Time runs out at last for great survivor
WAYNE Bennett has long advised young coaches that the day they agree to coach an NRL team is the day they agree to be sacked as a coach.
It took 32 distinguished seasons as a first grade coach, but Bennett has in the past week run himself into a corner in which the last year of his contract with the Broncos was terminated.
Bennett has had a gallows humour to how he views the job security of his profession.
But it might be a while before he can find something to chuckle about over his departure from the job he loved.
His observation of his 2008 departure from the Broncos – that he had made it easy for the directors and management – provided the map by which he found himself in yesterday’s outcome.
As far back as 1991, Bennett and the Broncos directors stood firm when a Brisbane television channel ran a poll asking its viewers whether he should be sacked as coach.
Twenty- seven years later, Bennett’s dealings with this board – and the club as a whole, according to CEO Paul White – had become “no longer workable’’.
“The club has not been built by taking the easy road. This has not been easy,’’ White said.
After the 1989 season, Bennett and then CEO John Ribot took the state- rattling decision of stripping the captaincy from Australian skipper Wally Lewis.
Nobody, not even Lewis, Queensland’s greatest player, and, it turns out, Bennett, the state’s most accomplished coach, is immune to the march of time.