AntonyGiant wrote:
Anderson was a good coach. He just lacked experience. He will have learned a lot with us and learned more of how to deal with the pressures of being rock bottom. He hadn't experienced it much as a player nor a coach.
He will go down in history but I believe the hard work was done by Nathan Brown. He turned us from whipping boys to a fired up, fit, skillfull team.
He lost his way with team shuffling. Lawrence jumping in at prop and Lunt at second row. Etc.
2013 came and Anderson used that fit skillfull team we had, and settled the ship. The players enjoyed their rugby again and topped the table
We can hope Rick Stone can take us a step further given the chance. I just hope our fans realise he's pretty much starting from square one regarding fitness and becoming a top 4 team again. Will highly likely take more than this season to reach them heights.
The New Stone Age should be exciting though.
That's an interesting post, I agree with most of it as well, Certainly the part about reaping the benefits of Browns coaching, (before he lost the plot), The likes of Crabtree were becoming skilfull players who could offload, Cudjo is another who leaped ahead, Lunt also was very good at that time.
Brown was the start of our downfall in a sense when he self destructed, Anderson was more a successful coach than a good one for me. He deserves credit for the defensive qualities we had for a couple of seasons, and also for winning the Hub cap, I think his shortfall was man management and lack of motivational skills, all the skills some of our players were showing under Brown, largely disappeared under PA and we were pretty much reliant on Brough to create anything, though K Brown had his good sides.
I may be doing him a disservice to a point, something went wrong at the Giants before last season and he may well have only been a part of it, I have no info from inside and am just speaking how i have read it. It would be interesting to see how he went at a championship club.
I am pinning my hopes on Rick Stone being a lot more like N Brown than PA, If he keeps us alive and going forward, even if it's only enough to keep us in the 8, With this seasons signings he will have done OK, and we should be far better placed to get players next year.