Waratahs lacking identity, toughness under coach Daryl Gibson, says Brendan Cannon
I KEEP hearing about how well the Waratahs have been training. I keep watching them lose games, too, so something doesn’t add up, Brendan Cannon writes.
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I KEEP hearing about how well the Waratahs have been training.
I keep watching them lose games, too, so something doesn’t add up.
Sometimes you can finish training with a warm fuzzy feeling; everything is clicking and moves are working beautifully, albeit without much in the way of defence.
But if that fuzzy feeling is being followed up by the hollow burn of defeat, like the Waratahs are experiencing now, then you have to acknowledge this fact: you aren’t training well.
Or more accurately, you aren’t training right.
I actually don’t mind hearing about training from players. It was common when the Waratahs were under Michael Cheika but there is a crucial difference between then and now, and I think it may point to the source of the problem in 2017.
Has training softened since Cheika left?
Cheika was known as being a hard-arse as the Waratahs coach. It was the one thing players would always speak about: how bashed they were at training, how tough it was. There were guys shaking their heads but they did it with a grin because they knew it was good for them.
You smash yourself at training, and have your reserves and other squad members making no concession, making you earn everything, have the odd fight. All so that everything you do at training feeds into success.
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No one talks like that now Daryl Gibson is in charge.
Is there is a softer approach now at NSW, with a coach still feeling his way from being an excellent assistant into his first head coach job?
It can be a tough transition from 2IC to the head coach.
It’s a lot easier to excel being an assistant because the majority of the pressure goes through the head coach and he absorbs it.
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But when an assistant gets promoted in the same environment, it can go two ways: it can be a runaway success by continuing established pathways and habits.
Or it can be a confronting challenge for the playing group and that coach, because the environment is the same but dynamics are different.
Do you go to the extreme opposite to how you were as an assistant? Or do you take the same approach as you’ve always had into the head coach position?
Can the players go to the coach in the same comfortable way they went to him as an assistant before? Is that relationship now more distant?
Elite athletes in every sport will tell you: comfort breeds complacency.
So to succeed you have to be constantly identifying your weakest points and improving them. You have to say unpopular things and make tough decisions.
To be fair to Gibson, he is in a difficult position. Following the Cheika era, which yielded the first ever NSW title, he took over a changing player group and had to decide how to take the team forward.
Doing the same thing as 2014 was never going to work and Gibson has tried to evolve the “identity” established by Cheika.
But it hasn’t seemed to work. The Waratahs’ style is very hard to pin down now and it’s probably no surprise they’ve struggled in the last two seasons.
It is a commonly held strategy that when things aren’t working, you go back to the basics. Return to some basic principles of Waratahs’ rugby: win the forward battle first — set-piece, breakdown, contact — and then let your backline finish the job.
I think NSW have the depth and the roster to be a competitive side but that edge — another Cheika term — is missing. The simple truth behind a hard edge is to ask the question: how hard are you training?
Maybe the playing group and the coach need to get together and ask themselves that question: “How hard are we?”
Honesty required.
Originally published as Waratahs lacking identity, toughness under coach Daryl Gibson, says Brendan Cannon