Paul Kent: How sports science has become the greatest threat to NRL performance
Sports science might turn NRL players into fine physical specimens but mentally it can leave a soft spot that creates a problem for some teams, writes Paul Kent.
Opinion
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The bitter ironies are always the worst kind, no matter how cloaked in good intention they come.
After Saturday night’s game, Newcastle coach Adam O’Brien made his way to the Sydney Roosters’ dressing room in a nod for old friendships and injury, knowing how hard the Roosters had done it with season-ending injuries to Brett Morris and Lindsay Collins.
He pulled up next to Roosters boss Nick Politis and soon into their chat came Trent Robinson, who pulled out a small box from his pocket and handed it to O’Brien.
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It was the Roosters’ premiership ring from their 2019 title, when O’Brien was an assistant under Robinson.
It was a classy effort from the Roosters, even if the timing highlighted the great difference in O’Brien’s life. He had just sat through one of the more embarrassing performances offered by an NRL team this season.
At the end, the Knights were outscored by an 11-man Roosters outfit led by a 78kg halfback, just 18 years old, in only his fifth game.
The Knights are not alone in their surrender.
The link between underperforming teams, able to play well for only parts of games, has become a modern trend in the NRL, one seemingly without answer as coaches dance the line between the honesty that leads to success and nursing along players whose sensibilities are easily offended.
Here, perhaps better than any other reason, is why there is no consistency across the 80 minutes.
O’Brien publicly wondered some weeks back whether his players got bored.
That’s not his only problem.
The Knights are an entitled lot, happy to play for the Knights in a Knights town, even though it has been years since they gave anything like a Knights performance.
There was a time when every team knew no matter where the Knights were running, it was going to be a tough afternoon in Newcastle.
Gorden Tallis said it was “always a beat up”. Steve Roach said you barely slept the night before. The only guarantee was pain.
Robinson acknowledged as much after Saturday’s game, saying his players spoke about Newcastle being a footy town that knew good footy and how they wanted to go to Newcastle and honour that.
These Knights, though, they live off the applause of those who came before them.
Gold Coast coach Justin Holbrook commented after Friday’s loss to Brisbane that his team’s defensive effort was like coaching under-20s again. That competition was noted for its indifferent attitude towards defence.
On Tuesday, Broncos coach Kevin Walters acknowledged his team’s shortcomings, telling them “we’re not that f...... good” before sending them off for more conditioning work.
Michael Maguire has been forced to watch his Tigers trail 28-6 at halftime against the Cowboys, rally to lose 34-30, emerge a week later to go down 18-14 to powerhouses Souths in golden point, crumble 40-6 to Manly before beating St George Illawarra last weekend.
By rights, Maguire should be a puddle of tears right now. You would not do it to your worst enemy.
Yet Maguire is cursed at the Tigers.
He has a reputation for overworking teams that, if allowed to be promoted much longer, could threaten employment.
Yet the Tigers are not hard enough. They are mentally soft.
The same at Newcastle. The Knights don’t train as hard as Melbourne do or the Roosters do and yet they wonder why those teams win premierships and they do not.
The more you wonder the more you see the greatest threat to NRL performance is sports science.
Players won’t hit the training paddock anymore without a GPS system and a high performance guy somewhere nearby telling them how much further to run before they must pull up.
The science, it goes, is to prevent the players from overtraining and the assorted problems that could come with it, like injury and fatigue and success.
It might turn them into fine physical specimens, it is hard to argue against that, but mentally players are being taken to the House of Almost Pain before being let off to recover.
This does not make champions.
Mental toughness is a muscle that requires work.
Robinson has worked this out at the Roosters.
He once said the sports science is there to ensure teams don’t overtrain but, at the Roosters, they use it to ensure they don’t under-train.
When Wayne Bennett lured Kelvin Giles to Brisbane all those years back, taking him away from the Canberra Raiders, who seemed bigger and harder than everybody they played, he did so with one instruction: “Put some steel in them.”
Giles said he was deliberately unfair to the Broncos. They would finish a run in the required time and he would tell them they missed time and had to do it again.
They would prepare themselves for six 400m sprints and after the sixth he would tell them there was four more. Herb Elliott always used to say: “Train like you’re number two and race like you’re number one.”
Elliott trained under Percy Cerutty, who liked to say: “Pain is the purifier.”
He also used to tell his athletes to “think deeply and separate what you wish from what you are prepared to do”.
More than a few NRL players could cop the tip. And their coaches could fast-track it by binning the sports science.
Playing NRL is not enough in professional sport. The currency is winning.
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