BY LEE ADDISON
Are you a dickhead or a good person?
Most Rugby League players would rather play under and for a good person even if they’re not necessarily the best technical and tactical coach, than for a dickhead or poor ‘man-manager’ who is good at the X’s and O’s.
Players don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.
Have you noticed that coaches often get characterised as either ‘good tactically‘ or as a ‘good man manager’? My response to that is, why can’t a coach be both? And does a good coach need to be an expert at the technical and tactical thing anyway?
One of the best coaches I have ever seen at the ‘man management’ business was Frank Endacott, the former New Zealand Warriors, Wigan Warriors and New Zealand national coach. His nickname was ‘Happy Frank’ – but he did have a severe streak in his coaching too. Then Wigan Chairman Maurice Lindsay brought Frank in to make the team, in his words, ‘happy’ again after the team finished fourth in the ladder and failed at home in the first round of the 1999 finals to unfancied Castleford Tigers. Under Frank, the team finished top in season 2000, losing only three games throughout the regular season. Unfortunately, they lost their fourth and fifth games of the year in the finals – twice to St Helens, one in a Qualifying Semi-Final and the other on Grand Final day.
A few months into the 2001 season, Maurice dispensed with Frank’s services and appointed Australian Stuart Raper to replace him. He didn’t have to travel far to join Wigan – he was the Castleford coach who had knocked Wigan out in 1999 and brought his underdogs to the finals again in 2000, much to everyone’s surprise. The rationale behind Raper’s appointment from approximately 100 km away was that he was more of a technician. The appointment was validated when he also brought Wigan to the 2001 Grand Final (which they lost again). Still, they did win the 2002 Challenge Cup.
The late Maurice Lindsay was definitely in the camp that thought a coach was either ‘good tactically’ or a ‘good man manager’. But a man who, ironically, is still thought of as a star in the town of St Helens (Wigan’s main rivals) has, as recently as 2024, shown that you can be a great coach for many years even if the public is told and often believe that he’s ‘not great tactically’. One look at the replies on my Rugby League Coach Facebook page if I ever do a post about this big man and his coaching exploits is proof positive that there is a strong narrative out there that doesn’t support claims that he is a superb tactician.
Australia, Queensland, Canberra Raiders, Souths Brisbane and St Helens legendary player Mal Meninga turned his hand to coaching in 1997. His 53%-win ratio over four years seemed to be enough for media and footy types to decide he’d had a poor start to his coaching career. (For the record, every coach since him has a lower win ratio than Meninga at the time of writing. Meninga left Canberra in 2001).
In late 2005, Meninga was appointed as Queensland State of Origin Coach. He is now regarded as the greatest and most successful coach in Origin history. That’s all. The Maroons had unprecedented success under him, including eight series wins in a row and twenty victories from his thirty Origin games in charge. His record will never be matched. Ever. Meninga is rarely discussed as a coaching great. Not considered in the spheres of Craig Bellamy and Wayne Bennett. Bellamy is a brilliant NRL coach who struggled as a representative coach. Meninga is a brilliant representative coach who was (supposedly) an average NRL coach. Yet Bellamy is lauded as the greatest and even when Meninga is lauded it’s with asterisks.
I posit this: Meninga is the most underrated coach in Rugby League history.
Meninga’s achievements are attributed as a product of a playing group. The Smith’s, the Lockyer’s, the Cronk’s, the Inglis’s… yet few remember he also coached the Steve Bell’s, Dallas Johnson’s, Adam Mogg’s, Neville Costigan’s, Ben Hannant’s. Players who need their full name written to know who they are.
After this success, he became coach of Australia in late 2015. He has won two World Cups with Australia and has also navigated a period where Australia are arguably at their weakest for generations, with defections galore to the island nations, New Zealand and even England from those who qualified to play for more than one nation.
This still wasn’t (and isn’t) enough for some people in the game, in the media, on the terraces and social media keyboard warriors, who still label Meninga as ‘poor tactically’. These so-called self-appointed ‘experts’ should take a deeper dive into what coaching actually means before they throw their casual labels around.
I have been talking with several people associated with Australia since he was appointed. They include players I have coached in the past that are currently or were previously, playing for him and the staff that are or were working with him.
Quite frankly, these conversations reveal that Mal Meninga is literally a world-class coach. And leader.
A friend of mine worked for Meninga during a recent Kangaroos tour and was inspired by the attention to detail Meninga had. My friend, who has seen the best and worst of many NRL coaches, was stunned at how strategic Meninga was, how he weaved narrative through every day, carefully mapped out amongst the playing group to create a series of moments for the team each week
Each moment tied into themes all harking back to key Kangaroos values. For instance, Meninga used Surf Life Saving Clubs as a vessel to instil selflessness into the team. Surf Clubs are the bastion of Australian values and run by volunteers. Every-day Aussies dedicating hours as the sun rises to save lives and doing so without payment, doing so because they care about their community, doing so because they want their children to understand sacrifice. Meninga organised two separate days for the Kangaroos to join Surf Clubs and participate in nippers activities and then stay for dinner with the Surf Club members. Kids with inked signatures on their arms still wet, screaming “I’m never washing again”. Grown men explaining to multi-millionaire players how they simply don’t think of not showing up for duties because it means so much to the community.
Players woke up the next day feeling grateful for their privilege. Feeling a desire to give back to the kids who idolise them. Feeling perspective.
My friend explained that Meninga, often seen as a strong leader but not a strong football coach, often derided as inspirational but not detailed, was exceptionally analytical throughout the tour. Fastidious to a fault. In the team room – every piece placed with precision. Meninga would have large posters, billboards, and photos printed daily to decorate the team room with unique messages. He would walk through the team room by himself, imagining how the players would feel, dissecting which piece of information they would digest first. And then redecorate if it wasn’t exactly right.
Meninga doesn’t pretend. Full stop. A man who knows who he is, is a man who must be respected. His game plan simple, his messages simple, his delivery perfected.
He understands that players and staff need to be spoken to fairly, treated with respect and especially, with honesty. He understands that the discipline of his players is paramount, but he treats them like adults, like men. He recognises that by representing Australia after the regular season, his squad members have experienced months of intense games and training with their clubs. He treats the players accordingly. Those linked to him with Queensland said he was intuitively excellent regarding their needs.
What wasn’t and isn’t relaxed with Big Mal though, is discipline. And standards. We underestimate Mal Meninga at our peril. We underestimate any coaches that, for some reason, we don’t think are ‘technical’ coaches, at our peril. That’s because players value the type of coach they play under. It’s something inherent in rugby league, probably because of its brutal nature as an invasion sport.
Coaching isn’t all about X’s and O’s. If it was then Meninga wouldn’t have created a legacy in representative football that will never be matched. Ever.
If you’re good with people, you can make a very good coach. But if you’re just good technically and treat your players poorly, it’s harder to turn that around.
Over six years before the publication of this book, I coached a young Mabel Park school team that I mentored several times a day, both in the gym and on the field. By young, I mean a team of year 11s playing in a competition meant for year 12s. 16 and 17-year-olds in an Under 18’s league.
The impact of the COVID pandemic and the subsequent restrictions decimated the group. Many of the players who had joined the team from interstate or overseas had to return home and then remain in their original homes. It never even crossed my mind to ask any of the players to stay to ride out the COVID wave. Players being happy and settled away from football is always my priority and, in this case, if that meant the players being with their families in a distant location for a time, then I was encouraging them to go.
At any level and in any circumstances, if you give players something akin to a leave pass from training for what seems like a genuine and personal issue they are dealing with away from the game, you can learn a lot about that person when the time arrives for them to return to work. If they value you for trusting them and caring for their welfare, they’ll give you everything when they return to the training field. If they start asking for more and more or don’t come back at all, it means they’re the kind of player who will let the team down when they’re needed the most. And you don’t win championships with those types of players in your team.
When we had that pesky COVID outbreak, several of the boys were granted leave to go home and spend time with loved ones, for obvious reasons, but some of them didn’t come back. Everyone of those who didn’t, communicated with me and kept communications up with the team, including sending messages and good luck videos when we made that season’s Grand Final.
Their absence left our team depleted, but such was our depth we still had plenty of players, yet our team was far weaker to all observers, and I think the players knew that too. It left us in that middle ground where, if we chose to work hard, we would get to a semi or final and maybe even win the competition if the stars aligned. If we didn’t commit to work, then it could be a long season. It was such a fine margin that year.
Unlike the St Gregory’s team of 2011, which was weaker than its predecessor, this Mabel Park side didn’t have months to prepare from the end of the previous season for a premiership onslaught. Just as we thought our season was about to start, we were at full strength with all our troops, before we got forced into lockdown and lost some members.
As a coach, sometimes you have squads where talent will keep them in the mix to win games all the time, other times you have squads that no matter how much work they do, they will struggle. This squad post-lockdown was now right, smack bang in the middle of that. Post-lockdown, nothing was going to get handed to them on a plate and they would go into games as underdogs on several occasions. It really was now up to them and their effort how far they progressed this particular season.
Once society returned to something resembling normality, our training standards were inconsistent and I didn’t feel I had control of the group, nor that they were training like a team that was going to threaten the competition’s best. During one week in the middle part of the year, two weeks before the start of the delayed season, I reached a breaking point with the team.
The day before there was a training session that was fantastic and I thought that, finally, the penny had dropped with the players, and this would be the norm from now. We seemed to be in the ‘zone’ as I like to call it. I told the players after the session that their attendance and commitment had to stay at that level.
Our time in the zone lasted less than 24 hours! At our next session, some players were missing (either late or didn’t arrive). In the circle at the start of the session, I noticed that some players were missing! I cancelled training immediately and told all players to attend an impromptu meeting in the hall.
In that meeting, I asked them to articulate what needed to change for us to be the best version of ourselves. I put it squarely on them and said that if I wasn’t getting the ‘buy-in’ I needed, they could sit in meetings every day when they should be in the gym or on the field. I told them that if we did that then they would go into Round One under-prepared and looking foolish.
The players, almost to a man, admitted that some people weren’t pulling their weight. Also:
1.  A few individuals were made to realise by their teammates that their efforts were impacting others, not just themselves.
2.  There was a ‘perceived hierarchy’ in the group and those who were meant to be role models weren’t doing it very well, according to their teammates.
3.  They said they needed discipline, attendance, teamwork and work ethic to succeed.
What I didn’t know or plan for after our cancelled session was that, overnight, the players contacted each other, either by phone or social media. The messages were clear – to rally around and start the next day with a fresh attitude. The following day’s session was the best for a long, long time.
It was the start of a new era of focused training. It was thanks to a collective decision about what the boys all thought needed to change. Indeed, what mattered.
We got to a Grand Final that year but missed out on the trophy. Still a huge achievement. When they were ‘up against a wall’ these young men showed outstanding leadership qualities.
What matters in this sport are things like:
1.  Constant commitment to your task
2.  Mateship, doing it for your mates
3.  Togetherness/shared endeavour
4.  Team first (no ego’s)
5.  Working as hard as possible
6.  Doing point 5 every time you train
You will notice there are no X’s and O’s listed in the above. Different coaches will have different terms for the above, but essentially the message is very similar. I remember Ricky Stuart talking about ‘”Want and Care'” or essentially “How much does a player want it” and “How much does a player care?”.
Wayne Bennett’s books over the years talk regularly about similar messages that, at face value, sound quite generic but actually mean so much. Des Hasler was huge on ‘1%ers’ when I worked under him and those are a lot easier to do if you have the desire, the want and the care to do them. I could go on and list several coaches from several eras and several sports.
I found it very interesting that, when given a chance to be honest with each other and share what they felt they were lacking, my team basically gave the answers that you’d also hear from seasoned campaigners. And the message coming from their peers was powerful. I was so proud of them.
Another thing that happened the day when I assembled the players in the hall was that I had reached my ‘breaking point’. I didn’t have a nervous breakdown, but my line had been crossed, and I wasn’t copping this kind of effort from the players anymore. I wasn’t walking past it, and I wasn’t allowing it to continue.
When I think of Grand Final-winning teams of past years, it always seems to be the team that goes the extra mile for each other that reigns supreme. When you have two teams that do that, you end up with epic finals or memorable moments that turn a game. As I write, both Hasler and Stuart are still very adept at getting their team to beat fancied opposition, despite their team having underdog status in most matches.
For over a century, our sport has been one of the most brutal, possibly up there with combat sports such as boxing. As a result, when the players play, it doesn’t pay to fill their heads with too many tactical or technical things. A player’s ‘fight or flight’ response is on show and survival instincts kick in. Let’s face it, you’re essentially carrying a ball against thirteen people who want to hurt you. Einstein, one of the most intelligent people this world has ever seen, would have trouble processing lots of information in such a brutal environment.
To me, knowing this kind of thing is one of the reasons that Wayne Bennett and Jack Gibson have been Premiership accumulators over the last half a century. Gibson once said “Kick it to the seagulls” to halfback Peter Sterling in a tense Grand Final dressing room. A confused ‘Sterlo’ went out for the warm-up and saw all the seagulls camped out at one end of the Sydney Cricket Ground, he then knew exactly what his coach meant. Bennett, when his St George Illawarra team were down at halftime in the 2010 decider against the Roosters, apparently said little more than “Can you play like the Dragons in the second half, please?”
In my own coaching career, there are examples I can use where I’ve channeled that kind of approach. As he told you in the Foreword, I used to just tell James Tedesco to “Let it Flow” before each game. What that meant was, that I just wanted him to unleash what he had in his armoury, on the opposition. I also wasn’t going to fill his head of noise pre-match. His teammates got a lot more information from me pre-match. Another one, Matthew Groat (formerly of Wests Tigers) was a player with whom I had to push some other buttons. In a bid to get him fired up to play a game against opponents that included David Klemmer (future Kangaroo, New South Wales prop), I told Groaty that his opposite number Klemmer had bashed him around the park the last time they played each other. (Completely fabricated story by the way) It would be enough for Matthew to go out and be the best forward on the field in a crunch game.
I had another player a few years later up in Queensland who could tear up the top opposition in the competition all on his own. I just unleashed him from the bench when the opposition forwards were tired, and he would create havoc. But could he defend? Not a chance. He didn’t know where to stand half the time never mind follow a defensive structure. To that end, before each game, I’d remind him that he had to stand ten metres back when the opposition had a play the ball but that in attack he could “Do what the (insert expletive) he wanted”. He appreciated that and flourished. He never scored less than two tries a game! To avoid him being the reason we leaked more than two, I told him to move around the defensive line, in the opposite direction to where he thought the ball would go. We had a great season too!
The key to coaching is simple instructions for players to carry out under pressure. Of course, there is an awful lot more to it than that, but it’s a superb starting point and should thread through everything a coach delivers. One of the best managers ever to coach the round ball game (soccer) once said “There’s no room for confusion in my dressing room.” Also, more famously, when one of his players was going through all the potential permutations that could happen during a free kick in training, Brian Clough famously responded “I pay you to shoot, son”.
Motivation and Mind Games
Mind games are something that many players and coaches use, but frequently deny they do or ever have done. Motivation is something that can either be intrinsic or promoted/created by coaches and players. We have all heard the criticism of a coach who is struggling so much that they are ‘failing to motivate the team’ according to outsiders and pundits.
A team I used to coach a few years ago had excellent success overall under my watch, but one year after I left, they started slowly. They were struggling and sat at the bottom of the ladder without a win. Back then, I started looking for the reasons why they might be struggling. I discovered that they had started to create too much propaganda lauding themselves on social media before they truly deserved it. I believe that the players were falling for their own, self-created hype.
The late Maurice Lindsay, the former Wigan Warriors Chairman I told you about earlier, used to teach me so much about this when I was a young coach who also worked in the media and marketing department there. He knew I had a desire to go deep into the coaching world, so he used to imbue me with tales of the Wigan glory days. This dovetailed with my work because I was responsible for a lot of the information that the Wigan club sent out day to day. He used to teach me that you should never give the opposition something to help them get motivated and never put a target on your own head. So, we used to talk the opposition up and talk ourselves down. That certainly stayed with me.
If you lose, say nothing. If you win, say even less.
Basically, my old team, in this instance, had been doing the exact opposite. They’d been talking themselves up, about how they performed in training, and doing it very much in the public arena. Making things even worse, they were doing this at the START of the season and on social media. They were posting more than Taylor Swift. I could imagine the fuel this was giving to all their opponents. A dominant team in previous years, their opponents will have prepared for a mammoth task when facing them and it would have been all the motivation they would have needed.
Silly, silly. Rule 101 of coaching if you ask me… don’t put a target on your own head.
I’ve been the beneficiary of other coaches’ or opposition players giving my team motivation by talking too much in public places. I remember once, struggling a little bit for something to give my players before a local derby game where we were slight favourites. As I was walking to the meeting room to see the players, somebody handed me that day’s local newspaper. Like a gift from the heavens, the headline and the story underneath in that day’s local rag was to provide the perfect script for my team talk! I will not tell you the team I was coaching nor the opposition because I don’t want to embarrass them.
On this day, the opposition coach spouted off to the local journalist about how good his squad was and how they were going to give us a really tough game because they fancied their chances. I duly read the contents of our local news source to my players and said no more after it. You could hear a pin drop on the bus going to the game. I also arranged for photocopies of the article to decorate our changing room wall, above each player’s locker area.
What followed was one of the most one-sided matches I have ever coached. My team were so fired up. The referee blew the full-time whistle (a few minutes early I am sure to give mercy) when we had reached 100 points, and the opposition had yet to score. I could not believe the motivation my team had been presented with and still can’t to this day.
The prevalence of social media frequently grants your opposition the platform to provide you, every day, with the motivational fuel, if you take some time to look for it! I see posts from players or clubs almost daily on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the like that I would love to show my team if I were a coach in the opposition dugout!
There’s an old tale about Wayne Bennett falsifying some ‘tip sheets’ that he said were from his grand final coaching opponent Brian Smith in the early ’90s. The old Master allegedly slipped them under his players’ hotel room doors the night before the game. True, false, embellished or otherwise, what this teaches us is that nothing motivates a player more than how good his opponent thinks he/she is and how they think you have weaknesses. These preach to the base instincts that our game relies on so much.
Another coach trick you will have seen (sometimes without realising it) is the team sheet trick. Some coaches don’t play any games at all with their team sheet, others sometimes do. One of the most famous tales of ducks and drakes in recent memory was the 2018 NRL Grand Final. Roosters coach Trent Robinson kept everyone guessing as to whether a partially fit Cooper Cronk was going to play. To cover this up in Rugby League is almost a miracle, it is a sport that leaks like a sieve!
Why is a team sheet so important? Well, as an opposition coach, if you know that a certain player is playing, you can look to either exploit the weaknesses or counter the strengths of that person. At the highest levels I have seen or worked at, players get information on what the halves do, which foot they kick off and where they favour their kicks. In terms of the powerful runners, players will find out what foot a key opposition player likes to step off or a hand they like to fend with. Then, all opposition players will be studied for defensive frailties, where they leave the line, if they are poor tacklers or have weaker shoulders to target.
Harry Siejka, a former Panthers, Warriors and Bradford Bulls player, is someone I have coached and coached against. When I coached against him and before I had even met him, I noticed from studying his footage that when he wanted to run the football, he stood closer to the ruck than if he had passing in mind and my players used it to predict his movements. When I coached him, I told him I had found that, and he didn’t even know that he did it! It was a subconscious act. According to some opponents, Immortal Andrew ‘Joey’ Johns always used to dig his toe into the ground seconds before he caught the ball to run straight at the defensive line. Barrie McDermott, the former Great Britain prop, has a glass eye due to an accident with an air rifle as a teenager and enjoyed a stellar career despite this disability. His issue was well known by opponents who often tried to exploit him on that side of his body in defence.
One team I coached against kept playing a certain two defenders on the same edge, so my team targeted all sets there. Both these players were/are ok in attack but the coach was crazily making them defend together. Both of them were very good at missing tackles and to put them on the same side and next to each other was like manna from heaven for opposition coaches. It’s that obvious I don’t understand why he never noticed. So, the team sheet was important ahead of that match!
If a coach doesn’t brief the players and those in and around the squad to keep their words to themselves, then this stuff often leaks to the opposition. It can be the difference between a four-point win and a two-point loss. Many of your players will be friends with opponents for all sorts of reasons, so be careful because loose lips sink ships!
Much to the chagrin of administrators and public announcers everywhere, my attitude to team sheets in crunch scenarios has been varied, I’ll be honest. Much to the chagrin of administrators and public announcers everywhere!
Once I listed all 30 players in my squad for a Grand Final and it was in alphabetical order too. Other times I have said a player was on the bench and then started them or I have genuinely had a different formation. I put a 15-year-old Alex Leapai in jumper 17 for his first-grade debut at school but I always intended on starting him and both he and I knew that. I just didn’t want the opposition to plan on bashing him in the opening stages which is commonly known as the ‘softening up’ period. Several years earlier, at Ipswich, I planned on starting a young prop called Monson against Palm Beach Currumbin but didn’t tell anyone, not even him, until the teams were just about to run out. I knew he would get nervous if I gave him too much notice! An ex-player of mine who is now a star in the NRL will tell you a similar story at the end of this chapter.
At Mabel Park, we played half a season with a half who also played at full-back in our defence. I also used him as my only half which meant I played with four props starting on the field. The 6 and 7 jerseys didn’t fit those extra props, so we had to just get players in jerseys that fitted them. The opposition coach would not have had a cat in hell’s chance of knowing what was going on.
There are no rules in Rugby League that say you have to have one fullback, two wingers, two centres, two in the halves, two props, a hooker, two second rows and a lock/loose forward. It has always baffled me when official governing body team sheets ask you to name someone in those positions. What if a team wants to play with thirteen props? Or thirteen half-backs?
As England Students coach, I once started with no hooker and used my second rows on each side to do the dummy half duties. It worked a treat and also allowed us to play a third prop at the start of the game. Countless times, my fullback has played as a half, giving me an extra prop. Having more than two props gives a team a great opportunity to get that all-important initiative that you need in the middle of the field.
On one occasion my fullback had to play in number 12 because we’d left the number 1 jersey on the floor when we left on the team bus to go to the ground! Several times, I’ve coached props who cannot fit into jerseys 8 or 10, outside backs who cannot fit into jerseys 1 to 5 and I’ve even had a half that had to start the game in a substitute jersey as that was the only one that fit him.
I’m sure the opposition thought we were playing mind games!
This is an excerpt from the new book Rugby League Coach: 13 Game-Changing Conversations to Transform your Coaching by Lee Addison. It can be purchased here.
