By Peter Jessup
The focus in the Auckland Warriors' face-off with the Penrith Panthers in Sydney today is as much on Mark Graham's coaching ability as it is the on-field performance of his players.
How do you bring a side back from a hiding? How to rejuvenate them and restore confidence? Because if he does not do that, the Warriors are on a slippery slide to hell.
Graham started with a team not of his choosing and a club without cash to buy in players when the season kicked off in 1999. Now he has had the opportunity to clean some out, to replace them with his picks, and months to gel the new unit. There are no excuses.
Graham's intensity is clear to anyone who has seen his reaction in the coach's box after his side has let in an easy try. But yelling alone will not work.
Coaches were supposed to lose sleep after a defeat like that at Canberra, and he had done so, Graham said yesterday.
"Hopefully we've put it behind us. There's been plenty of talk this week about what went wrong and I'm pleased about the way we've gone about getting back on track," he said.
They had addressed the repeated failure under the bombs of Brisbane, Newcastle and Canberra, by dropping plenty of high kicks on the backs with the forwards working to provide shelter for the ball-taker.
There would be more pressure on the kicker this week "so he doesn't have time to read the label."
He expected a big improvement in the kick-chase, Graham said. But most importantly, their defensive effort had to lift.
"We won fewer than half the tackles against Canberra. We'd worked hard on that all last year and all this and I can't work out why they fell back into the bad old ways."
There may be a multitude of reasons. The team management have discounted the boardroom dumping of shareholders Graham Lowe and Malcolm Boyle. If not that, then what?
John Simon appears to be shouldering too much - others are failing to step up and take pressure from him. How much does he miss Stacey Jones? And is there a general malaise that says, in the back of their minds, that they cannot win until Jones comes back?
All the Warriors' attack was down the left-hand side of the field last week, and half Ben Lythe will be told to call more down the right this week.
There have been other problems, though. Graham has always maintained you need to earn the right to go wide by first smashing the ball up the middle.
The props did not do that at Canberra. Nor did they throw the opposition backwards in the tackle.
So how did Graham go about turning his troops from a party of sideshow psychiatric patients on a day trip to the circus into a confident and capable military-disciplined unit? Team bonding.
They have been to see the movie The Hurricane, acted on stage, and written a victory song they hope to sing in the dressing-room beneath Penrith Stadium this weekend.
Graham has encouraged them to talk to each other, to feed off each other's enthusiasm. Don't leave the job to someone else, put your hand up and do it, he has said.
The coaching approach before and after Canberra has not been the one-dimensional whip-them-with-barbed-wire routine Graham Lowe always maintained he instilled in his players.
The players have had plenty of that but it is followed by input from McClennan in the specifics that need working on - a sort of bad cop-good cop routine.
In trouble, the players have had sports psychology sessions, video dissection and anything else thought valuable available to them. But then Lowe was not one-dimensional either, his tough-at-all-costs attitude often a front.
Graham said he would quit at the end of the season if the team had not made the finals playoffs and he maintained that position this week.
The trouble is, he is the main man, the one Warrior most league fans still have faith in. Graham's personal mana will remain untouchable.
But if he and his team management of Mike McClennan, Hugh McGahan and Trevor Clark cannot work out what is going on and lift the side, not even free buckets of Prozac will be enough to keep a pall of depression away from, or to attract fans to, Ericsson Stadium.
Graham said: "Great things are achieved by people whose backs are to the wall and there's no disputing ours are."
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from NRL
NRL team start swear jar after f-bomb barrage
Mitchell raised eyebrows with an expletive-laden radio cross.