles, finishing sixth in the regular season. But Barrett’s boys were quickly pushed out of the finals series and into Mad Monday’s garage after being lapped by Penrith in the first semi-final.
Still, Barrett had his first finals series as a coach, making the outlook for 2018 promising.
But, aside from a big win against a busted Parramatta outfit, Manly’s wheels have been wobbling since the start of 2018, with Barrett fighting spot fires on multiple fronts.
A picture summary of Manly’s current situation would look something like a brown paper bag, some Northern Beaches effluent and a lighter.
The team is shot. They have leaked more oil on the field in the last two weeks than a 1979 Datsun, blown a gasket in their salary cap, and have some concerning internal leaks in and around the team.
They are hemorrhaging money in cap-compliance fines and have had multiple player dramas, including the unfolding Jackson Hastings-DCE debacle.
And with no money to spend on players for 2019, they could well lose some of the cattle they currently own as well.
In the end, Barrett has been left with little choice.
He could see it all out, make what he can out of what he’s got and maybe roll into ninth in 2019, if he’s lucky. Or, he could recognise that his 2018 Manly Warringah utility is a burning wreck, which he should jump from pronto and into another, less combustible outfit when it rolls along.
It looks a pretty easy decision, don’t you think?
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