Coaches are people with feelings, let's go a bit easier on them

Gee, rugby league coaching is an incredibly easy gig.

Well, that’s certainly the case if you listen to the multitude of online commenters who are always so quick to declare which NRL coaches are just awful at their jobs, deserve to be sacked and that there are a wealth of better options available. 

The latest head to roll is Anthony Griffin, with the St George Illawarra board voting last Tuesday to terminate his contract with immediate effect.

The baying mob and the vultures in the rugby league media have been circling the man they call ‘Hook’ for quite a while now, with the Dragons recent very poor form finally sealing his fate.

As I’ve written previously, there are many factors that must fall into place for a club to be successful, with just one being the coach.

However, upon his head has seemingly been heaped the blame for all of the failures, inadequacies, misfortunes, missteps and plain bad luck the joint venture club has experienced during his tenure.

And that can’t possibly be true or fair. 

Yet for many commenters it really is that simple. They are happy to deride him as a failure and an incompetent. Yet most do it without any real knowledge of what went on at all, or without any seeming consideration for the feelings of the man.

Or even that he even has feelings.

But coaches do have feelings. They are some of the most passionate people there are. They suffer horribly for their failures. In a media environment that has at its core a rapacious and insatiable appetite for content, all perceived failures are horribly examined in minute detail, in high definition, slo-mo while everyone discusses them – often brutally.  

This forensic exploration for weakness and issues across the entire landscape of the game is constant. The moment a club, player or coach is seen to be struggling massive attention is focused in, not in an attempt to fix it but to effectively will it to become a major issue that they can feast on like carrion.  

It must be utterly horrible for those being subjected to this public dissection. 

I am ashamed to say that I have previously engaged in this behaviour myself, looking at the potential axings of coaches as some sort of sport to be debated for a lark

For that I sincerely apologise to all whom I have done that too.

I’m no longer on that ride at all and I’m encouraging all of you who might still be on it – or are complicit through silence – to please reconsider your position.

I encourage you to see them as people with feelings.

One of my very favourite sayings is “Before you criticise someone first walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticise them you’ll be a mile away and they’ll have no shoes.”

But all jokes aside, think about how you’d feel about receiving the same level of scrutiny and criticism while trying your best to succeed.

After his Cowboys beat the Raiders in Canberra in 2019 on the back of a steamrolling performance from his star lock forward, I asked the late Paul Green how good it was having Jason Taumololo in his side. 

At the time I did not fully grasp the gravity of his response. “It certainly helps me to sleep at night.”

Just a year later Green was sacked as coach of the side he had taken to premiership glory only five years earlier. 

Coaching is a brutal business. The coaches are like the gladiators subject to the coliseum crowd baying for blood. 

Dragons head coach Anthony Griffin. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

And they regularly get blood.

Green’s axing from the Cowboys is just one of 63 incidences of coaches being sacked in the NRL era (1998 to present).

That works out at an average of 2.44 per season. So the likelihood is high that there will be at least one more departure this calendar year.

Griffin is in the just 19 per cent of coach sackings that  have occurred before the Origin period, with 46 per cent actually happening in the post-season.

Now Griffin has been axed the attention is likely to turn to someone else – Brad Arthur due to Parramatta’s up and down results or while the Knights are showing some form, the direct heat is on Adam O’Brien or perhaps it’s Justin Holbrook. No one has ever been able to relax at the Titans and Holbrook will be well aware of that.

And for the first time in his stellar tenure there is actually some pressure on Trent Robinson at the Roosters.

The optimism that aspiring first-grade coaches display in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that they’ll find a way to achieve winning a premiership is actually quite a wondrously beautiful thing. 

In the 25 completed seasons since commercial interests seized control of the competition just 14 coaches have achieved that summit. 

Paul Green celebrates his finest moment as a coach, North Queensland’s 2015 Grand Final win with Johnathan Thurston. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

So each year an average of 2.44 of the 16 coaches (15.25 per cent) will get the boot and just one in 16 (6.25 per cent) will succeed. 

The non-level playing field that all of the NRL clubs exist on has a massive impact on which clubs the sacked coaches will come from. 

A total of 39 of the 62 sacked coaches (62.9 per cent) have come from just six clubs:

9 – the Warriors
6 – the Rabbitohs, the Wests Tigers, the Dragons
4 – the Panthers, the Cowboys, the Roosters

Of all the teams that have contested the premiership each year just 12 sides have shared in those 25 Grand Final triumphs and ten of those titles (40 per cent) have been shared by just two clubs: The Roosters and the Storm. 

The overwhelming likelihood is that the coaches that get sacked will be from clubs that are struggling that season. 90.4 per cent of the time the club firing the coach was in the bottom eight at the time, with the side being in the wooden spoon spot 23.8 per cent of the time. 58.7 per cent of the coaches sacked had sides that finished in the bottom eight the previous season too.

The worst NRL seasons for sackings were 2002 and 2020, with five coaches let go by clubs in each year:

2022: 

Paul McGregor – Dragons, 
Paul Green – Cowboys, 
Steve Kearney – Warriors, 
Dean Pay – Bulldogs, 
Anthony Seibold – Broncos

2002: 

Andrew Farrar – Dragons, 
Craig Coleman – Rabbitohs, 
Terry Lamb – Wests Tigers, 
Mark Murray – Storm, 
Murray Hurst – Cowboys.

In each of seasons 2006, 2012 and 2014 four coaches were sacked.

Conversely, there have been just seven seasons when only one coach has been sacked: 1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2016, 2018 and 2021.

And there has never been an NRL season where no coach has been sacked.

Nathan Brown (Tony Feder/Getty Images)

With the exception of the Dolphins, every current club has sacked at least one coach in the NRL era, with the Raiders the only side to have terminated just one contract, David Furner in 2013.

And 25 of the coach sackings (40.3 per cent) have involved 11 coaches who have been sacked more than once:

3 – Chris Anderson, Nathan Brown, Anthony Griffin
2 – Tim Sheens, Matthew Elliott, Daniel Anderson, Brian Smith, Jason Taylor, Trent Barrett, Steve Kearney, Michael Maguire.

That stat would not be music to the ears of the four current NRL coaches – five before Griffin was terminated – who have been sacked at least once previously:

• Anthony Seibold
• Ivan Cleary
• Tim Sheens
• Ricky Stuart

Pretty much without exception, every one of the coaches who were terminated were determined, passionate and dedicated. They tried their very best. But things just didn’t work out.

So lets all stop treating their sackings like some kind of game or sport. Lets give them thanks, space and respect.

Just like we want for ourselves.