True leaders prevail in finals football, writes Paul Kent
It’s been a typically grinding season for every NRL club that’s left us with eight remaining premiership contenders. Strong leadership is the common denominator that’s kept them alive in the 2019 season, writes Paul Kent.
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Nobody has quite figured out when, in rugby league, good ideas become bad practice.
It is a mythical line but, once crossed, it is deep and unforgiving.
St George Illawarra believed, as a club, they were making the right decision including the exiled Jack de Belin at training every day, pumped and polished and outperforming his teammates.
Welfare, and all that. As the season wore on, though, and form and injuries hurt the club, De Belin became a dark reminder of what could have been.
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As the NRL recovered from its summer of hell Penrith, frying a little more than most, tried to dismiss the off-season scandals as nothing but a bad week until, 10 rounds in and with just two wins to brag about, coach Ivan Clearly finally conceded the truth everybody else could see.
“That took an enormous toll on our team,” Cleary said after a game. “It obviously rattled them because we went off a cliff at the start of the year.”
That’s the thing about success; when everybody thinks it is all about talent, leadership is everything.
Much of this week in the League Nation has been spent on the impact of the judiciary and the carnage inflicted on teams.
Jared Waerea-Hargreaves beat the judiciary but Sam Burgess didn’t. Friday night’s semi-final will take an entirely different dynamic because of it.
LISTEN! Matty Johns, Brett Finch and Paul Kent have a look at the first week of the finals, Ben Ikin’s run-in with Sticky, why the Titans are such a mess and Russell Crowe’s book of feuds.
Subscribe to the Matty Johns podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
Marty Taupau is a shocking loss for Manly in this evening’s game against Cronulla. All season rival teams have spoken of quelling the one-two punch provided by Taupau and Addin Fonua-Blake, and what a tough job it is.
The pair has been significantly bending the opposition defensive line and creating space for others to play with. Now, already down on numbers, the Sea Eagles are forced to play the Sharks without one of their great unspoken weapons.
Once you look beyond the normal line-up changes, both teams are terrific examples of leadership and what it can be.
Des Hasler arrived at Manly convinced how the Sea Eagles would play.
Hasler spent the summer drilling the Sea Eagles defensively. They spent hours in the sun tacking, often and at full contact and, with essentially the same squad as last year, improved from 15th to sixth.
Hasler was clear on what works, his players understood it and got on with it.
Cronulla have long known their identity. They were tough and rough and were the team that scrapped on every play. They acknowledged it and revelled in it.
Yet this year the Sharks have drifted from that formula. It could be argued they have attempted to expand their game but, really, they have moved away from what works.
Leaders set the standards in clubs, whatever they might be.
They must be different and must be right for the personality of the team, or the personality you want the team to be.
Each of the best teams in the NRL has a different personality and the personality resembles the character of their leaders.
They are comfortable in their difference. Most other teams, the ones who don’t play this weekend, are caught trying to mimic the best traits of the successful teams, hoping mimicry will be enough.
They do it with no understanding of why it works and it is not enough. They don’t see the mortar in the brickwork.
Gold Coast, the NRL’s worst team, is trying to be a copy of the best everything good they see in others teams. In the end it becomes nothing more than hollow words. A bluff.
The Titans don’t know who they are as a club and will never be successful until they do.
Burgess is the best of South Sydney.
Not so long ago a young Rabbitoh fighting his way through the grades was asked the difference between South Sydney and his former club.
His answer was brief.
“Sam,” he said.
Leaders drive the standards inside clubs. They show the squad what is acceptable and what is necessary and they provide a way.
Sam Burgess has something in him that makes men follow. Not all of it is found in a textbook and it would be a hard sell at places like, say Harvard, where others have gone to sharpen their leadership skills.
But if you were sitting in a foxhole Burgess is the first one you would want beside you. He gets the job done.
Leadership is a growth industry around the world. You can’t walk into any company nowadays without tripping over four suits setting up their power-points, ready to run workshops on how to become a better leader.
Whole shelves are dedicated to it in bookstores. Big businesses pay silly money to have even semi-successful people stand in front of staff selling, often stale ideas, hoping even a part of it might strike a chord within their management team, many of whom are ill-equipped to become leaders anyway.
Where sport differs from business is too often business identifies the poor characters with the strong results and tries to turn them into leaders.
Leaders rise naturally in sport. You can’t hide their success, and often that their success looks different to the success of others.
Ricky Stuart is a different coach to Craig Bellamy, even though they are close friends. Bellamy is a different coach to Wayne Bennett, even though he did his apprenticeship under Bennett.
Trent Robinson, the other top four coach, comes from an entirely different coaching tree altogether.
Brad Arthur learned under Bellamy but the further he is removed from the Bellamy years, forced to find his own solution, the better coach he is becoming.
Anthony Seibold is discovering the same.
This premiership will be won by the team that best exerts its character.
That gives a natural advantage to Melbourne, one well-earned and deserved.
Bellamy has well-grooved his finals preparations and Cameron Smith is the greatest leader the game has seen. The Storm simply know, better than anyone, what it takes to get the job done.
Nothing is done any longer by guesswork.
Boyd Cordner is all about sacrifice. His best work usually goes unseen because the benefit is there in his teammate.
He works in a system that went into planning last November before Trent Robinson even began their pre-season training. Robinson plans everything.
Every session the Roosters will do this week was decided almost a year ago.
Leaders have an innate understanding of what is necessary to get the job done. Culture is the most overused word in sport, nowadays. Good clubs have good culture, it goes.
Every club looking to improve will often defend its culture at the same time promising improvement. It is a small truth that good culture can be found in inverse proportion according to usage.
It overlooks one of the first, important qualities of leading, that leaders have vulnerability.
They have the strength to recognise their vulnerability and work their choice, to accept it, into a strength.
Burgess has a vulnerability.
He works hard to hide his vulnerabilities but it is more often when they are exposed, sometimes unwillingly, that his true value as a leader is exposed.
Burgess acted rashly and cost his team but it happened in the process of a positive act, as far as chasing victory, and his remorse since tells his teammates exactly where they are.
There has never been a leader who did not make mistakes.
The most comfortable is Jarrod Croker.
Croker is not the best player or the most outrageous personality at Canberra but he lives a daily standard that forces his teammates into line.
He refuses to let his setbacks sway him off course.
He knows what he values and what that price is. What he stands for and so what he wants his club to stand for.
Burgess is different to Croker but each in their own way remains certain of what works for them.
The strong are leaders left, each different, but each clear on what they want and how to get it.
WHY WASN’T BEATTIE’S SELFLESS MOVE COMMENDED?
It was a landmark moment that passed with barely a flicker of recognition.
ARL Commissioner Peter Beattie stood down as chairman during the week, saying Peter V’landys was the man for the job, and for the first time in the Commission-era a high-ranking official has put the game first, ahead of his own ambition.
A sad reflection of the Commission era has been the exploitation of the new structure, with self-interest and personal ambition driving so much of the decision making, at the overall expense of the game.
It is still going on and is becoming one of the more difficult problems to resolve within the game. Some couldn’t be shifted from their role with a bulldozer, unwilling to surrender the reflected glory of the position.
Beattie recognised V’Landys was the best man for the job and stepped aside to give the game its best chance of pushing forward.
More, he has elected to stay on to help V’Landys through the first 12 months as he is sure to get some turbulence from others around the game.
Beattie has worn the barbs in his tenure but his contribution, big picture, deserves to be recognised.
Once he got his Twitter account under control he has had a significant, and positive, impact on the game.