The SHAMEFUL Treatment of Brian McDermott

Hi tvoc - you and I are just never going to agree! I think you're being a bit too dismissive of my comments re Fa'afili, who could play centre and wing, offering some versatility and great experience which could be passed to his colleagues. I agree with you that of course the spine is important but I would never say players such as Keith Senior didn't make a tremendous difference to our team because he didn't form part of the spine; what made Keith a quality player was not just his ability to score a few tries, but his experience and physicality, which is enormously important as both support to his senior teammates and as an example to younger players. Fa'afili was just one example of players that didn't play or left - another example is Henry Paul, who was never replaced, again a player with great experience who could lead a team.

I agree with you that a good coach should get the most of the players he has, but who's to say that McDermott didn't? Myself and other posters have talked a lot about attitude within this thread, and I've already mentioned that London is a Club which in recent years has primarily attracted players who just want to play rugby (this doesn't inspire anyone to play for pride in the shirt they're wearing). A standard contract is 2-3 years, and with lack of financial investment it is difficult to let a problem player (or players) go before his contract ends, so in most cases you just have to sit it out and do your best.

I don't think for a second that I have "blind faith" in the management - again, we've 8 years worth of primarily incredible memories which I use as evidence of their desire to win (unless you would suggest that this was all just luck?) I don't need to see any headlines to know, off the back of this obvious desire to be successful, that it will be being worked on behind the scenes, but of course, GH's acknowledgement of the disappointing results last week was a nice to have. We seem to be two sides of a coin on this - me with my faithful view, you with a cynical one. (And I think it's a rather too early to be using the word "doomsday"icon_wink.gif.

For me, the season is all about the Grand Final, and I think if you ask any player (perhaps particularly a Warrington player) whether or not they want to finish top or win the Grand Final, they'll all say they want to win the Grand Final. If you ask them how long the season runs, they'll say until October, not until September. All those elements you discuss, "rub of the green", "bounce of the ball", "a contentious referee", a team bowing to pressure by being overwhelming favourites happen week in, week out, and thus effect your League standing. We did not play well for the majority of the season last year, I make no mistake about that, but we reached the Grand Final and won because we were the better team against everyone we played. If we'd played like that all the way through the season, we would have finished a lot higher; we proved that the potential was always there.

Apologies again, my maths was wrong there. We might have avoided Wigan in the run up to the Final, but obviously we did not avoid them in the Cup. While the first 15 minutes of that game was really poor, the remaining 65 was brilliant, and we undoubtedly outplayed them. We could have beaten Wigan that day, but getting out of the starting blocks late as we did proved to be costly, and I don't think you could blame Mac for that. I suppose my answer here is that we could have beaten them, in a 1st grade final, for the first time under Brian McDermott.

You specifically mentioned that we'd only beaten Wigan twice in ten games since Michael Maguire arrived at Wigan, and so I was pointing out that 1 of the last 2.5 years was under Brian McClennan, and like I say, this suggests something in the players mentality. While I appreciate one draw from five games is not what we might have hoped for, you're comparing a man who's had the job 18 months to Tony Smith who had 4 years and Brian McClennan who had 3 years, and these stats don't take into account injuries to either our team or Wigan's, which of course effect the game. Incidentally, under Graham Murray we lost the 1998 Grand Final, which I would gladly have swapped for the in-season wins.

You say the players know when they are being short-changed. In the last 18 months, under Mac, Kevin Sinfield (Feb 11), Carl Ablett (May 12), Kylie Leuluai (May 12), Zak Hardaker (May 12), Jamie Peacock (March 12), Brett Delaney (Feb 12), Kallum Watkins (Jan 12), Ryan Hall (Jan 12), Chris Clarkson (Dec 11), Jamie Jones-Buchanan (Dec 11), and Ian Kirke (July 11) have all signed contract extensions, which tells me that they don't believe they are being short-changed by either the Club or McDermott. I agree, we know what they are capable of, but it's not like we haven't seen them switch on under Mac.

Again I just don't think we're ever going to agree!