Why the Titans should take a chance on Ben and Shane Walker as co-coaches
THE Titans need to make a bold move in replacing Neil Henry and appoint the Walker brothers as co-coaches.
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EVER since the movie, if not necessarily the book that precedes it, everyone in every sport has been looking for their Moneyball stat.
An ocean of silverware awaits the discoverer, or so the thought goes, and rugby league is no different.
The game currently has four different statistical companies pumping out enough stats to drown you in decimal points.
LEGACY: The Under 20s team of the decade
REPLACE: Maroons assistant set to take over Souths
As well as Fox Sports Stats all NRL coaches are contracted to use Prozone, which not all coaches do use, while Champion and Opta also provide statistical data.
As yet, none have found the elusive formula.
Des Hasler once relied heavily on a system called Contributor Value Rating that collected all the important stats and spat out a rating that he used as a guide toward performance. Two premierships came his way.
Somewhere, though, Hasler got it backwards and the stats began to drive the performance. The Bulldogs became a team that won because they completed a certain amount of sets in a game, for instance, and so they began playing a simple risk-free style to achieve their completion rate which, as a byproduct, barely threatened the defence.
They got it backwards.
Moneyball began when the stats nerds went looking to win their fantasy leagues and applied sabermetrics, the study of in-game stats, to the results.
They discovered, somewhere among all the numbers, that the time-honoured belief that batting average equated to success actually ran second to another, less recognised statistic, called on-base percentage.
It existed in the fantasy leagues until Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, brought it into the major leagues.
Beane managed the salary-cap-poor A’s and found on-base percentage valued players differently and was a great way to find value against the richer teams.
Baseball is different from rugby league, for very obvious reasons. Baseball, essentially, is one player against one player. Pitcher against batter.
The contest is rarely isolated in rugby league, a team game.
Which is what makes the bid by Ipswich’s Walker brothers, Ben and Shane, to coach Gold Coast so interesting that it cannot be ignored.
The Gold Coast don’t have the money to compete with the big teams as it currently stands.
The Broncos, just up the road, kill them on third party deals. They are the lowest spenders in the football department, so the resources are not there like at other clubs.
And their roster is hardly enough to threaten for a premiership anytime soon.
It limits the Titans’ choice.
They can’t afford a coach with premiership-winning credentials, so a Craig Bellamy or Wayne Bennett or Des Hasler is out.
One choice is to find Bellamy-lite. A coach who knows the theory and has watched the Bellamy style succeed from afar and does his best to enforce all he sees in a Bellamy team or similar.
There is no doubt all modern defences come from the Melbourne template.
Wherever they go here ends with a cookie-cutter style all the teams play, with block plays and completions and wrestling dominating the training paddock, just not well enough to make any real dent on the ladder.
The other alternative is the gamble. The home-run swing.
The Walker brothers play a style unlike anything played in the NRL.
Their whole game is built around time in possession. Not completion rates, the mandatory stat generally spoken of in the press conferences, but how long they actually old onto the ball.
Their basic theory is the longer they have the ball and the less time their opposition does, the more fatigue
In the modern world of stats, time in possession is the only one they worry about.
They encourage quick play-the-balls against them, as it limits their opponents’ time with the ball. They limit the structure in their attack.
Their hiring at the Gold Coast might be genius or madness, nobody is quite sure which.
Any success will depend on the bravery of the Gold Coast club and their willingness to gamble for success.
Do they go for it and try to win it all, or settle for middle of the road and safety?
Billy Beane’s Oakland never won a World Series, though got close. Other teams with richer salaries threw an eye over the Moneyball concept and adopted some of its principles, quickly negating Beane’s advantage.
Currently, nine Major League Baseball teams have sabermetrics analysts on staff.
Originally published as Why the Titans should take a chance on Ben and Shane Walker as co-coaches
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