Why is it if a team are rubbish its the coach if they do well its the players? Not sure of Websters record as a coach but I know he was unbeaten with us and went on a longish unbeaten run with Wakey when taking over, started the season well and then the inevitable collapse came due to small squad, lack of resources and injuries to key players. Pretty harsh to judge anyone on those terms. His big failing was his approach to the media and the interview where he seemed to throw the towel in.

That approach sounds pretty much exactly how we'd get several years of huge gulfs between performances with halfback consistency/availability problems.

There's a difference between getting a team well drilled and ready for your halfbacks to take control of, and essentially expecting the halfbacks to do the coaching for you. For an analogy, I'd think of the team as a car. The halfback is the driver, not the mechanic. They have input and take control, but it's not up to them to build and constantly maintain it.

I've just read it again in context and still think it's cobblers. In a well-coached side, all the halfback should need to do a lot of the time is tell the players which play he is running, and then they would all know where they need to be and what they should be doing from strong preparation (done by the coaches, not the halfbacks, in training). Maybe you worded it badly, but your post really reads as if for each play the halfback needs to hold a quick conflab on the pitch to let all the players know their places.

As opposed to needing the halfback to do the same?





No it isn't. It's simply knowing starting positions and how the play is expected/likely to unfold and how to react. It doesn't have to be a strict itinerary.



Yes, from a set of known and practiced set of plays with improvisation thrown in. Your argument sounds more like the halfbacks having to teach the players attacking plays on the fly.

Nailed it, IMO. With the very limited public evidence of what Webster will/can offer us, there's not a lot we fans can accurately say on this one. Fingers crossed the club make a good judgment on their better information.

I remember once reading/hearing a theory that when people really excel at something, they often struggle to teach others because they can't get their head around why others find difficulty in doing things that come very easy to them. It can also make them less patient and communicate less clearly, because they know what they mean but it's so natural to them that they don't know how to explain it properly.

I think Bobby Charlton was a good example of this. A world class player but really struggled as a manager.

Look at the great Leeds United side of the 70s. Quite a few had a go at management but only Jack Charlton had any measure of success (Bremner, Clarke, Gray, Yorath, Hunter, Cooper, for example, all failed to set the world alight). Being a great player doesn't equate to becoming a great manager

theres examples of this all over and in all sports - botham, tony adams, maradonna, gazza, lee crooks

How many frickin errors are we going to make? We need to settle down and play the percentages

Wrong thread

I thought that was the type of rugby everybody hated when we did play it.