Mike Hosking: A premiership for the Warriors looks a long way off

A dejected looking Warriors fan reacts during the defeat to the Manly Sea Eagles. Photosport

OPINION:

Thanks very much Nathan Brown. We wish you well.

Not one of the club's longer tenures. But the Brown era, if era isn't too grandiose a word to use, is now officially over. Stacey Jones is in for the rest of the season.

It's hard to know how these things work. The likes of Alex Fergusson, Phil Jackson, Bill Belichick, Sir Graham Henry, and Lois Muir, were they singularly spectacular? Could they have taken any team and made them great? Or did they have a pile of luck? Did they have a budget to recruit? Did they come along at the same time a crop of rare talent showed up? Or did a whole bunch of stuff sort of align itself and make them seem greater or luckier than they might have been elsewhere?

The point being, getting rid of Nathan Brown doesn't solve anything. Brown is the usual scapegoat offered up in a sort of mid-season sacrifice. His replacement, Stacey Jones, as much as I loved what he did for us all those years ago, he's clearly not a solution because he never left the club when he retired. If he was an answer Brown would not have got the job.

The trouble with the Warriors, and I speak now with over a quarter of a century's worth of observation, is their problems are so far and so wide, it's hard to know which leak to plug.

Coaches are obvious. But their relocation has been brutal, you can't blame them for that. Their lack of success feeds on itself. When you don't win, great players don't want to play for you.

Their behaviour doesn't help. Matt Lodge gets into a scrap with the owner and walks with next year's wages. No real explanation is given. Kodi Nikorima is gone. Shaun Johnson's arrival is good news, but at the wrong end of his career.

Every season there is a strange and frustrating series of events as to why they don't do as well as they could or should.

Ownership, coaching, Covid, recruitment, and injury. It's a sad bewildering and seemingly never-ending story. The latest chapter is a coach who turned up for five minutes.

This time it feels a bit "back to square one." Hiccups you can take, hurdles you overcome, and setbacks you rebuild from.

This though feels a bit more serious. Too much of what should be going right isn't. There isn't momentum in some areas to cover off the trauma elsewhere. This feels like you got over Covid but then a bus hit you.

Not only isn't this our year. I'm not sure what needs to be done to ever make it our year.