The Wayne Bennett Super thread!

[Big Pete]

Fair point but that doesn't really answer the question.

What does Bennett have to achieve in order to be considered a success?

 

[Cult]

Fair point but that doesn't really answer the question.

What does Bennett have to achieve in order to be considered a success?

He needs to leave the club in a better position than we were. I'd love three premierships though.

 

[Big Pete]

Expand on that a little.

Do you mean ladder position, roster, culture, game-plan, all of the above?

 

[QUEENSLANDER]

But if we don't win it then who is going to cop the blame from you? The accolades have never just gone to the coach. He doesn't get to take the trophy home, along with 17 premiership rings. He doesn't win the Clive Churchill medal and get selected in the Australian team afterwards. He is always the last person on the team list. A fair share of the blame will go on Bennett if we don't win a premiership. The key word is fair though. You can't just chastise him on his inability to win a premiership for us yet.

No I agree. But ultimately he picks the team and he has cut a lot of players and signed lots of questionable ones. Having done that I think he stands to cop far more criticism compared to if he just came to the Broncos and worked with what he had. With or without Boyd, we have one of the best teams in the comp and if, after all his cutting and signing of players he can't get a title then to me, it shows his recruitment was shit, and he is going to cop the blame for a lot of it.

u say that the coach is often at the end of the list when it comes to accolades. I can't disagree more. When saints won it was all about Bennett. He got the best from Soward, he brought darius to them. Bennett this, Bennett that. But when Newcastle went shit, it was Alex McKinnon, bad roster etc. it might just be his loyal fans and the courier mail writers, but Bennett seems pretty much immune to blame, yet somehow gets all the accolades.

The league community as a whole (especially fox and courier mail) have a raging boner for Bennett. As i said in my earlier post, if u are going to give the coach credit for success, u have to blame him for losses, but the media never, ever has done that. He can do no wrong. It seems he has earnt such respect from past achievements he can do no wrong nowadays. It baffles ,e a bit, but that's how the media is I guess.

 

[I bleed Maroon]

Expand on that a little.

Do you mean ladder position, roster, culture, game-plan, all of the above?

Professionalism. I want the Broncos to have an air of professionalism and seriousness about continued and consistent success again. We haven't had that for a long time

 

[Cult]

Expand on that a little.

Do you mean ladder position, roster, culture, game-plan, all of the above?

I know it's a lame answer but yeah, all of the above. Ladder position, definitely. Culture, there already seems to be a change. Some lazy people were shown the door. Not pushed, shown. Hopefully the other lazy people see that and change their ways. Game plan definitely needs to be changed. I know people say Bennett is boring. It's simply not true. Sailor, Renouf, Alfie, Lockyer, Karmichael and Chris Walker are some of the most exciting players ever and were all allowed to do their thing under Bennett. The team was boring when it needed to be though. I can admit that. Currently it doesn't need to be. Hopefully Hodges, Milford, Copley, Hunt and Parker are allowed to as well. So yeah, all of the above.

 

[Ari Gold]

I'll ask others this question.

Does Bennett have to deliver Broncos a premiership in the next three years to be considered anything less than a failure.

Bennett needs to achieve what it is he plans to do. That might sound a tad Laurie Daleyish, but by that I mean we judge him on the success he has in going in the direction he chooses to go in. He's signed a player coming off his worst ever year (Darius Boyd, 27) and a guy who is quite honestly one of the biggest flops in recent history (Adam Blair, 28). His goal here is obvious - he is in win now mode. Therefore, he has to deliver on that and win a premiership.

Some of our juniors might come good about the time Bennett is leaving, but IMO, they aren't his mission. He didn't come here with them as his mandate. He came to win a premiership now, and so he has to be judged on that.

The other thing I hear is that WB came back to restore the Broncos aura. That's hard to quantify, but it's the other factor I'll judge him on. Will we still be the fearsome team that people wanted to play for like we were in the 90's. I doubt that's possible in today's game, but regardless of your opinion of Boyd and Blair, they are hardly the players that our Alfie led team in the 90's had.

He needs to leave the club in a better position than we were. I'd love three premierships though.

Literally impossible for Bennett to not leave the club in a worse position. I mean, look at last season. Hook as coach, Hoffman at five-eight, backrowers as props. 3 man benches being used. Only 1 rookie being introduced. Stuart or Sheens would have to be coach for us not to improve from the position the club was at when WB arrived.

 

[Cult]

The other thing I hear is that WB came back to restore the Broncos aura.

This aura also needs to be restored by the fans at Suncorp. We have huge turnouts but everyone is so quiet. But that comes with losing. I'm sure it will change when we start winning again.

 

[Porthoz]

I'll ask others this question.

Does Bennett have to deliver Broncos a premiership in the next three years to be considered anything less than a failure.

Short answer... yes, absolutely!
Given the "revolution" in the roster since his arrival, it's clear he has made his bed, and will have to lie in it.
Obviously circumstances and mitigating factors like injuries should be taken into account, and 3 years deep into the finals would certainly soften things.

Inversely, should he achieve great results and a premiership, credit should be given where it's due.

For now, I'll settle for being able to breathe easier when we get 18-20 points ahead, instead of worrying how long we'll keep the lead...

 

[Super Freak]

If Bennett doesn't win a premiership, I can live with that.

What I can't live with is how much of a joke the Broncos have become. Teams don't fear us anymore, they don't even have to be at their best to beat us anymore. We are not as competitive as we used to be and I expect Bennett to change that and turn this club around to be the force we once were.

I don't want to go to games wondering how many points we are going to lose by. I want to go to a game completely confident of a win. I just want them to be one of the top teams again.

 

[Alec]

Getting rid of one of the worst coaches of all time is enough to be a success.

 

[Huge]

15 put of 16 coaches are losers every year. Sure you could look at it that way but it's hardly a realistic way to view things. A reasonable person realizes there are degrees of success. The only way it could be reasonable to demand we win a premiership is in the circumstances where we have all the best players in ALL the positions on the field AND on the bench. We don't have that, there are many players from within the NRL we would love to have in the team.

I want the team to be feared, other teams to play the Broncos hoping for rather than expecting a win. I want the team to be setting the standard and to have the old familiar ruthlessness coupled with the exhilarating style of play. I will probably have to settle for a team that makes few mistakes and is forced by the competition to play boring football. Sadly the game is not as open and free flowing as it used to be and WB will have to coach to that.

It doesn't have to mean a premiership is the only success that WB brings, there is still a lot of repair work to be done.

 

[broncos4life]

Fair point but that doesn't really answer the question.

What does Bennett have to achieve in order to be considered a success?

He has to win a premiership

 

[Morkel]

IMO, I view 2008, 2009 & 2011 as the years that could have been. I'm going to be bitterly disappointed if I end up viewing 2015, 2016, 2017, etc in the same light. That'll be 10 years of "what ifs". So whether that burden should fall on Bennett's shoulders is fair is another debate, but yes. If Bennett doesn't coach us to a premiership I'll be very disappointed and will view his time as a failure.

 

[Porthoz]

Fair enough, it's true you don't have to be respectful but you CAN refer to them in a normal manner without being disparaging. It just seems petulant to me that a wise and grown man has to be mean spirited in virtually every post. Imagine were I to say something nice about WB or Boyd every single time I mentioned him, it would soon be seen as tedious repetition .

Just on the contract saga I do not know the sequence of events but I do know that long before WB was mentioned, long before his break with Tinkler and at the start of the season Hook was on the nose and skating on very thin ice. I believe the club was looking at their options very early on. As far as I am aware there has been nothing concrete presented that WB acted improperly . You are entitled to believe whatever anecdotes you like but it certainly seems to contradict the widely held view that he acted in good faith.

I would think that the same consideration you have for Boyd, now that he is here would be extended to WB, now that he is here.

I'm moving this to the Bennett thread, as the other one is about Barba, and we seem to be jumping from one topic to the other...

Regarding the bold bit, I'm sorry, but the widely held view is nothing of the sort.
Obviously only few actually know the whole story in detail, but this is the widely held view:

Wayne Bennett to return in Brisbane Broncos shake-up

My source and others confirm that this is actually pretty close to what happened, including the $950K "disrespectful" bit... except that it wasn't an unanimous board decision, but a decision forced upon the rest of the board by the majority holders.

Take what you want from it...

 

[Ari Gold]

I personally don't care if WB came at the expense of a currently employed coach. Removing my opinion of WB's suitability for us aside, this is professional sport. You never stop trying to improve. You wouldn't expect Ben Barba to say no to signing with the Sharks because he's taking Nu Brown's spot in the team and another person's spot in the Top 25. Even though there's only 1 catch, I really do fail to understand the purpose of attacking WB for signing with a club where someone was already employed.

 

[Huge]

I'm moving this to the Bennett thread, as the other one is about Barba, and we seem to be jumping from one topic to the other...

Regarding the bold bit, I'm sorry, but the widely held view is nothing of the sort.
Obviously only few actually know the whole story in detail, but this is the widely held view:

Wayne Bennett to return in Brisbane Broncos shake-up

My source and others confirm that this is actually pretty close to what happened, including the $950K "disrespectful" bit... except that it wasn't an unanimous board decision, but a decision forced upon the rest of the board by the majority holders.

Take what you want from it...

I read Roy Masters account. So on the Sunday WB phones Murdoch telling him he will take the job, obviously it was offered to him previously. Likely he told Murdoch he would not take the job while Griffin was there..he accepted the job for 2015 and not for the remainder of 2014. It seems that Murdoch made the decision to remove Griffin prior to WB phoning him to say he would take on the role in 2015. We all knew Griffins job was in jeopardy as he did. The view you have presented is the Roy Masters view and even though he is in the media I think it extremely unlikely Murdoch would have shared with Masters what he was intending or the communications he had had previously with WB. The slant you have put on it Porthoz is that WB was sneaking around trying to take the incumbents job when the true powerbroker ,the ultimate authority Murdoch had set out to get his man. If anyone was to be accused of underhanded actions it must be Murdoch although even that may not be true, he could have already told Griffin he was looking for a new direction in 2015.

When WB phoned Murdoch it seems to me the WB was accepting a job offered. The sacking of Griffin was done as it is done everywhere in most businesses The Boss decided what he wanted, WB didn't take something from Griffin, Griffin lost it through his own ineptitude.

 

[broncos4life]

Who cares that he negotiated while a coach was still employed, that's how it works.

I haven't lost respect for him for doing that, I don't respect that he ever said something so bloody stupid though