Evolution of the coach: How rugby league coaching has changed

As the NRL season says goodbye to 9 of its 17 teams, the jury is out on the quality of coaching performance at clubs where players are now on holiday, rather than preparing for finals.

Messrs Adam O'Brien (Knights) and Des Hasler (Titans) have already been sentenced to their fate; the coaching wilderness. While the man known as Benji Marshall (Tigers) and Jason Ryles (Eels) brought their teams back from the abyss, coaches Anthony Siebold (Sea Eagles) Shane Flanaghan (Dragons) and Todd Payten (Cowboys) spent much of the season staring at it.

Kristian Woolf (Dolphins) has shown the hitherto impossible ability of exorcising the ghost of Wayne Bennett (Souths). Bennett spent much of this season looking like said ghost.

Over the coming weeks, we could see Ivan Cleary canonised as the patron saint of Penrith should he guide his side to a fifth premiership in succession.

If any of Andrew Webster (Warriors), Trent Robinson (Roosters), Michael Maguire (Broncos), Craig Fitzgibbon (Sharks), Cameron Ciraldo (Bulldogs) or Ricky Stuart (Raiders) lead their troops to championship victory, their fans will be questioning if they are indeed coached by someone with the ability to perform miracles.

We already know Craig Bellamy (Storm) has divine powers. The only question is, is he still that same enlightened being at this stage of his career?

Every one of these coaches is earning in the region of $1 million per year. Their every move of a footballing nature scrutinised to the nth degree. Their job is all consuming and very capable of expediting the aging process.

The role of an NRL head coach has evolved so much that you could almost compare the job description to that of a corporate CEO of a large company.

I wrote something on this a few weeks back.

These coaches probably have the late, great, Jack Gibson, Australian Coach of the 20th Century, to thank, for proving beyond doubt the importance that a coach plays in the success of a team.

So many coaches prior to Gibson were ‘captain-coaches', combining their on-field ability with assumed leadership skills, both in training and games.

The first ever ‘captain-coach' was Arthur Hennessey. At South Sydney from 1908, he was asked to captain-coach and was astute enough to bring big picture strategy to proceedings in Redfern, building their game plan around the “4 Ps” (Position, Possession, Penetration, Pace).

Hennessey may have led the Bunnies to the promised land, yet even his achievements were later dwarfed by another Arhtur. Mr A. Halloway led Easts and Balmain to a total of eight premierships and even managed to inspire a 35-match winning streak at one point.

The likes of Ken ‘Killer' Kearney (Dragons) and Clive Churchill (Souths) would create waves both on and off the field as captain-coaches, but two other coaches soon emerged that are arguably, the first of the mould that we take for granted today.

The amazing thing is, both Duncan Thompson and Roy Francis, who plied their trades on opposite sides of the world in the 1950s, were the originators of methods that are still in use today and amazingly, both are spoken of very fondly in the walls of North Sydney!

Thompson was the Godfather of ‘Contract Football', a form of play that former Ipswich Jets coaches Ben and Shane Walker perfected to win their clubs' maiden Queensland Cup premiership almost seventy-years later.

No less than Super Coach Wayne Bennett once told of how he adopted contract football at Souths Magpies in the late 1970s and how he continues to be influenced by Thompson's philosophies, today.

Meanwhile in England, Roy Francis was earning a reputation as the figure that future 'Coach of the Century' Jack Gibson would one day call weekly for advice!

Francis won several major titles over two decades at the highest level, revolutionising the art of coaching in the UK. He introduced film analysis of matches, scientific training techniques, and sports psychology, decades before they became commonplace in sport in general, let alone rugby league.

His reputation travelled so far and wide that North Sydney came knocking on his door in the early 1970s. He coached the Bears in the shadows of the Duncan Thompson Stand; opened at North Sydney Oval in 1929 and named as such thanks to Thompson's premiership-winning exploits in the 1920s.

Yet coaches of the ilk of Thompson and Francis were still few and far between up until the 1970s. They were mostly seen as something of an expensive luxury and not always essential. The role of the coach as we know it today was still to be carved in stone.

When Francis cheekily asked for the modern equivalent of $25,000 (three times the usual value of such a role) to coach at Norths, he was shocked when they agreed!

Coaches were often former senior players, who, after ‘captain-coaching' for a period, would stay on at their club to help give something back, or simply because they didn't want to leave. They weren't paid much.

The most interesting thing about Duncan Thompson and Roy Francis is that both served in World War 2 for their respected Armed Forces. It appears clear the lessons they learned followed them into elite level rugby league during peace time.

Thompson served as an Amenities Officer and Francis, a PT instructor during the Second World War. This is hugely significant because, if you imagine a nation at war, particularly world war, they throw all available resources towards survival and then ultimately, victory. The best minds of each nation are recruited to deliver the best outcomes in all sorts of areas.

Both Thompson and Francis were exposed to the best possible methods of fitness training, psychology, team building and management techniques in their respective roles. Rather than being exposed as a soldier in the traditional sense, they were tasked with delivering these cutting-edge interventions to the troops under their watch. It appears they were both smart enough to adapt them to the warfare that took place on a footy field.

As a result, we can only imagine what an eye-opening period it was for a then 40-year-old Jack Gibson, regularly on the phone to Roy Francis, when the 1970s rolled around. Gibson had done two years at Easts (Roosters) and was at the start of a four-year cycle, three of which were spent as coach of the Dragons and then Newtown Jets.

Despite setting excellent standards, particularly in defence, Gibson's sides could still not win that elusive premiership title.

It was while he was at St George 1971 that it seems the final piece of the Jack Gibson coaching jigsaw, and also the modern-day coaching context, fell into place.

A 1971 sales and motivational film called The Second Effort contained a segment on Vince Lombardi; the all-conquering American Football coach of the Green Bay Packers, the dominant Gridiron team of the 1960's in the USA.

Gibson embraced everything the film offered, using it to inspire his team to greater heights. It also kick-started a love affair with all things American that led to the adoption of a number of methodologies to help him win five-premierships with Easts and Parramatta between 1974 and 1983.

By the time 1979 rolled around, Gibson had a new generation of coaches to contend with. Warren Ryan in particular became the biggest threat to the superiority of the future coach of the century when he arrived at Newtown Jets.

‘Woks' brand of football has been described by Phil Gould, who played under him, as being “the most influential on the way the game is played today."

The Warren Ryan brand included, amongst so many other things, an emphasis on defence systems, including the ‘umbrella defence' and the term ‘inside shoulder'.

Ryan and Gibson would meet each other in the 1981 grand final, with Gibson reigning supreme. When Jack left the premiership-winning circles after the 1983 finale, Warren duly took over by taking the Canterbury Bulldogs to the next three, winning the 1984 and 1985 versions. Not content with that, he moved to Balmain and coached them to the 1988 and 1989 deciders, too.

The role of coach had now gone from that of optional luxury, to absolute necessity. It was in this context that a young Phil Gould could sense destiny, first by becoming the youngest premiership-winning coach in 1988 in his old coach's seat at Canterbury, and winning it again in 1991 at Penrith, after losing in one a year before.

Yet Gus probably brought the coach's role in mainstream media to new heights, thanks to his continuing roles on Channel 9. Where as coaches such as Warren Ryan, Roy Masters and Jack Gibson would do a bit, Gould turned it into an art form, and brought game analysis to another level.

When we think that between 1981 and 1991, Gibson, Ryan and Gould won seven of the premierships on offer, it started to become clear that it was Warren Ryan's influence that had most influence on the first two years of the 1990s. Yet two other giants of the game were emerging or about to emerge, one of them mysteriously anointed by none other than Jack Gibson himself.

Tim Sheens and Gibson's choice, Wayne Bennett would coach teams to victory in eight of the premierships on offer between 1989 and 2000.

They would both add another in 2005 and 2006 respectively, before an apprentice of both of them would burst on the success scene a year later and remain there to this very day.

Storm coach Craig Bellamy played for Canberra Raiders under Tim Sheens and was Assistant to Wayne Bennett with both Brisbane Broncos and the Australian national side. He has won grand finals in 2007, 2009, 2012, 2017 and 2020, won six minor premierships and featuring in nine end-of-year deciders.

Every current coach employs wrestling coaches, rules have changed and new language has been invented to describe tackling techniques.

We can trace much if not all of this back to starting under Craig Bellamy in Melbourne. And so, the evolution continues.