Heads should roll, says former coach Robertson

Gary Caffell
Heads should roll now that Wairarapa-Bush have been relegated into the bottom section, the Lochore Cup, of the 2008 Heartland rugby championship.
That's the view of a former coach of the union's senior representative side Ritchie Robertson, who this season co-coached East Coast to their first-ever senior first division title on the club scene.
Robertson says those union officials who twice overlooked the then incumbent Graeme Cheetham for the head coaching role should take responsibility for Wairarapa-Bush's failure to retain their Meads Cup spot and resign.
"They are the ones who should be made accountable, they created the mess we are in now," he said.
Robertson was "gutted" and publicly said so at the time when Cheetham was axed despite him and Lofty Stevenson taking a very inexperienced side through to the previous season's Meads Cup semi-finals.
First he was beaten out of the job by Earl Va'a and when Va'a pulled out to take up a more lucrative coaching position in Japan again Cheetham missed out, this time to Kelvin Tantrum.
Robertson said choosing Va'a ahead of Cheetham was bad enough but considering he had come second in that race he should have been an "absolute certainty" when the position became vacant a second time, even more so since it occurred just before the club season began.
"Here they were with a guy who had done well the season before and had already done his homework on most of the players, you would think he couldn't miss," Robertson said.
"I mean if he was good enough to be second first time round you'd think they (the union) wouldn't have even bothered to re-advertise."
Robertson said comments made by WBRFU chairman Bryan Weatherstone at the time of Vaa's appointment that if the board felt that "local coaching was going to see our Heartland team into the Meads Cup final then we wouldn't be making changes" had come back to bite him.
"I wonder what he thinks now," Robertson said.
Angered as he is by Cheetham's dumping for "no apparent reason other than a couple of minor off-the-field issues" Robertson does not want to be seen as a critic of Tantrum.
Rather he said the current coach was a "good bloke" who was always going to be on the back foot because of the lateness of his appointment, and the decision by the union that he should work with the same management team put in place by Va'a.
"I'm not saying things would have been any different had he been able to choose his own support group but it was a big ask to expect to him to fit in with people he probably didn't even know."
Robertson is convinced, however, that Wairarapa-Bush do have enough talent on the local club scene to be a very competitive unit at Heartland level although he admits that what he calls a "more meaningful" club competition would help bring that talent out to a greater degree.
"We have to come up with a format which encourages players to produce their best form week in and week out," he said. "Hopefully that will happen."