NRL 2020: Stint in hell over for NRL’s interim coaches | Paul Kent
Stepping up from assistant to the (caretaker) main man can be a painful but crucial audition. Five assistants were thrust into the NRL hot seat in 2020, but only one of them will walk into the top job next year, writes PAUL KENT.
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The highway out of Brisbane wasn’t straight enough for Peter Gentle. Monday’s flight to New Zealand cannot come soon enough for Todd Payten.
Dean Young retires the red and white Sunday having never seen himself in any other colours.
Josh Hannay returned to Townsville Thursday night waiting for a phone call that will come.
And given it was nine years between stints this time around Steve Georgallis, the Canterbury coach until a little after five on Saturday evening, wonders how long until the next gig will come along.
He loves coaching, he says.
What is shared among them this weekend is their stint in hell is over.
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Five good assistants leave their jobs this weekend, all of them thrust into a position sometime this season where they were asked to do their best … at a time when their club was at its worst.
Only Payten, who leaves the Warriors tomorrow to take up Hannay’s job at North Queensland, is walking into a head coaching role next season.
For the rest, the past several months have been as much audition as trial.
And it has been some trial.
For each the job was different. The week before a coach gets sacked is about the worst week there is in rugby league.
“There’s a reason things aren’t working out,” Gentle says.
Players are raw and the new relationships need to be managed.
And one of the little understood realities is that when coaches shift from the assistant’s job to head coach they actually do less coaching, not more.
Assistant coaching is pure coaching. On the field teaching skills and in the office devising tactics.
Head coaches oversee that but, they soon found, deal with managers and sponsors and media, their phone growing hot on their ear.
“The biggest change was how busy your phone becomes,” says Payten. They also inherited the responsibility for their players’ welfare.
Soon after taking over the Warriors Payten received word the team’s application to exempt their families, so they could join them in Australia, was denied. He knew it would shatter them.
“I thought should I hold off telling the players for a few days?” he says.
“After talking with the coaches we decided we had to tell them as soon as possible.”
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All agree honesty was paramount once they took charge. In some respects, honesty is the first quality that disappears when a coach begins to struggle with his squad and survival ode takes over.
“You can play mind games but that never works, it always comes back to bite you,” Georgallis says.
“They might be disappointed with the decision you make but it’s the decision you make.”
The job, they realised, is never a total fix because time prevents it. But adjustments are made.
Hannay butted heads at times with Paul Green about the Cowboys’ attack.
“We had regular robust discussions,” is how he describes it. As attacking coach he wanted to update the attack to what he thought was a more modern style but Green was comfortable with his system.
Hannay believed the game had moved on from shapes and structure.
“One of the first things I thought we needed was to let go of the structure and go to a more principle based attack,” he says.
Now sitting in the big office, Hannay slowly began making adjustments.
For Young, a different fix was needed.
The Dragons have one of the most misunderstood rosters in the NRL.
There is enough representative players at the club to bring sharp criticism from fans when the results don’t come. But it is fool’s gold.
To put it delicately, or not, they are non-winners. Only two players at the club have ever finished top four.
So Young, a premiership winner, set about changing their habits.
He wanted them to train like winners. He changed their weights program, for instance, knowing the improvement in real terms would be minimal but the change in habit was necessary. The change was more about resetting where they are.
It should not surprise anyone that knows Young that his best work at the Dragons this season was for the man who comes in next.
Gentle took over a squad that had given up on their coach. He couldn’t continue.
“There had to be a point of difference,” he says. “If we kept doing what we were doing we were going to keep getting what we got.
“So we changed our defence. Simplified things. The players bought into it.
“I took the approach of it being like if you had a rep team.
“I wanted to simplify things. Get them working for each other, playing for each other.”
For them all it was an audition.
When the next job might come, though, they never know.
Payten has been hired by the Cowboys. Young will go with him as an assistant, knowing he needs a new club to continue pushing his coaching credentials.
Georgallis was interim coach at Penrith when Matt Elliott was sacked in 2011. He didn’t think it would be nine years before his next head coaching role, or it would be another interim job.
But the dream has never changed.
“I love coaching,” he says. “There’s six or seven clubs waiting to finish up this week so hopefully something might come through next week,” he says.
“I love coaching. But it’s hard. There are so many good coaches who are hoping to coach.”
Not all, though.
For Gentle, who spent Sunday night in the office cutting video and preparing for the final week, his team, on the bottom of the table but the job still to be done, he likes the life of an assistant coach.
“It really doesn’t appeal to me, head coaching,” Gentle says.
“All I really want to do is coach. I don’t want the other stuff.”
By tomorrow all their auditions will have ended.
“What the interim coach does give you is the chance to be seen,” Young says.
“If you look at Peter Gentle, because of the way he handled himself as the Broncos coach, there’s a fair few clubs chasing him to be an assistant at their club.
“I’m not sure Todd Payten would have got the job at the Cowboys if they hadn’t seen the job he did with the Warriors.
“It’s a club in crisis but it gives you an opportunity to be seen.”
Originally published as NRL 2020: Stint in hell over for NRL’s interim coaches | Paul Kent