NRL 2022: Why Kalyn Ponga won’t help Knights win a premiership, Paul Kent
The great clubs are always well led, and Kalyn Ponga has shown he doesn’t have the influence needed to deliver premierships for the Knights, writes Paul Kent.
Opinion
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Leadership, at least as the old-timers remember it over morning porridge, is a disappearing art in the NRL nowadays.
At least the way it used to be.
When Newtown was moored to the bottom of the ladder in the 1970s and refusing to budge, the Jets benefactor John Singleton went out and hired Tommy Raudonikis away from Wests for the single purpose of bringing Tommy to Newtown to teach them how to win.
They found other reasons to be fond of each other later.
Tommy went to work early.
Just half a dozen games or so into his first season he suffered a gash to his head that bled so well it gurgled.
At halftime Warren Ryan was giving his players the talk and the doctor kept trying to get to Tommy to stitch his wound closed and Tommy kept pushing the doctor away.
Finally Tommy stood and subtly pushed in front of Ryan and reached up and wiped the blood down over his face as he stared at his teammates seated around him.
“Bleed with me!” he said. “Bleed with me!”
Tommy was inviting them to join his war and the Jets left the dressing room that afternoon and gave it to Parramatta, which was assembling the best team of the decade, and in victory they found their belief in themselves.
It all turned around for Newtown after that.
It takes its forms, too.
When Mal Meninga was flicking off defenders with casual abandon in the Brisbane Rugby League the Canberra Raiders, who were something of the competition whipping boys at the time, grew tired of their easybeat reputation and mortgaged the farm to bring Meninga south.
It was treated lightly around the game.
Ron Casey was on Channel 10 news claiming it the greatest waste of money in rugby league, which was no small feat, wondering how Meninga was ever going to step up from Brisbane to match it week to week with the big boys in Sydney.
Meninga changed everything at the Raiders, though.
He brought standards to the club not there before and he figured he had spent his whole life winning and didn’t believe the Raiders had a right to change it, so they better come along with him.
Such was his magic he even somehow shortened the highway between Canberra and Queensland and suddenly a stack of other Queenslanders like Steve and Kevvie Walters, Gary Belcher, Gary Coyne, Sam Backo, Peter Jackson all made the trip to Canberra.
They might have believed it was an outer suburb of Sydney but, a year later, they were in the grand final and old Casey was forced to eat his hat.
The players followed him, and as he matured his leadership matured with it.
Changing behaviours have changed leadership styles over the years but what has not changed is that clubs can’t be successful without true leaders.
So much, in today’s era of the salary cap, the true leaders have a built-in premium. Same as goalkickers.
They are worth more for simply what they bring.
It is generally considered that any player earning more than a million dollars a year is being paid not just for his talents on the field but because of the influence he has off it.
It’s a spin-off question to consider, one to ask once this week’s drama in Newcastle settles down and the Knights begin to ask themselves what they are getting for the million dollars they pay Kalyn Ponga every year.
Who do you win a competition with? And what teams have players capable of driving behaviours that end in premierships?
Part of the reason Penrith is the reigning premier is they have tremendous leaders in Nathan Cleary and Isaah Yeo, who know their role goes beyond performance.
Cleary is the first to arrive, last to leave kind of player. That is a literal example, not lazy writing, as he sets the example from Monday to Sunday.
Yeo has the maturity and strength over the group.
Cameron Munster is the star at Melbourne but Jesse Bromwich is the Storm’s standard bearer. It is the chief reason Wayne Bennett recruited him, to plant the culture at Redcliffe.
Dale Finucane changed Cronulla the moment he walked into the joint.
Coach Craig Fitzgibbon knew exactly what he was getting when he chased Finucane. So much, that when Finucane pushed for a four-year deal, which was enough for other clubs to withdraw interest, Fitzgibbon thought it was worth the gamble.
It would be worth it for what he brought.
Parramatta have banked that Clint Gutherson and Mitch Moses are the two men to lead them to premiership glory.
The Eels’ finals failures in recent years, along with their dramatic inconsistency, means the jury is still scratching its chin over whether they can deliver the hardware, though. At some point the Eels might have to figure out whether they need to make a change.
The Cowboys and Broncos both turned their season around with astute recruitment over the summer. They couldn’t have purpose picked their new players better.
Chad Townsend’s Townsville arrival allows Scott Drinkwater to just go and play, for an easy example, but his presence goes beyond that, into how the Cowboys prepare off the field and execute on it.
Adam Reynolds has gone to another level as a leader but the likes of Kurt Capewell and Pat Carrigan also drive the player buy-in at the Broncos that is filtering through the group.
The great clubs are always well led.
The poor clubs are led only when the television cameras are around or somebody pokes a nose over a fence to see what the others are doing and they copy it, right up until they lose interest.
Knights coach Adam O’Brien said yesterday he needed to drive standards to get the Knights where they need to be.
It’s what the club needs to hear from their coach. But they’re waiting to hear it from the captain, too.
SHORT SHOT
Once again it is time to begin the annual appeal to keep the men out of the NRLW.
The game is going through great change at the moment and we will see the next level of advancement today when the new competition kicks off around the country.
More than once since the 2021 season ended earlier this season (revived after being cancelled through Covid last year), some of the game’s best players have talked about the expansion of the game and growth in skills that is advancing the game with each new season.
And unfortunately the talk gets around to how, with better coaching, they will be able to slow the ruck down and control the game more and be better at what they do.
Where is it written, though, that these new skills will make the game better?
It is lengths ahead of the AFLW, for one, as far as a spectator sport goes.
One of the great attractions to earlier seasons of the NRLW was how the women tackled. They brought back the old-fashioned collision that used to be such an attraction in the men’s game but which has now mostly disappeared through advancing wrestling techniques.
NRL boss Andrew Abdo should be having a talk to the NRLW coaches and imploring them to continue creating their own game, with its own unique appeal, instead of trying to simply be poor imitations of the men’s game and its heavy emphasis on the wrestle.
He should be telling the referees to put an emphasis on the quick play-the-balls.
Quick play-the-balls and fast footy will be a far more attractive look than trying to do what the blokes do.
It’s not the way to sell the game.
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Originally published as NRL 2022: Why Kalyn Ponga won’t help Knights win a premiership, Paul Kent
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