Paul Kent: Wayne Bennett’s magic not rubbing off on Dolphins in search for star power
The Dolphins’ struggle to land a marquee player for their inaugural season is the first solid indication Wayne Bennett’s magic is wearing out, writes PAUL KENT.
The fever hasn’t quite reached the required pitch for all out warfare according to standard rules of NRL engagement but, this being rugby league, and Wayne Bennett in particular, fair to say it ain’t over yet.
The Dolphins got their official welcome to the NRL this week when they found the Broncos outsmarted them in the chase for Reece Walsh’s signature.
They had him and then they didn’t.
Almost immediately the Dolphins complained to the NRL and everybody else who would listen — namely, us slobs in the media — about the unfairness of it all, claiming it was a restraint of trade, to find a legal term.
The hilarity of it all is that it came just a week after Bennett told a radio show that Cameron Munster, who is still very much contracted to Melbourne for the 2023 season, and unable to even sign with a rival club until after November 1 according to the terms of that contract, was part of the club’s long-term view.
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“If we don’t get him in ’23,” Bennett said, “certainly ’24 is on the table for us and hopefully it is on the table for him.
“Cam probably won’t be there next year but we’ve got one or two at mind that we are working with at the moment to get them over the line.”
It was deliberate antagonising from Bennett.
He knew it would send Melbourne into a muck lather and it did exactly that. Bennett then sat back chuckling, stepping it up when the Storm raced off a complaint to League Headquarters.
Meanwhile, one of those men Bennett was quietly confident about getting over the line was Walsh.
Instead of going to New Zealand next season, Walsh was looking to stay in Brisbane after a relationship breakdown, which the Warriors and certainly the Dolphins knew of.
The Warriors suspected Walsh was being secretly wooed by the Dolphins, which he was, so after he told them he wanted to stay in Brisbane, and named the Broncos as his desired team, they agreed to release him on the condition he could go only to the Broncos.
As the holder of his valid contract, the conditions of his release were up to the Warriors and agreed upon by Walsh.
The Dolphins were out of play, and so complained immediately to the NRL.
The richness of such hypocrisy is hardly new in the NRL, but it’s a special one complaining about a player being banned from signing with them even as their coach was suggesting they might privately be inducing another player at another club to break contract.
Everybody knows these are the rules in the cattle trade, but to be outplayed so publicly, and to make it so public this time around, is one of the real dents in Bennett’s career.
Along with Walsh, the Dolphins have also missed out on Kalyn Ponga, Brandon Smith, Harry Grant, Tino Fa’asuamaleaui, Jahrome Hughes, Ryan Matterson and several other good ones.
Bennett has the most storied career in rugby league coaching, and this isn’t the way the fairytale is supposed to end.
He went 34 consecutive years as an NRL coach, ageing in tortoise years and turned finding a job into a small art form.
Where reputations follow coaches from job to job, Bennett does it backwards. His reputation precedes him.
Nobody knows how to maximise that better.
A quietly told story around the game is that when the NRL was about to rubber stamp the Dolphins as the 17th franchise one of the final conditions put on the club was that Bennett be hired as the coach.
Until that moment Paul Green was pencilled in. Bennett, it went, had the job at the other two bidding clubs.
Most believe that as the Dolphins emerged as favourites for the job Bennett’s reputation as the Pied Piper of coaches would advantage the new team and so it was quietly made known to the NRL, who knew the importance of the Dolphins beginning strongly with a strong roster.
The question is who convinced the NRL …
Hmmm.
Missing Walsh this week was perhaps the biggest blow to the club’s short reputation.
While other players rejected the Dolphins’ approaches, Walsh was considered a done deal. His name had been quietly mentioned in negotiations with other players.
Walsh, himself, had told players he was heading there.
Big picture, being unable to land even one marquee player yet, with nobody left coming off contract, is the first solid indication the Bennett magic is wearing out.
Bennett was always a first-rater at two things: he could coach, as they say, and he could play politics like few others.
Both qualities are connected, and survive in inverse proportion to each other; the more a coach wins the less politics he needs to play to survive. Start losing and they start working the phones.
For much of Bennett’s career he didn’t need the politics.
Winning at the Broncos, with the tremendous advantages they had, insulated Bennett.
It also gave him the space to learn the politics of the game from afar, well before he needed it.
Bennett first took that reputation on a hit-and-run mission at St George Illawarra, where Nathan Brown could not quite get them there and Bennett swept in and took them to a title in his second season.
His reputation walked into Newcastle and Bennett followed soon after, and that is when it began to sour.
He coached tremendously his second season at the Knights to push them to within a game of the 2013 grand final.
Then early in 2014 Alex McKinnon broke his neck in round three and the Knights went into a tailspin. Owner Nathan Tinkler began losing money and players were not paid.
There wasn’t a happy day at the club after that and Bennett knew he had to get out and as the losses mounted the politics increased.
The morning of the Rise for Alex round, round 19 when McKinnon returned to Marathon Stadium for the first time, Bennett spent the morning negotiating a return to the Dragons, finally satisfied with their final offer.
Before accepting, though, he excused himself from the room to call the Broncos to see if there was any chance of a return.
It angered many at the Knights, starting with both current and ex-Knights when the gossip went around that Bennett was negotiating his exit on such an important day. Particularly when it was coupled with a disappointing loss.
It angered the Dragons, also, when he returned to the Broncos after they thought they had him.
By now the gap between politics and winning was narrowing for Bennett.
He returned to Brisbane but it became an unhappy stint, and as the Broncos recognised the change in Bennett and began to manoeuvre him out Bennett read a different set of tea leaves and fought bitterly behind the scenes to remain.
It was Bennett in full flight and fight, yet it was the first true political battle he lost, the Broncos finally sacking him.
“I was happy to be sacked,” he said.
He signed at Souths and, before there was any chance Bennett might agitate for an extension like the trouble at Brisbane, Souths got in first and signed Jason Demetriou to succeed him for 2022.
With nowhere to go for the first time, he found work with the Dolphins, which meant missing this season, his first as head coach, since he was at Canberra in 1987.
As the coaching has changed Bennett has adjusted better than them all, increasing the politics even as the footy diminishes.
For years he was regarded as the best politician in the game, a crown he wears quietly, and given to him by a former NRL chief executive, but it is one that sits more uneasily by the minute as the Dolphins miss player after player, as the past fortnight showed.
The good news is that it ain’t over yet.
SHORT SHOT
Nick Kyrgios will put Australia in a particular kind of spin Sunday night.
He trots onto centre court for the most storied title in tennis, one that resonates particularly strongly with Australian sports fans, and he will try to win our first Wimbledon men’s title since Lleyton Hewitt in 2002.
All while a domestic violence assault charge hangs over him.
Normally a grand slam title would absolve him of his sporting sins but for many, prepared to overlook his behaviours because he wins, this is taking it one step too far for many.
How we view our sporting heroes is an odd one.
For years Jai Opetaia has been campaigning in the boxing ring.
Yet what he did last week on the Gold Coast has gone largely unnoticed by mainstream sporting fans, and entirely by the wider public, even though it will be regarded as one of the greatest sporting performances in Australian history.
Few understood the significance of what he did.
Opetaia went in against IBF cruiserweight champion Mairis Briedis, whose only previous defeat in his 13-year career was four years ago against Oleksander Usyk.
Usyk is currently the WBA, IBF and WBO heavyweight champion after moving up and beating Anthony Joshua last year, so that’s some pedigree.
Last week Opetaia broke his jaw in the second round. By the 11th it was hanging grotesquely from his face, now broken on both sides, to the point he could no longer hold his mouthguard in.
Yet Opetaia fought on bravely, and continued to withstand the punishment to his face, which Briedis was targeting late, and he won the title.
His jaw was so badly smashed he was unable to talk after it.
The only similarity boxing and tennis has is they both once carried much bigger importance in Australia’s sporting psyche.
Yet Kyrgios will go out on Sunday night, do not much more than hit a tennis ball, and if he somehow wins some will note the bravery of his victory even as others refuse because of matters back home.
Meanwhile, the true champion sits at home sucking on a straw.
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