Matthew Johns on the halves problem NRL coaches must overcome

IT is a question so simple you wonder why nobody else has ever considered it. Right here is the example of the problem with modern coaching.

IN the green room before Wednesday night’s NRL360 there were 40 different topics discussed about the way of the ­modern half.

Matthew Johns was in and would soon give just about the best 20 minutes of television heard all year. Johns was talking through ideas with that marvellous ability he has to take the complex and make it very simple.

That is how he avoids the curse of the modern coach.

Noam Chomsky, one of the living world’s great thinkers, once said if you can’t explain something simply then you probably don’t understand it.

Chomsky’s message is lost on the ambitious coach, filled with bluff, who when asked to explain what he is trying to do with his team will break into a lot of jargon.

It does not take long to realise they are repetitions, empty phrases repeated because they have been heard and rehearsed and give the impression of knowledge without any clue to true understanding.

Johns’ credentials to talk about halfbacks is well established. It is more than simply playing outside the greatest halfback of all time.

It began for real when Matt Orford left Melbourne all those years ago and Craig Bellamy was looking for a halfback and he sent Cooper Cronk, a utility player that mostly worked in the centres, to Johns to see if he could make it at No.7.

Bellamy has sent his halves to Johns ever since.

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Brodie Croft spent time in the most recent summer with Johns and, when his form dipped and before he was sent back to Queensland Cup, he slept a few nights at Johns’ place on Sydney’s northern beaches.

In Croft he found a perfectionist, he is saying this night, who goes to the line every time trying to think his way through all those options.

“Too much,” Johns says. He began talking to Croft about what he did well.

“Cooper,” he says, “built his game brick by brick.”

The pressure on the modern halfback is to be all things to all coaches. Every half has to play like Johnathan Thurston. They forget Thurston is at the end of his career and that it took Johnathan Thurston a long time to become ­Johnathan Thurston.

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Too many modern coaches confuse their halves, he says. And the reason is because they are confused themselves. So he refuses to speak in coaching jargon, the modern smother for a lack of understanding.

Johns is frustrated with the modern coach who pops an eye over the back fence to see what the opposition is doing and copies it. The junior reps coach whose intention is not to teach young players the skills and understanding required to make it but wants to win at the expense of education.

So the kids are coached to structure and repetition and their brains slowly rot through inactivity.

To make his point Wednesday night he spoke about the two dominant halves of the 1990s, his era, Allan Langer and Ricky Stuart.

Brodie Croft has spent time working with Matthew Johns. Picture: AAP

They dominated for more than a decade with styles that were completely different.

Stuart played to width. He had a long pass, a long kick. He ran tempo. Umbrella defence dominated the game but Stuart’s long pass got around the umbrella to find Laurie Daley running an overs line, or Mal Meninga, coming short off Daley, and the Raiders were close to unstoppable.

Langer played short. He constantly probed. Short passes, inside runners, turning over tired defenders. At his best he could not be handled.

Tim Sheens realised the advantage Stuart’s talents offered and he built the Raiders attack around it.

Wayne Bennett knew what he had with Langer and ­refused to get in the way.

He bounced in full of energy on Wednesday. This kind of stuff is rarely heard on ­television, anymore.

Then Johns asks a simple question. What would happen if you had taken Langer out of Brisbane and sent him to Canberra and sent Stuart to the Broncos in his place?

It is so simple you wonder why nobody else has ever considered it. Right there is the example of the problem with modern coaching.

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Forget Sheens is coaching the Raiders and imagine for a minute the modern coach welcoming Langer to the club. The modern coach would explain to Langer how they liked to play at the Raiders and how they knew he was terrific at playing short but they liked to play with width and so, Alfie, how’s your long pass?

Meanwhile, Stuart would be in Brisbane being coached to play like Langer and, between them, all those wonderful gifts would stay unused.

And that was his problem with the modern half. Modern coaches don’t coach to their strengths but are stuck in this cookie-cutter style, copying whatever they see better teams than them do.

They forget it takes 50 or even 60 games before a halfback begins to find his feet in the NRL.

They ignore what their halfback is good at and what made them interesting to him in the first place and they try to alter his style to play a game that is really somebody else’s game, because it somehow satisfies them as coaches.

And when the player fails it is the player’s fault, not theirs. To cover their lack of coaching they coach “structure”.

Ben Hunt has copped plenty of criticism during his time at the Dragons. Picture: AAP

Each set is pre-planned and designed for a result and offers little attention to the anomaly, the slow defender, the injured defender, the half-break that was not in the plan.

It forces on the game its greatest sin, that of being boring. Bellamy understands Johns and how this offers an advantage.

With his halves still young and developing he resists building his team’s attack around them and instead went into Friday night’s game against South Sydney with no promise who his halfback will be for this finals series, just saying that they will pick the right halfback for the game.

He knows the strength of each of his three choices and for the moment he is picking the right halfback for the right game.

Importantly, he is not trying to change the way each plays. This entire weekend shapes as a big one in the game.

Anthony Milford has found form at the Broncos. Picture: AAP

Ben Hunt has copped so much criticism he is coming out the other side as a figure of sympathy. Again, few of the critics have bothered understanding Hunt’s strengths and weaknesses and how much Gareth Widdop, back Sunday, complements him.

The Brisbane halves, Kodi Nikorima and Anthony Milford, have finally found form after concentrating on what they do well.

On Saturday night the perfectly balanced pairing of Nathan Cleary and Jimmy Maloney take on another combination that has found its balance, Blake Green and Shaun Johnson.

Halves will always be the lifeblood of any good team. The trick is to find who can coach them.

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Originally published as Matthew Johns on the halves problem NRL coaches must overcome