Cronulla can’t match the selfless toughness of their title-winning team
Cronulla’s long-awaited premiership finally came because they had a squad of players ready to unleash the violence and take the beltings for each other. This year’s Sharks can’t say the same, writes PAUL KENT.
John Morris has good news coming.
No team in the NRL is better equipped to fix Cronulla’s problem than the Sharks themselves.
No team is as selfless as the Sharks at their best. They wear the hurts and the welts because they know, to do what needs to be done, there is no other way for them.
They built a premiership on it.
The fix to Morris’s problems is not as easy it once was.
Paul Gallen, the captain, is in slow transition out of the game. Luke Lewis, who set a standard for the team like few could, is already retired.
Mick Ennis is gone.
The hard edge that built Cronulla is gone or going and what’s left is a team in transition. The consistent violence they brought to their football is in decline.
Ennis spoke to it Monday on NRL360. He talked about the beauty of arriving at Cronulla in 2015 and finding a club happy to do all the dirty work necessary to find excellence.
Nobody cared who got the credit.
Lewis led Cronulla’s right side chase, with Jack Bird and Val Holmes, the most ruthless in the game. The middle forwards rolled their sleeves for the fight and the dirtier it got the better they liked it.
There was only one stat the Sharks cared about and it was one they all shared in. Who got the W.
Ennis felt it immediately.
Every club in the NRL strives to have similar values running through its team. Most clubs will put their hand up to having it, just to show their fans they are not missing out, even though most clubs only speak to it.
But for a time the Sharks lived it. It delivered their only premiership.
Now, the Sharks languish in 11th and are going south.
There have been rumours of unrest at the club and it all broke open Sunday afternoon on Triple M when talking about Cronulla’s loss to New Zealand.
I said there was unrest at the club. It was getting around the game the troubles on Cronulla’s left edge.
Morris was juggling Josh Dugan, Josh Morris and the new kid, Bronson Xerri at centre.
Xerri debuted at right centre but the plan was always to switch him to left centre when Wade Graham, who also plays left edge, returned from injury.
Graham finally started a game in round 15 with Morris at left centre and Xerri the right winger. A week later he switched them and the troubles began.
Morris did not like playing right wing. The irony was he scored three tries in the close loss to Brisbane.
But friction remained.
Morris wanted to play centre.
In some ways it is nothing more than internal politics. In others, though, it is everything.
Because it is against everything that made Cronulla so formidable.
Gallen confirmed the internal unrest to 100% Footy on Monday night.
“There’s an element of truth in that, and it has been addressed, it has been addressed by myself to the playing group today,” he said.
“I’m not here to repeat exactly what I said in the playing group meeting but I said ‘Look, we’re here as a team, we win together and lose together, whether you play wing, centre, front row, wherever you play you go out there and do your job for the team.”
Gallen had a simple message for his teammates: “There’s no point being the best player on the field in the losing team.”
It was the philosophy that drove the Sharks through their premiership window, where every game was a street fight, and ended in that premiership.
No team troubled the competition’s standard-bearers, Melbourne Storm, more than Cronulla in such a mindset.
Monday’s meeting came at the right time for Cronulla. Their finals hopes could depend on how honest the players were inside that meeting.
The question now is whether the Sharks have enough of the old DNA still within their football club or whether it is gone forever.
Only they can answer that.
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