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In the one season Anthony Seibold took command of a united club, he performed wonders.
When he coached his second side, there were all sorts of agendas being pushed behind the scenes which contributed to his downfall.
The problem for him is he’s walking into a Manly club which has been torn apart by factionalism and this is more than likely his one and only chance to salvage his coaching career in the NRL.
Seibold has finally been officially unveiled as the successor to Des Hasler at the Sea Eagles on a three-year deal and he will be under pressure from the get-go next season not just because he’s replacing a beloved club icon who was in many ways hard done by to be shown the door last month.
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Manly plummeted from eighth to 11th on the back of seven straight losses to finish the season with six of them coming after the controversial build-up to the Round 20 home game against the Roosters when seven players boycotted the match due to the club’s rainbow-themed “inclusivity jersey”.
(Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)
Hasler had been under contract for next season and threatened legal action after the club’s handling of the jersey drama damaged his chances of a top-six finish which would have triggered a contract extension for 2024.
The Sea Eagles are getting an older and wiser Seibold than the one who was an assistant at the club under Trent Barrett in 2016.
Seibold enjoyed a successful first season as a head coach with South Sydney two years later, winning 17 of 27 starts as he took the team back to the finals and taking out the Dally M Coach of the Year award.
They went within a point of upsetting the premiers Melbourne at AAMI Park in week one of the finals, outlasted the Dragons by the same margin via Adam Reynolds’ field goals and Cameron Murray’s crucial one-on-one steal before their playoff charge ended with a 12-4 Preliminary Final defeat at the hands of the eventual champs, the Sydney Roosters.
From there, Seibold’s fortunes went south as soon as he inked a deal to head north to coach the Broncos.
The 48-year-old former Canberra forward had made enemies in outgoing Brisbane coach Wayne Bennett and the Broncos’ old boys network, who wanted Kevin Walters installed. Their allies undermined Seibold behind the scenes before he even arrived at Red Hill.
The first season was barely OK, by Broncos standards, limping into the finals in eighth place but the end result was unacceptable – a 58-0 caning at the hands of Parramatta in their first playoff.
Season two at Brisbane started well with back-to-back wins but then the pandemic hit, halting the competition for two months, and the Broncos’ form collapsed – in their second game after the resumption, the Eels pumped them 59-0 in an ominous sign of what was to come.
They won just one of 11 games and Seibold departed late in the season as the Broncos tumbled to their first wooden spoon.
He said he learned plenty from “some of the challenges that were presented to me” in his inglorious Broncos exit and now has “a vast array of experience”.
After stints helping out on the Newcastle and England rugby union team’s coaching staff, he’s been entrusted with turning the Sea Eagles’ fortunes around by chairman Scott Penn.
While he has been the majority owner of the club for the past 15 years, Penn is wresting back control from Hasler and the family of the late, great Immortal five-eighth Bob Fulton, installing Tony Mestrov as the new CEO late in the season and making several changes to the club’s off-field staff.
If Penn is mightier than the sordid underbelly of the Sea Eagles’ internal politics, Seibold stands a chance of reinstating the team as finals contenders.
He has been doing the rounds of the media since Wednesday afternoon’s stage-managed announcement and is adamant that he doesn’t see this appointment as his last chance to salvage his coaching career.
Anthony Seibold after winning the 2018 Dally M Coach of the Year award. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
But it is.
Another failure and his cards will be marked as a coach who could have been a difference maker but was not the complete package that early indicators suggested him to be.
NRL coaches often get a second chance at a new club if their first stint goes awry. Many even get a third start. But unless you have a premiership trophy on your resume, it’s almost impossible to convince a prospective club to take a punt on a coach who’s had three false starts.
In the first 25 years of the NRL era, there has only been two coaches who fit this description and they both at least had Grand Final runner-up credits in the bank – Brian Smith, who was given a go by the Knights and Roosters after starting out at Illawarra, St George and Parramatta, and Graham Murray, who also kicked off his career at the Steelers before coaching the ill-fated Hunter Mariners and Roosters before the Cowboys handed him the reins.
Manly’s roster is still relatively strong, not of “premiership-winning” calibre as Penn would have you believe when he was trying last month to make a case for why Hasler had underperformed as coach.
They have 2021 Dally M Medal winner Tom Trbojevic returning from shoulder surgery at fullback, a potential star in Josh Schuster getting a chance to form a potent halves combination with captain Daly Cherry-Evans while Jake Trbojevic and Haumole Olakau’atu will be the foundation of a solid pack.
Add in the likes of Reuben Garrick, Jason Saab, Tolu Koula, Taniela Paseka and Lachlan Croker and Seibold has a team capable of threatening the top four although depth is a worry and a few injuries to their key players could result in another slide like last season.
Their only significant losses are the departure of veteran five-eighth Kieran Foran to the Gold Coast and prop Martin Taupau, who is yet to sign a deal elsewhere.
“If we work hard and connect and bring that togetherness to the group, along with unlocking some of the potential of some of the younger players, we can continue to improve,” he said in a video interview posted on the club’s website.
He won’t be overseeing pre-season training until the end of the month due to his England rugby commitments but is confident new assistants Shane Flanagan and Jim Dymock, along with Steven Hales, will get the squad heading in the right direction.
Seibold spoke of wanting to challenge the players over the summer months, “making the guys accountable to the effort parts of the game”.
“I’m really looking forward with great optimism for what we can do over the next couple of seasons. There’s an opportunity to build and not just build but bring some success to the Manly team.”