Cronulla’s pursuit of Tim Sheens is a masterstroke, writes Matty Johns
In a world where teams are too fixated on the two points this weekend, the Cronulla Sharks are playing the long game with their pursuit of Tim Sheens, and could benefit for years to come, writes Matty Johns.
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The Cronulla Sharks’ pursuit of Tim Sheens to run their football operations is the smartest decision of any club in recent memory.
Sheens is one of the game’s greatest innovators and educators. With the Sharks having one of the best crop of youngsters in the competition coming through, it’s an appointment which will help Cronulla enjoy on-field success for many years.
To best use Sheens, the Sharks don’t need him wearing a suit and tie and sitting behind a desk, they need him in a tracksuit, on the paddock, doing what he does best: coaching and educating.
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I’m not talking about being the first-grade coach, I’m talking about coaching the whole club. Implementing a program where the young players continue to be educated, even in a high-pressure environment, and the coaches themselves continue to be taught and encouraged to evolve.
Coaching has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. The pressure for immediate results has produced less pure coaching, less educating.
When I first came through the grades at the Newcastle Knights in 1990, the onus was very much on building young players into smarter, more complete footballers.
Even in the run of the season, Monday through to Thursday was all about learning and developing better skills and awareness. Stuff which wasn’t going to so much benefit you that weekend, but in the long term, when you started to join the dots in your head, was going to give a tactical base to last your whole career.
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In 2019 it’s all about the two points, the result, the performance this coming Sunday. This type of coaching hurts a player’s development, and does little for a club’s future.
The way ahead is what the Sharks are attempting to put in place. NRL coach John Morris is about Friday night’s two points, while Sheens ensures the players, particularly the younger ones, continue to be taught the game regardless of where the team sits on the ladder or the pressure the NRL coach is feeling.
There’s no better man to do this than Tim Sheens.
When gauging a coach’s abilities there’s more than just titles to consider. There’s the influence they have on the game going forward, through the men they have mentored. Let’s call it a coach’s “family tree”.
Once, a coach and his style generally came from one of two of these coaching family trees. There was the Jack Gibson style or the Warren Ryan.
Gibson heavily influenced men like Wayne Bennett. They keep the game simple and appealed to the human side of the player, great man managers.
Warren Ryan influenced coaches like Phil Gould, who saw the game as a science, the players chess pieces.
Of course off Bennett and Gould spawn many other coaches that they personally influenced, but the principles of Gibson and Ryan were at the centre of how they ran their teams.
But in recent years the Sheens coaching tree has surpassed all others, with the men he once mentored having enormous influence on how the modern game is played and structured.
Craig Bellamy, Paul Green, Michael Maguire, Anthony Seibold, Ricky Stuart, Mal Meninga, Laurie Daley, David Furner, Neil Henry and Morris, among others, are, to varying degrees, disciples of Sheens’ coaching.
Not surprisingly, most of those names stem from the great Raiders sides of the 90s, which dominated the game.
Sheens won comps with the Green Machine in 1989 and 1990, but it was the 1994 team which I consider one of the greatest of all time.
They were brilliant with the football and brutal without it.
They could easily score 60 points on you and be determined to keep you to zero.
But the best advertisement for the Sheens way was what he did at the Wests Tigers.
The Tigers, when Sheens arrived, were an underachieving team in the midst of a problematic merger. But what the Tigers had were a crop of quality youngsters. so Sheensy went to work and played the long game.
Training sessions were firstly built around teaching basic fundamentals — catch and pass, executing a two-on-one, a three-on-two, running correct angles.
Benji Marshall told me recently, the sessions were long and the youngsters at times, puzzled at why they were spending so long on trying to perfect things in which they believed they were already fluent.
During this process the young Tigers copped some heavy defeats. But Sheens continued the process, educating, playing the long game.
About halfway through the 2005 season Sheens invited me along to watch a Tigers training session. I couldn’t believe what I was watching, it was rugby league perfection.
Every player connected and synchronised into what the other was doing and thinking. The passing razor sharp, the ball runners running late, deceptive lines, the playmakers operating at top speed, but with the perception of all the time in the world.
For me personally, that session changed the way I viewed how attacking football should be played.
I turned to Tigers assistant coach Royce Simmons and said, “If you blokes can play like this in the heat of the battle, no-one will beat you.”
Royce smiled.
They won the competition two months later.
Originally published as Cronulla’s pursuit of Tim Sheens is a masterstroke, writes Matty Johns
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