Ben Ikin won't guarantee anyone a position for 2023, and talks about the performance review currently being undertaken at the club;
Ben Ikin Says:
Asked if Walters is the coach to lead the club forward, Ikin said:
“Yes I do.
“With Kevvie, the only thing I can judge is did he win more games this year than last year and the answer is yes.
“For Kev, even though he takes the brunt of it (criticism of Brisbane’s failure to make the finals) publicly and I get that, he also signed up for that.
“If you didn’t know before Anthony Seibold what happens to you if you don’t win in Brisbane, well we all knew after that - and Kevvie is at that point now.
“But the journey we go on over this next week is not to just sit Kevin Walters down and say you didn’t do this, you didn’t do that, how are you going to get better.
“Each department, led by our CEO, will undergo a forensic review about how they performed, how they can get better and the coach’s part in that is how he will lead that.
“I’m not going to guarantee anyone their position for any length of time, it’s up to the individual to argue their case and that’s what the review process is about.
“We’re asking tough questions to get a sense of whether or not anybody in any of the key positions has the right answers to move the football program forward again.”
The Broncos football boss confirmed the player performance reviews:
“We have this silver-bullet theory in rugby league that if you kill the coach and you get a new one, it (a club’s problems) will all solve itself,” he said.
“Football programs win premierships. We want to build a world-class footy program that contends every year. The Storm and the Roosters have shown us that you can do it.
“Today (Tuesday) was player reviews and the department reviews are at the end of the week.
“The players came in and went down the Green Mile to Kevvie’s office where it starts and they bounced along from office to office where they go from the head coach to the head of performance to the assistant coaches (to discuss their performance).
“There will be questions about things that happened this year in our football program for multiple people that need answering, so that others can understand what took place.
“If you can argue your case, and demonstrate that you have learnt from your successes and failures this year and have a plan about advancing the program, then you keep your job.
“We got closer to a premiership this year. We didn’t finish where we wanted to finish, but we got closer to a premiership and the responsibility for everybody in this off-season is to build a plan to get closer once again.
“We have to keep closing the gap until we get ourselves into contender status and once you start contending, like the Storm and Roosters, there is no reason why it should ever stop.”
Ikin on the players struggling to cope with the hype after their winning streak:
“It’s one thing to manage failure, it’s another thing to be able to manage success,” he said.
“So when we won seven in a row, there’s a whole lot of people, and it happened unconsciously, we started to enjoy that success.
“A little bit of the discipline, the steel that had found its way into what we were doing week to week, prior to the winning run, started to fall away a bit, partly because we have a young squad.
“When that discipline erodes, it starts in between training sessions, then it finds its way into training and eventually it’s Friday Night Footy, you have lost four games on the trot and you think how the hell did that happen?
“Some would call it hubris, an inflated sense of self, but the good thing, if there is one good thing to take out of the finish to the season, is we got a lesson in what it takes to be a great club.”
some other info from the article:
- The club has a ruthless history of sacking coaches, with Ivan Henjak (2010), Anthony Griffin (2013) and Anthony Seibold (2020) all given the bullet after missing the finals just once
- Walters finished with a winning 13-11 season this year. His 13 victories represented an 85 per cent improvement on the seven matches Brisbane won in his first season in charge at Red Hill in 2021.
- The hierarchy commenced the club’s end-of-season review on Tuesday with Broncos players summoned to Red Hill for a series of one-on-one interviews with chief executive Dave Donaghy.
