Phil Gould must resign as general manager of the Penrith Panthers over Griffin-Cleary saga
PHIL Gould’s actions over the last few days prove the time has come for the Panthers general manager to step aside from running Penrith writes PAUL KENT.
Opinion
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PHIL Gould spruiks an elusive truth.
It comes in small glimpses, a peak through a keyhole. It might be exactly how he describes it, but it might not be the full picture either.
Gould will have strong justification for telling as much truth as he believes his club’s fans and members need to know but it has brought extreme pressure to the club and puts him in an untenable position.
After the week that has just been it is not good enough.
Gould should resign.
The question is does Penrith board have the courage to pull the trigger?
Gould has upset most of the rugby league community this week.
Many of them Penrith fans.
He has cost the Penrith club millions of dollars by sacking Anthony Griffin on Monday, less than a year after extending his contract for two more seasons.
Removing all emotion, it was negligent in a fiscal sense. Corporate Australia would reel if similar practices were imposed on their shareholders.
If Gould was in public office he would be one election away from Opposition.
His handling of the Griffin sacking has led to a steep erosion of faith in the Penrith club.
Gould has been trusted to deliver the Panther message since he first came into the job in 2011.
Chairman Dave O’Neill or chief executive Brian Fletcher are rarely heard on club business. Gould is the front man.
But he blew it this week in his handling of why Griffin was actually sacked and what might or might not have been offered to Wests Tigers coach Ivan Cleary.
Gould was bullish early.
“I’ve already had 12 applications come in overnight from people within the game,” he said Tuesday, when the going was still good.
“Other assistant coaches and even some head coaches from other clubs.
“I think we’d be a very popular choice for a coach who’s looking for a strong club and a good roster and great facilities.”
Seems like nearly everybody wanted to coach Penrith.
But Penrith’s lack of strategy for how they would sell their pitch, and how they would shape the narrative, soon became evident.
Leaks at the club revealed Cleary as the preferred choice.
On Tuesday, Gould said: “We do have someone in mind and we’re still waiting on an answer on that.”
By Wednesday the Tigers had flared in defiance and there was a lot of public blowback on Penrith’s audacity to headhunt a rival coach with two years to run on his contract.
Gould began speaking of a meeting between O’Neill and Cleary which was about, apparently, the sale of Cleary’s house.
“Dave innocently asked him, ‘Would you ever come back to the Panthers one day?’” Gould said in his podcast.
“And as I understand it that conversation escalated over the next couple of days to the point where on Friday I was informed by Dave that Ivan was keen to have a talk to the Wests Tigers about his long-term future with a view towards one day returning to Panthers.”
So this all happened, supposedly, on the back of a casual conversation between the chairman and an ex-coach.
Gould believed Griffin had to be sacked immediately.
“My only involvement in all of this was to tell our executive that if Ivan was going to have that discussion with Wests Tigers on Monday then we owed it to our coach to inform him exactly what was happening because it will create a media storm and it will make his position very difficult here,” Gould said.
The logic is absurd.
Either Cleary was being geared to return next year and Gould wanted Griffin out of the joint before he had a chance to win the premiership, which was the early narrative but has since been denied, or, as Gould claims, Griffin had to be sacked immediately in preparation for Cleary returning in two years time because he would struggle with two years of speculation.
But that just puts any coach in the same position Griffin was just sacked to avoid: coaching an interim role while they wait for Cleary.
Gould was struggling to hold it together. Then hours after his podcast the sacked coach Griffin upset the whole narrative.
He appeared on NRL360 and said he anticipated being sacked at season’s end after falling out with Gould over nothing more than “coaching philosophy” but he was shocked at being sacked four games out from the finals.
He took offence at Gould’s explanation why.
Griffin is media shy. It is certain the Panthers did not anticipate the umbrage Griffin would take at the version being peddled by the club or that he would choose to speak in a live, unedited interview.
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Griffin spoke in rock solid sentences. Every word was laid like a rock in a stone wall.
He spoke in specifics.
It compared favourably against Gould’s shifting truth.
And he put the Panthers in the middle of a full-blown public relations disaster.
Sacking Griffin now looks an emotional decision, not strategic.
When Gould returned to Penrith in 2011 he gave no time frame for when he would quit.
He said he would walk away when the job was done. By then, he said, he hoped to have the club in such a place his job as general manager of football was “redundant”.
Most of that has been achieved.
Gould has done magnificent things since he returned.
He drove the $22 million Panthers Rugby League Academy, among the best in the business.
He ensures the club invests heavily in its juniors where unlike, say, the other big nursery at Parramatta, the conversion rate from juniors to NRL is high.
He was behind Panther House. There, young, relocated players are housed in a family environment by former Panther Shane Elford and wife Alanah.
He continues to do good work around the club with various charities.
But under his watch the Panthers have had no great joy in the NRL.
They have not reached a grand final in the eight seasons he has been there.
They have reached the finals just four times, including this season.
He has sacked three coaches, Matt Elliott, Ivan Cleary and now Griffin, after all three disagreed with his coaching philosophy.
He appointed Cleary and Griffin and both had success when left unencumbered. Both saw their results deteriorate when Gould began to interfere.
And in both cases, just when the Panthers appeared to be heading towards where they needed to be, it came spectacularly undone.
Cleary was “tired”. Griffin was “old-school” and had “lost the playing group”.
Griffin did not deny there might have been grumbles from some players but outright rejected the hard to deny — and equally hard to prove — claim he had lost the group as a whole.
Griffin knows it is impossible to keep all 36 players happy at a club.
“They don’t all want to kiss you in the cheek when you come into training,” he said
Maybe Gould’s job is redundant already and there is just nobody at Penrith who has noticed yet.
Maybe Gould should concede he has taken the club as far as he can and, so they can reach that next step, just walk away.
*****
BILLY Slater’s looming retirement immediately puts him in the Immortal debate.
Which promises to go on for some time.
Slater won’t be eligible for the next Hall of Fame Induction or the one after that.
A requirement is that players have to be retired five years.
Slater’s eligibility for the Hall of Fame does not come around until 2024.
By then, the next class of Immortals will have been inducted when the four-year cycle for them comes around again in 2022.
Slater won’t be eligible then because he won’t yet be in the Hall of Fame, which is necessary for the Immortals and surely is inevitable.
He surely has to be an automatic first round induction.
It means Slater won’t come up for Immortality until the class after that in 2026, some eight years into retirement.
It won’t always work out as an eight-year time span but every automatic entry into the Hall of Fame will miss at least one cycle and, in rare cases, two.
Slater is quite simply the best fullback many have seen, including many who go back to Graeme Langlands. Witnesses who saw Clive Churchill are a little harder to find, but Slater remains a favourite of Churchill’s widow Joyce.
It will be interesting to see how time treats him.