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Opinion
Early on Thursday, news emerged that the Manly board of directors had resolved to relieve head coach Des Hasler of his position, effective immediately, with former Souths and Brisbane mentor Anthony Seibold likely taking over in Hasler’s stead.
At this point, and at several other points since, Manly supporters could be forgiven for wondering what in the name of Cliff Lyons and Ken Arthurson is going on at their club?
Hasler might not be the man for Manly’s short-term premiership ambitions or long-term strategy – assuming there is one – but why now, with the club apparently more in need than ever of stable leadership, experience and corporate knowledge? And, why Seibold? There’s a time and place for a technocrat, but surely this is neither.
As a supporter of another NRL club, I can sympathise without necessarily empathising. With my empathy deficit in full swing, I say, who cares. Let Manly stew in their own silliness and let’s ponder what Hasler’s defenestration might mean elsewhere.
There’s an experienced, multiple premiership-winning coach suddenly on the market. He might have some baggage, including, if reports are correct, some pending legal proceedings, but he’ll surely be motivated.
He’s renowned as an innovator, a mad scientist according to some. While his ideas don’t always work, he’s rarely short of them. His affable eccentricity seems to go down well with players and his mumbling, shambling public persona is disarming and often amusing.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
He’s seemingly the complete package in his own, slightly peculiar way.
What’s the market for Des?
There are no current vacancies in the NRL. Wests Tigers have opted to resurrect Tim Sheens, with the Benji Marshall master-genius succession plan in its incipient stage. Cameron Ciraldo’s thinking about his office adornments at Canterbury, as is Andrew Webster across the ditch at the Warriors.
It’s possible that Melbourne is starting to think about life after Craig Bellamy, but they’re likely to promote from within or from among their alumni. Manly royalty, albeit exiled royalty, might not go down too well.
Brisbane and Canberra should be thinking about potential alternatives but won’t, at least for now. That leaves Newcastle, the Gold Coast and St. George Illawarra, all three of whom could conceivably sack their coach during the 2023 season. Is it worth avoiding the angst of a messy in-season divorce by hiring a better coach now?
King Des and the Knights of the round table
Every coach is part of a tradition. In recent years, journalists like Paul Kent and Andrew Webster have traced the legacy of the first generation of ‘super coaches’ – the likes of Warren Ryan, Wayne Bennett, Jack Gibson and Ron Willey – into the modern day. Craig Bellamy and Trent Robinson are starting to develop ‘coaching trees’ of their own.
And this isn’t just a coaching thing. Like a lot of people, I’ve been shaped by my more senior colleagues and how they deal with things – and sometimes how they fail to deal with things. Everybody is a walking, talking legacy artefact.
But everybody has a filter, and you can’t guarantee that they’ll absorb the things that matter. Adam O’Brien, an offshoot of the mighty oaks that are Bellamy and Robinson, appeared genuinely baffled at times in 2022. His Knights team seemed to have little idea of what to do with the ball, spent more time without it and became increasingly demoralised as a result.
There are two broad possibilities. First, the Knights didn’t quite understand, or weren’t interested in, what O’Brien wanted. Second, and even more alarmingly, they did understand what he wanted, and it resulted in the incoherence we witnessed.
Whatever the case, there’s cause for concern. Maybe O’Brien mimicked his mentors and said all the right things when he was a protégé but didn’t really understand what he was saying. Maybe he’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Say what you will about Hasler, but he’s his own man. He’ll give a team their own identity. I suspect he’d go down well in Newcastle. They seem to like their heroes to have quirks and imperfections. They definitely don’t like a dilettante (who does?) and that’s what O’Brien looks like to me.
Titanic ambition
When Wayne Bennett’s first spell at the Broncos was drawing to a close and it seemed he was heading for the Roosters, there were some, me included, who thought it’d be far more interesting if the master mentor took on a real challenge.
What could he do with a team like Cronulla or the Warriors, both then chasing their first premiership? Many years on, we’ll finally get to see if Uncle Wayne can build a contender at Redcliffe.
Hasler might well be disillusioned after his dismissal from Manly and might channel his energies into something else. Or maybe he’s up for a real challenge, like the perennially insipid Gold Coast Titans.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
Justin Holbrook’s done enough to suggest that he can coach. His St. Helens teams didn’t just win the Super League, they dominated it. Even if Saints’ traditional rivals, Leeds and Wigan, were not as competitive as they had previously been, it still takes something to maintain the dominance Holbrook and his charges achieved over multiple seasons.
On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of strong competition other than an emerging Catalans team who promised much but failed to deliver when it really mattered. Can Holbrook drag a weak team up the ladder against a much higher standard of competition? Can he get the best out of the very talented but underperforming players at the Titans?
David Fifita and Mo Fotuaika should be among the elite forwards in the NRL but aren’t. A player as gifted as AJ Brimson should have no trouble converting to the front line. The Titans’ edge defence was inexcusable in 2022. Something’s wrong.
Hasler loves a big, athletic edge back rower and isn’t afraid of using them innovatively, as his time at Canterbury demonstrated. He took a Manly team that included Moses Suli, Morgan Harper and Jason Saab to a preliminary final in 2021. Des loves the edges, they’re where his teams are most effective.
It seems to me that Hasler is good at bringing out the strengths of his teams and minimising their weaknesses in the process. He might be able to paper over the cracks of a talented but flawed team like the Titans.
Saint Des and the Dragons
Yes, I’m a Dragons supporter and I’m not happy. We were always headed here. I’ve argued previously that Anthony Griffin should be dispensed with immediately, regardless of what other coaches are on the market.
The Dragons have gone nowhere for two years and Griffin refuses to think about the long-term interests of the club. What are St George waiting around to discover? Whether Andrew McCullough, Moses Mbye and their ageing brethren might eke out a few narrow wins against the likes of Canberra and Manly, and maybe finish eighth?
It’s really not good enough, and now there is a serious coach on the market. He’s an innovator, somebody who could figure out a way of accommodating Tyrell Sloan, Talatau Amone and Jayden Sullivan in the same team while also using the talents of Ben Hunt, Cody Ramsey and Josh Kerr.
(Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)
The thing is, could the Dragons even make a bold, proactive move? There’s been inertia and indecision on the board for years and they’ve been mostly happy to wait around and discover the inevitable, only acting when they had no other option.
Dragons’ CEO Ryan Webb entered the job in 2020 full of enthusiasm and ambition. He’s rarely been heard from since. Assuming he wanted to, could he explore the possibility of hiring Hasler? Does he need the imprimatur of one of the ancient directors from St George to make a proactive move? I don’t know, but it seems a pertinent question.
I’ve presented Hasler as somebody who could fix any problem, which is probably naïve. He could conceivably fix lots of problems, but not every problem and certainly not a lot of them at once. Who could?
Still, at least three NRL clubs should be considering whether he could fix their most immediate problems. As for Manly, good luck.
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