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The upside for tortured St George Illawarra fans is that their team’s fortunes can’t get much worse but the club’s decision to put their faith in controversial former premiership-winning mentor Shane Flanagan is still a monumental risk.
Flanagan will demand results and he will not take shortcuts when he takes over at the helm next year after the Dragons board met on Tuesday to consider their options between him and former Dragons premiership-winning players Dean Young and Ben Hornby before going with the more experienced candidate of the trio.
He is walking into a similar situation to the one when he started his NRL coaching career at Cronulla 13 years ago. Back then the Sharks were a mess after Ricky Stuart’s tumultuous four-year stint as coach ended with him walking away late in the season as the team narrowly avoided the wooden spoon.
Flanagan ended up guiding Cronulla to a historic first title in 2016 in the second of two stints at the Sharks either side of a year-long suspension two years earlier due to the peptide scandal which engulfed the club a decade ago.
Shane Flanagan (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
Caretaker coach Ryan Carr is set to see out the rest of this season after doing a commendable job since replacing sacked coach Anthony Griffin a month ago with Flanagan to begin his tenure next season.
The Dragons are last with a 4-10 record after 15 rounds but have won two of their past four since Carr took over, including last Saturday’s 36-30 thriller over Souths so avoiding a first wooden spoon for the club is the main goal for the rest of 2023.
Unlike during his early years at Cronulla when the club went close to insolvency on several occasions, Flanagan will have much better resources at his disposal with St George Illawarra’s high-tech Centre of Excellence at the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus due to be completed by the end of next season.
Sorting out their under-performing roster will be one of his first and most important priorities.
Dragons skipper Ben Hunt, who has been linked to a move to several clubs in the wake of Griffin’s dumping, revealed on Saturday that he had spoken to Flanagan, who had assured him that he would keep him at halfback and not shift him to hooker for the remaining two years of his contract, if he became coach.
What that means for restless rising star Jayden Sullivan remains to be seen. The young halfback requested a release last off-season because Hunt was blocking his path to the No.7 jersey long term before being convinced to stay.
Teams like the Wests Tigers and Dolphins are desperately looking for a promising young playmaker so don’t be surprised if he gets targeted by cashed-up rivals.
Flanagan will be pretty much stuck with the same squad next year with only Josh Kerr, who has already signed with the Dolphins, and fringe first-graders Billy Burns, Moses Mbye, Tyrell Fuimaono and Tautau Mogo coming off the books and not taking a lot of salary cap space with them.
At the end of next year the Dragons have half their current top-30 squad off contract with only Hunt, Jack Bird, Sullivan, mid-season recruit Viliami Fifita and Zac Lomax signed for 2025 and beyond.
(Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
Flanagan showed during his time at Cronulla that he favours established first-graders with grit rather than panache – he pillaged the Wests Tigers when they needed to jettison several players, unearthing a rough diamond in Andrew Fifita and getting value out of the likes of Chris Heighington, Beau Ryan and Bryce Gibbs.
But he also won’t be afraid to go after big names – Luke Lewis, Wade Graham James Maloney, Michael Ennis and Ben Barba, briefly, proved to be astute purchases after being unwanted or under-appreciated elsewhere. The Dragons would do anything to get seasoned players of that calibre into their camp over the next few years.
Although the Sharks also did also bring in Todd Carney, Josh Dugan and Tony Williams, very briefly, under his watch, which indicates that questionable off-field character was not a deal breaker when it came to assessing potential recruits.
The risk in signing Flanagan for the Dragons is that he comes with a lot of baggage from his time at Cronulla.
He enjoyed a 55% win rate during his eight years at the Sharks, capped off by the memorable 14-12 Grand Final victory over Melbourne seven years ago which ended almost a half-century of heartache for the club.
But it was his methods which caused controversy.
The club adopted a “whatever it takes to win” mentality under his watch and the Sharks nearly went belly-up after the infamous period in which compound pharmacist Stephen Dank was brought in to administer peptides to the players.
Flanagan, who was de-registered at the end of 2018, was not allowed to hold a head coaching position as part of his punishment for disregarding the terms of his original ban by continuing to contact personnel at the club over recruitment decisions.
Jayden Sullivan scores. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
However, the NRL will not stand in his way now that the Dragons have identified him as their next head coach.
In some ways he’s the safe option for the Dragons because he has a record of success and many more runs on the board than Young or Hornby.
Young filled in as St George Illawarra’s interim coach in 2020 after Paul McGregor departed and has been assistant to Todd Payten at the Cowboys for the past three seasons while Hornby was also an assistant at his home club before taking up an offer to head to Souths when Griffin lobbed in 2021.
Another former Dragons international, Jason Ryles, was the early favourite to fill the coaching vacancy but he recently informed the club he would be leaving his assistant role at the Roosters to return to Melbourne where he is expected to succeed Craig Bellamy as head coach in 2025.
Flanagan becoming Dragons coach is something of a homecoming. The 57-year-old came through the junior representative ranks of St George started his first-grade career at Saints with three matches in 1987 before the hooker had stints with Western Suburbs and Parramatta.
He was briefly an assistant coach at St George Illawarra under McGregor after he left the Sharks at the end of 2018 and has also worked for the club as a recruitment consultant before joining Manly this season on Anthony Seibold’s coaching staff.
The Dragons will be at long odds to get back into title contention anytime soon and if Flanagan can get them within touching distance of the top four during his first couple of years it will be a remarkable achievement.
After a pathetic record of just one playoff win since their 2010 premiership success, the bar is at an all-time low for the Dragons.
The question now is have the Dragons already hit rock bottom after Griffin’s three-year reign of error and Flanagan will restore some pride in the club’s reputation or are they making the same mistake as last time around and entrusting their team with a coach who will take them further away from their goal of returning to grand final glory?