Paul Kent: Eels sit where most experts predicted in race for NRL premiership

After two disastrous losses, the heat is on Parramatta — but as Paul Kent writes, have the Eels really underachieved if they finish fourth this year?

MACKAY, AUSTRALIA – JULY 29: Eels players react after their defeat during the round 20 NRL match between the Sydney Roosters and the Parramatta Eels at BB Print Stadium, on July 29, 2021, in Mackay, Australia. (Photo by Albert Perez/Getty Images)

We nearly all took a shot at it at the beginning of the year, hopeless romantics who had no idea how the new rules would affect the game but boldly pressing on regardless, submitting our top eight predictions.

It is a ritual set-up to do nothing but bring embarrassment, with the chances of getting through a season without injury about as safe as toppling over Niagara Falls in a beer barrel.

Mick Ennis and Cooper Cronk began the season as they have continued it, finding something else to disagree on with Ennis predicting Parramatta for a fourth-placed finish while Cronk had them slightly lower down the table at sixth.

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Sam Burgess tipped the Eels to finish fourth.

Slowly, though, as other experts like Greg Alexander and Gorden Tallis and, across town, Andrew Johns entered their tips, a theme was developing.

Andrew Johns, who has a minor coaching role at the Eels, was optimistic about the club’s chances this season. Picture: Toby Zerna

Tallis had them finishing fourth.

Alexander the Advisor, who moonlights as a Fox Sports expert when he is not advising the NSW Blues for three games a year, tipped the Eels to finish fifth.

Over at NRL.com a couple of likely tipsters in Steve Renouf and Jamie Soward had Parramatta finishing fifth and sixth respectively.

Point is, nobody tipped the Eels to finish higher than third on the ladder, other than Johns, who also had a minor coaching role at Parramatta that might have contributed to his optimism.

Now, with four games to go the Eels sit right in the middle of where most predicted, fourth, and yet with the same roster now as they had then the narrative is somehow growing that their premiership window is closing.

And coach Brad Arthur is feeling considerable warmth.

Just what has changed, when pre-season predictions were just about right on the money, to say now that the Eels have suddenly underachieved, nobody can explain.

Certainly the past two losses have added to Parramatta’s anxiety but if the current game has a message it lies in Souths, who are currently on a nine-game winning streak that came immediately after a 50-point loss. In other words, blowouts are not unusual in today’s game, or even always a fair guide.

The Eels were outclassed by the Rabbitohs last weekend. Picture: NRL Photos

Just about everybody had Melbourne and Penrith as their top two, currently first and second, with variations of Souths, the Roosters, Raiders and Parramatta taking up the other two spots.

There is trouble afoot, though, and the worry for the Eels is it seems the dishonest kind.

Nothing undoes a club like backroom politics.

Reports surfaced recently claiming fullback Clint Gutherson was seeking as much as $1 million a season to re-sign at the Eels.

Further, it said that Gutherson was already stubbornly digging in after negotiations for his current contract turned sour and, it went, he felt he sold himself a little too cheaply and was adamant he would not be making the same mistake again.

For a club whose only real need is a genuine game-breaker, and the money to afford him, it was a worrying leak from within.

If only it were true, for one.

While Gutherson has begun negotiations his manager Sam Ayoub has yet to present a figure.

The concern, though, is who at the club leaked the $1 million demand and what were their intentions?

Eels skipper Clint Gutherson has begun negotiations with the Eels on a new deal. Picture: Mark Evans/Getty Images

It has added to the speculation that Parramatta’s recruitment and retention department are singing from different hymn sheets and that is where the real trouble might lie.

Managers regularly query Parramatta’s urgency and attention to detail in regard to recruitment, which happens outside Arthur.

Arthur does not seem to get the support other coaches at the more successful clubs seem to be receiving.

Craig Bellamy has such faith in recruitment boss Paul Bunn that many are signed without Bellamy even seeing them play.

Peter Mulholland tells Ricky Stuart he has found another one and Stuart waits until they turn up for training to get his first look. Daniel Anderson enjoys similar trust at the Roosters.

It gets more complicated at Parramatta. Former Wests Tiger Mark O’Neill is head of football and his relationship with Arthur is as solid as a tower of jelly.

The issue seems to be that few good ones are ever signed unless Arthur does it himself.

On Tuesday, Parramatta chief executive Jim Sarantinos dismissed any talk of internal rumblings. Arthur, he said, has never been told to take a player he did not want.

The speculation about Arthur and O’Neill struggling to agree on recruitment, which was mentioned by the grumpy bloke on NRL360 on Monday night, was also disputed.

“Mark and Brad have robust discussions all the time and, let me tell you, I like that,” Sarantinos said.

Parramatta’s recruitment team is Arthur, O’Neill, Sarantinos, chairman Sean McElduff and recruitment boss Ben Rogers.

Eels chief executive Jim Sarantinos has dismissed talk of internal rumblings at the club.

“I don’t have a whole heap of people who are yes men reporting to me,” Sarantinos said. “I need people who can challenge me and I think that is healthy.”

It was a vigorous defence from the club boss, and you would not expect any less.

But it sits at odds with the outside feedback, leaving you to wonder if the boss is learning something new as well.

Kent: Why punting Arthur would be just window dressing

The much-vaunted premiership window is as unforgiving as the average high-rise window, from which it might or might not have taken its name.

Essentially, once you go through it there is no turning back, the descent is fast, and it is usually fatal.

Parramatta coach Brad Arthur finds himself perched on the window now, pushing back against those inside, nudging him off the edge.

Brad Arthur is under plenty of pressure at Parramatta.

The Eels, currently fourth, were so poor against South Sydney last Friday that their performance went some way to legitimising the growing narrative that Arthur is a coach incapable of delivering Parramatta a premiership and so, unless the Eels move to sack him and replace with a legitimate premiership coach, this current window will close without a premiership.

What has been lost in the argument is a simple question: what evidence is there that Parramatta are in a premiership window?

The Eels are a good team. Most weeks they play hard and they win more than they don’t.

But they have not been the equal of either Melbourne or the Sydney Roosters over the past five years and they are not in the same class as Penrith this season.

They have many good players but not one outright champion – in a game where the recent rules changes favour the champion players more than it ever has before – like the Storm does or the Roosters do or Penrith or even South Sydney.

All four of those clubs have better rosters than the Eels.

Arthur’s detractors and more than a few single-minded Eels fans will no doubt point to Parramatta’s record in recent seasons to refute this.

The Eels are a good team but don’t measure up the very top clubs.

They will point to the record books where it says the Eels finished top three last season, fifth the season before, and fourth in 2017, none of which delivered Parramatta a premiership.

That Melbourne and the Roosters finished above them each season, and actually took out the title, escapes their logic. They live in a world of selective reasoning, and so continues this myth that the Eels are in a premiership window.

Maybe the true coaching job was not Arthur failing to take Parramatta from fourth or fifth to a premiership, but that he got them to fourth or fifth in the first place.

To assume the Eels are ready to win a premiership and just need a new coach in place is the absurd assumption that there is a crop of premiership-winning coaches for the Eels to choose from.

NRL clubs do not have the advantages of other sporting codes. Management at Manchester United can look to leagues in Spain, Italy, Germany, indeed all across Europe, to find qualified replacements.

The NRL breeding ground seems to be confined to the assistants jobs at Melbourne and the Roosters.

Parramatta’s form has fallen right away in recent weeks.

There has not been a coach to come out of New Zealand since Frank Endacott coached the Warriors in 1997-98.

The only NRL coaches to come from the second biggest rugby league competition in the world, the English Super League, are young Aussie coaches returning after several years doing an apprenticeship to round out their education.

Not one Englishman has coached the NRL since Malcolm Reilly at Newcastle, also in the 1990s.

The only out of work premiership-winning coach not fattening up nicely in retirement is Paul Green, Shane Flanagan and, for next season, Wayne Bennett.

The rest want to stay retired, crocheting while they watch Super Saturday without an ounce of worry.

But not even this solves Parramatta’s problems.

If any of those men landed at Parramatta next season there is a gold-carat guarantee they would immediately begin turning over the roster.

They win more than they lose but the Eels are still no closer to an elusive premiership.

Not wholesale changes, but they know enough that to trot out the same roster that has failed under Arthur would be to leave themselves vulnerable to the same fate.

Overlooked in the argument about coaches delivering premierships is the first basic truth.

Coaches do not win premierships. Clubs do.

In recent seasons the successful clubs have been tandem efforts; Bellamy and Frank Ponissi, Robinson and Politis, Anthony Griffin and later Ivan Cleary, with Phil Gould.

While coaches have long been credited as the chief reason why clubs are successful, the landscape is slowly transforming, yet coaches remain their own worst enemy because they protect this assumption they do all the hard lifting.

Historically they have been given the greatest power at the club, but the job has become so much bigger.

In recent years NRL clubs have slowly followed the lead of sporting franchises overseas, where a head of football, or perhaps baseball or basketball, is responsible for the long term success of the coach.

Often they are in charge of hiring the coach. And often they are a safeguard against short term decisions that might improve the short term success of the coach, but have long term repercussions, such as sacrificing junior development to front load the roster.

Brad Arthur has been relying on Mitchell Moses as his creative force.

It is why Gould, who has not coached a team to a premiership in 30 years, still has value identifying talent and setting up systems within clubs to ensure ongoing success.

Gould set up the elite pathways system at Penrith, from which Ivan Cleary benefits, and is now employed to do similarly at Canterbury.

Part of Parramatta’s problem is that Arthur and head of football Mark O’Neill do not often agree on what makes a good footballer or, further, a good recruitment.

This would reveal a management problem at the club.

As for what is happening at Wests Tigers, where a similar campaign is being raised to hold coach Michael Maguire to blame for their continued underachieving, take the above argument and double it.

Originally published as Paul Kent: Eels sit where most experts predicted in race for NRL premiership