: Sun Apr 05, 2009 6:20 pm
Some teams have started slowly this year, Catalans for example with only 1 victory in the league against a Warrington team who were in meltdown. After a 3rd placed finish in the table last year, fans would have expected the team to kick on this year and so it looks like Kevin Walters has taken them backwards.
Equally, McNamara has inherited his position from a successful coach in Noble. If we're to be fair though, the seeds of decline were sown by Noble's recruitment policy over the years and now McNamara can't really pick up the pieces, and doesn't have the experience as a coach to make do with what he has. You can see why Bradford fans want a coach with more experience. After a lot of success in the SL era, you'd hate to see your side on 3 points however early it may be in the season.
Fans hate to see clubs go BACKWARDS. Wigan aren't the dominant force they once were, Warrington have high expectations they never achieve, and Catalans and Bradford are capable of so much more. Salford were always going to struggle but I can understand that fans want an inspirational coach who can get the team to play as greater than the sum of its parts.
I think a few things we need to account for are a lack of quality coaches in the sport. Who would replace these struggling coaches? Also, I think we need to appreciate that at this point in time there wasn't a big enough pool of SL standard PLAYERS to support 14 teams in the league. I don't think we've seen an increase in the quality of the competition in terms of skill and thrilling matches, but we're seeing a levelling out of the teams so that everyone can compete on the day (this owes a lot to the salary cap).
As a whole I think we need to accept that with the franchise system coming into play, some steps back will have to be taken, but from there we'll have a base from which to build and this will ultimately strengthen the competition. It might just take a few years for this to show. For the moment, I hope clubs will stick by the coaches a little more as stability will be important.