Life as an NRL head coach looks an unenviable rollercoaster of high blood pressure and 24/7 intensity.
On Sunday Wests Tigers coach Benji Marshall spoke about how it felt like he was delivering his own eulogy after the club’s seventh loss in eight games against the Warriors.
On Saturday night it was Todd Payten who conceded he was losing sleep at night because his team was failing to be connected and fight hard for 80 minutes the way opposition sides were.
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You’d love to have known what was really going through Des Hasler’s head when the Fox League cameras kept panning to the coaches box as the Titans remained anchored to the bottom of the ladder with another loss to the Broncos.
Or what about the contrasting fortunes of Queensland coach Billy Slater and NSW Blues coach Laurie Daley after another gruelling State of Origin series.
Both looked emotionally fried at various stages of the series.
The reality is it’s a brutal business. No wonder four-time premiership-winning coach Tim Sheens often states there’s only two types of coaches.
Those who’ve been sacked and those who are waiting to be sacked.
There’s guaranteed to be some ruthless decisions made by NRL clubs over the course of the next two months as another season moves to the business end.
The mail around the game is Hasler, Payten and Newcastle’s Adam O’Brien are the coaches under the most pressure. (Since publication, reports have emerged that O’Brien will be sacked.)
The Wests Tigers have to stick solid with Marshall because if they don’t there’s too much risk around Jarome Luai’s get-out clause and the club simply can’t afford to start yet another rebuild.
At Manly it’s fair to say it’s going to be results-dependent for Anthony Seibold who bought himself some valuable latitude with wins over Wests Tigers and Souths leading into the bye in round 19.
Des blames discipline for Titans loss | 06:33
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Seibold’s “we’re all going to die” press conference in relation to questions around the pressure of being an NRL head coach was also different gravy.
Hasler will be gone at some point because it simply hasn’t worked at the Gold Coast Titans.
The flip side to the ruthlessness of life as an NRL coach is the euphoria around winning, helping to turn a club around and ultimately aiming at premierships.
Bulldogs coach Cameron Ciraldo is a good example of a bloke who’s gone in, gone through a season from hell to start with and is now riding the wave.
Then there were the tough decisions made in round 19.
Ciraldo axed controversial mid-season recruit Lachlan Galvin out of the club’s best 17 in a bid to snap back-to-back losses. It worked.
The same can’t be said for Parramatta coach Jason Ryles who went with the left field play of using Dylan Brown at hooker for the opening 28 minutes against Penrith.
That coin flip didn’t fly but given Brown’s out the door to Newcastle at the end of the season anyway you can see why Ryles wanted a closer look at playing Joash Papalii in the halves.
The list of emerging coaches who’ve done strong apprenticeships is a crack field right now with names like Willie Peters, Josh Hannay, Matt King, Dean Young and Ben Hornby all assembling strong resumes.
What Peters has done at Hull KR in the Super League is impossible to fault and extremely appealing given he’s rebuilt a club that was in the doldrums from the ground up.
There’s a number of clubs in the NRL who could do with a coach like that right now.
What were your likes or dislikes from round 19?
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