NRL: Youth versus Experience

Warriors coach Brian McClennan. Photo / Getty Images

Wayne Bennett backs wise old heads, but Brian McClennan says the kids are all right, writes Michael Burgess.

Australian super coach Wayne Bennett says it is the Warriors' inexperience which is affecting their season - and that it cost them the match against his Knights side.

Warriors coach Brian McClennan disagrees, citing "game management" but, after the team surrendered two 18-point leads in a row (one to Bennett's Newcastle team), criticism is beginning to centre on the Warriors' development mantra and gamble on youth.

The Warriors have introduced plenty of new faces this season, some caused by injuries and with some moments of success, but many of them have had to cope with a classic case of 'deep end' learning. Bennett has seen it all in a career that has spanned almost 650 NRL matches and says it is always a tricky equation.

"It's one of the biggest challenges as a coach," Bennett told the Herald on Sunday. "You know you can only get them experienced by playing them but you know that by playing them, they are going to make mistakes on you. That is always the million dollar question."

"I always say you need to have played three years and about 40-50 games before you know what the hell is going on out there. Up until then, you can get the odd exception but it is a huge adjustment to anything else they have ever played.

"If you have got too many in the team that haven't got [those numbers] up, that makes you even more vulnerable."

Today the Warriors will take the field with nine of their 17 players under Bennett's magical 50-game mark, including their fifth debutant of the season in Carlos Tuimavave.

No one will deny that youngsters such as Ben Henry, Elijah Taylor, Konrad Hurrell and Sione Lousi have impressed individually and developed substantially but collectively the team has shown a disappointing tendency to blow big leads, switch off at vital times and consequently lose a series of big matches.

"There are a whole lot of issues there," says Bennett about using youth. "[Generally] the less, the better; the more, the more fraught you are with the danger of not getting it right.

"You have to get them in there but you have to manage how you get them in, what position that come in, how long they might play for, how long they don't play - there is a whole range of things. I like the older players because they know how to get the job done."

Newcastle's clash with the Warriors two weeks ago was a classic case study of Bennett's beliefs in action.

"I didn't take Danny Buderus off all night because it was tight and tough out there and we were getting on top," says Bennett.

"If we were losing that game, I probably would have taken him off but I left him on there because he knows how to get the job done."

Bennett put his faith in the 34-year-old, 234-game Buderus but was more circumspect with young Kiwi prospect Zane Tetevano, who has taken the field on just 13 occasions in the NRL.

"I didn't put Zane back out there in the second half because he is probably not going to turn up on assignment somewhere where we need him to because he is not experienced enough to," says Bennett. "But we will keep bringing him along because we think he is a wonderful young player and it will be a process. But I had [Zeb] Taia [102 NRL games] back on, I had [Neville] Costigan [145] on, [Adam] Cuthbertson [101] - they all know how to get the job done. They know what works out there and how you close games out."

Reflecting on that game, where the Knights overhauled an 18-0 deficit after 20 minutes to win 24-19, Bennett says a lot of it was down to exploiting the relative inexperience of the Warriors.

"The Warriors didn't switch off against us; they kept pretty good ball control and stayed in it - you couldn't put their loss down to switching off," says Bennett.

"We got ourselves back into the game, playing a pressure game, and managed to maintain that pressure and that's when your inexperience comes to the fore. When they were leading 18-0, they didn't look like an inexperienced team.

"[At that point] you have to pull them back, get them into that pressure where all of a sudden they have to make decisions quickly and are getting tired [and] exhausted."

McClennan refutes the suggestion that inexperience has been at the core of the problems in 2012. "I don't think you could point it at that," says McClennan. "It's not been because of the young guys - it's down to how we managed games as to why we have lost. There's been a few [losses] that have been close; had we managed things better, we would have won.

"Last weekend [against Manly] was another example. Systematically on defence, we had blokes that didn't fufil their roles. Had they done that, we would have won. And had we kept on playing on offence, we would have made it harder for [them] opponents to attack back as well. It's not the younger guys that have been the problem, it's been across the board."

McClennan says the strategy has not been about blooding players for the sake of it, just picking the best 13 each week, a lot of whom happen to be on the young side.

"At the start of the year, we brought up seven from the NYC competition," says McClennan. "As a coach, you pick what you think is the best team - whether they have played or not. We are picking the best team to get out on the pitch and [development] is a by-product of it. We are not saying we are doing this because of development, we are doing this because it is the best team to win a game."

Nathan Friend, playing his 150th NRL game today, knows all about the value of experience: "When I first went to the Gold Coast, we were all in our mid-20s. We only had a few young ones and they got their experience around us and it worked out well. I guess here our inconsistency comes from not having enough experienced players to young guys."

Friend had just turned 21 when he made his debut in 2002.

"When I first started, I thought 'I'm ready for first grade, give me a go'," says Friend. "But it is not until about 50 games that you start to understand the game and every game starts to slow down for you. Now you enter a game and you can see things in advance."

Elijah Taylor is often held up as a poster boy for the promise-to-performance path. The back rower will play his 41st game today and increasingly looks an assured first grader.

"I feel like now I know what the job requires," says Taylor. "I know when a tackle is going to be fast, I know when it is going to be slow, I know when to get off the line fast and when to ease back. That is what last year was about, because I made a lot of mistakes but I am better for it and it has made me a lot wiser and smarter."

"[Mental toughness] in a team depends on your experienced players because they drive that more than your inexperienced players do," says Bennett. "If you have got good professionals in your team, they get a hold of that and make that happen for you. I've been doing this for a long time. I know how it works and I know what doesn't work ... I'll leave it at that."