AN IMPOSING LIST of astute coaches has shaped Rugby League in Australia. Names like Jack Gibson, Wayne Bennett, Craig Bellamy, Bob Fulton and the like have moulded the game into the powerhouse it is today. Yet statistically, the most successful Rugby League coach of all time is Norm Provan. In terms of matches won and lost, Provan is ahead of all comers. At the start of the 2013 season, his win–loss ratio through his years at St George, Parramatta and Cronulla stood at 68.5 per cent. Craig Bellamy is next with 68.2 per cent. Following in order are Bob Fulton, Charlie Lynch from the 1930s, Wayne Bennett, ‘Pony’ Holloway of 1920s vintage, Ken Kearney, Jack Gibson, Frank Burge and Des Hasler.
Provan included four premierships in his coaching record, and a near miss in 1978 when Cronulla drew the grand final against Manly, then lost the replay. He has watched with some bemusement as coaching has become a dominant feature of the modern game and top coaches have moved into the bracket of million-dollar earners. Arthur Summons, too, has been a close observer as Rugby League has grown ever more professional and clubs have built coaching staffs to cater for every element of preparation.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
Some very good coaches have made a big difference to Rugby League down the years. Some of them have changed the game. Coaching seems to become more sophisticated every year, with an ever-increasing number of support staff, and an ever-reliance on what we might broadly call science. Computer analysis, GPS tracking, dietary supplements et cetera have made the game Norm and I were involved in seem a rather quaint pastime. By the measures of today’s science-minded set, we sort of rolled around in the mud and enjoyed ourselves just so we could have a drink afterwards. Of course it wasn’t like that, but our ways would get little respect today from the tertiary-educated gurus running the sports science industry. Their ways can lead to trouble, of course, as the events of early 2013 made clear.Yet for all the new theories, and the new accent on physiology and psychology generated by small armies of hangers-on, the really strong eras in the game can usually be traced to a dominant coach whose raw knowledge of Rugby League and understanding of young men and how they tick were his prime assets.
The first influence for change in my experience was Ken Kearney through the early days at St George. Kearney introduced the straight-line defence that became a bedrock of Rugby League over time. Everybody’s responsibility was clear, and it relied on every man doing his job, but it was the start of the defensive emphasis that has made modern Rugby League what it is. That emphasis has also spread to modern Rugby Union, where so many ex-league players have had an influence. Kearney also brought many of the attacking skills of English Rugby League to Australia. He found an important ally in Harry Bath, who was a master of ball distribution and whose outstanding career as a coach integrated so many of those skills into the Australian game.
Jack Gibson was perhaps the first to bring a modern professional standard to the way a club operated. He saw the relationship between the ‘front office’, the coach and the players as critical to success, and concentrated on coaching the club’s officials almost as much as the players. He took himself off to America and studied the operational ways of the big NFL clubs and brought back the best of their winning ideas. He started the rise of Rugby League as a serious business, and he gained immediate success. Gibbo also had the personality of a born leader. He was one of those guys who would walk into a room and everybody stopped and looked. It was a skill cultivated out of saying only what was necessary to say, and no more. He cultivated a mystique about himself. Gibson’s speech after Parramatta first won the premiership that had eluded them for nearly 40 years is a case in point. As a hush fell over the Parramatta Leagues Club auditorium, he announced to a packed room, ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead,’ and promptly sat down. Such was the delirium that night that the fans burned down the old Cumberland Oval grandstand. I have asked several players over time which ingredient they felt most made Jack Gibson the coach he was. The answer was usually the same: fear.
The 1970s and ’80s produced a succession of game-changing coaches. Roy Masters at Wests developed to new levels a relationship between emotion within the team and a growing accent on marketing. His pre-match face-slapping sessions, and his class war between his Wests ‘fibros’ and the Manly ‘silvertails’ found fertile ground within a Magpies team that included warriors like Tommy Raudonikis, Les Boyd and John ‘Dallas’ Donnelly. Roy made no bones about stirring them up. He would question Donnelly’s toughness within earshot of everybody else before a big game, then watch him go berserk. It was an era of great and bloody battles. Warren Ryan at this time was beginning a stellar coaching career as coach of Wests under-23s. At Canterbury in the middle 1980s, Ryan brought levels of physicality into the game that channelled the old aggro we used to employ and put it to more orchestrated and productive uses. He developed the gang tackle and built into his teams a forward defensive power that left rivals happy not to have the ball.
At Manly, a coaching dynasty had evolved under Frank Stanton, whose strong focus on discipline lifted Manly to two premierships and took the Australian team to great heights as well. Bob Fulton captained Manly under Stanton and developed his own coaching style to great effect with Easts, Manly and Australia. Fulton brought great detail to his coaching, organising his teams to work off the ball in such a way that they were always in position to strike. In winning the 1987 premiership, he also triggered the modern interchange system. He had so worked the old ‘head bin’ rule in that match that he effectively launched open interchange before the league did, running players on and off at will.The third leg in the Manly dynasty was Des Hasler, who played for many years under Fulton and soaked up all the lessons. Hasler is a workaholic who seizes on all things modern, pushing technology and sports science into the forefront of all he does. He hired a Brazilian wrestling coach to help out, and he fashioned a hefty competitiveness in Manly and later Canterbury.
Wayne Bennett has been the great survivor, excelling at the very top of the game for nearly four decades without a break. I always thought three years was about the limit, because your players get sick of you. But Bennett’s quiet demeanour and disciplined ways have allowed him to stay fresh, and he has not baulked at the hard decisions sometimes required to keep his team personnel fresh. He moved Wally Lewis on when he thought the time was right. Bennett and his coaching contemporaries also benefit in terms of limiting over-exposure from the modern staff coaching system, where assistants take up much of the face-to-face responsibility.
Of all the modern coaches, Craig Bellamy fascinates me most. He has a unique capacity for combining the natural emotion that I have always thought the basis of the game, and a more detached, reasoned persona that dictates his tactical approach. Some of it may go a bit too far, like the Storm’s accent over time on grapple tackles and the like. Like all coaches, Bellamy is dependent on the quality of his team, and in that area he is more fortunate than most. But the way they respond to him, and the way he always seems to get the big games right, makes him a coach out of the ordinary. I thought his work in the 2012 grand final was a classic case. He developed an impregnable game that drew the best from the extraordinary talents in his team. And he seemed to anticipate everything that Canterbury were going to do. Getting it all so comprehensively right is the ultimate goal of coaching, and in the modern game Bellamy is about as good as it gets.
Which brings me back to my old mate Norm Provan. It is no surprise to me that even today, after all these years, Norm still sits above all Australian coaches on a matches won and lost basis, slightly ahead of Bellamy. Norm typified what coaching was in his day. He led by example. To have had to rely on supplements or hormone injections or global positioning satellites or computer readouts would have been considered an abject failure by Norm. He would have regarded most of it as contrary to the spirit of what we all looked upon as a great game. Norm knew the game inside out, he knew his players inside out, and more often than not he knew his opponents inside out as well. His requirement of his players was that they give their all—no more and no less.That he is still on top more than three decades after he coached his last team says it all.
NORM PROVAN
I am always being told how much the game has changed. Coaching certainly has. I can see the logic of why the modern coach has seized upon the things that he has . . . the technology and the obsession with turning everybody into body-builders. But I believe the jury is out on whether it has made the game better. To me Rugby League has always been a straightforward game in which the base elements never change. A competitive team needs to be fit, for starters, and we always managed that through training. We didn’t train all day, every day, as happens a lot now, and we certainly didn’t need anything injected into us to make us better. We worked hard, and you don’t see anybody these days who could run non-stop through a game any more consistently than Johnny Raper did. All we ever needed on top of that basic fitness was some talented players, a solid tactical approach, some creative attacking moves and a spirit within the team that made the whole thing enjoyable.
Now I’m not saying that we were great and that they’ve lost the plot today. But I do believe that coaching has overreached in some of the things that it has brought to the game, and got lazy in other areas. They have overreached with all the things around the edges. The number of staff they have, for a start. There are so many people on the gravy train these days who all feel they have to make an impact to justify their job. That’s where the sports science has got out of hand. It is also where over-coaching has bred confusion among players who have to answer to too many people. And it seems to me coaching has become too careful . . . nobody takes the sorts of risks that bring real reward. Again, it seems like job protection. Be cautious, be careful, lest something go wrong and you get the blame.
One of the great differences, and I know I’ve harped on this a bit, but they don’t let the ball run to the backs and let the backs run the ball, as we used to do. It was the great joy of my years at St George that the ball would finish up in the hands of players like Billy Smith and Graeme Langlands all the time, and the magic would follow. We worked on elaborate moves to bring them into play. The key players would devise them and all the forwards knew their job was to dominate up front sufficiently to give the fast men behind us every chance. Winning the forward battle was not about giving our egos a boost. It was about providing chances for Reg Gasnier and Eddie Lumsden, for Johnny King and ‘Changa’ Langlands.
It is a different world today, and coaches operate under different pressures. But the fundamental base of Rugby League still revolves around finding holes in defences, running around people and past people and using your fastest and most light-footed players to do so. There is less emphasis today on that sort of game. It is all about power and physical confrontation. About trying to run over people rather than around them. In short, it is less creative. The game is too structured, and everybody seems to follow the same pattern. It is not producing or rewarding the truly instinctive, creative players. And the game is the less for it. As one example, I remember the amazing Brian Bevan, an Australian who played all his football in England, producing all sorts of magic on the wing for Warrington. His was the ultimate in spontaneous, instinctive football.
Bevan left Sydney to play in England straight after the war in 1946. He retired in 1962, having scored an amazing 796 tries in his career. The Kangaroo tour of 1956–57 had many wonderful experiences for me, but one of the most fascinating was to see Brian Bevan in action. He scored a try against the Kangaroos that was as good as any try I have ever seen. Bevan was as lean as a greyhound, he had hardly any hair and no teeth, and he was trussed up with so many bandages he looked like a trotter. But he could run like the wind, and his ability to step past opponents was like nothing I had seen before or since. He scored a try against us that was one of those long-range affairs in which he zig-zagged this way and that and scored on the opposite wing. He took the ball deep in his own territory, seemed to amble to where all the defenders were, then took off. He jinked, changed direction several times, slowed down, accelerated. Nobody could get near him. Apparently he did it all the time, often getting through an entire team.
Bevan was born in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, had a few games for Easts, but was posted to England with the Navy during the war years, and they just didn’t let him go. The sight of him bamboozling the Australians of 1956 remains one of the high points of my Rugby League experience. Regrettably, I think the sort of formula football that is coached in the pressure cooker of today works against that sort of creativity. Brian Bevans these days are much harder to find.