How Melbourne created one Munster of a player
IF you want an indication of how highly the Melbourne Storm rate Cameron Munster, try this on for size. At a club famous for making players thrive in their famed systems, this time they were ready to change the systems to fit one of their players.
Change was perhaps on the horizon already, admits assistant coach Adam O’Brien, but Munster’s move from fullback to five-eighth would be the catalyst to speed up the process.
While Matthew Johns has been given much of the credit for readying Munster for his move from fullback to five-eighth, O’Brien has been a key figure in the transformation.
As a long-standing member of the Storm coaching staff and current attack coach, O’Brien was the man that first envisaged Munster as a key playmaker and helped smooth a path that has led all the way to a State of Origin debut on Wednesday night.
‘‘We had a good footy player on our hands, seeing him come in and what he did with that fullback role when Billy [Slater] hurt himself,’’ O’Brien said.
‘‘Blake Green had signed with Manly and we were hopeful Bill was going to come back. And we knew he would go back to the number one spot. When we had a look at it, Cameron seemed to fit [as five-eighth]. He busts a lot of tackles and he’s very strong, especially through the core. We found that he wasn’t beating defenders with sheer pace and acceleration. He was beating defenders with smarts and strength.’’
With Slater returning this season from his shoulder concerns, it became a numbers game. Melbourne’s best 13 had Munster in there somewhere, even if his move to five-eighth took a bit of digesting when it was first floated. ‘‘When I sat with him and told him he’d be moving, there was a little bit of anxiety. I guess what people tend to overlook is that here’s a young kid that replaced Billy Slater and had a really strong season,’’ O’Brien said.
Munster, a 22-year-old from Rockhampton, had adapted to the NRL with consummate ease and many expect him now to be a longterm addition to the Maroons lineup as generational change quickens in their ranks.
In Melbourne, his move would see O’Brien and head coach Craig Bellamy adapt their shapes in attack to move away from some of the systems that have served them well for so long.
‘‘What we weren’t going to do was make Cameron conform to us. We were going to change the way we play to suit Cameron. What we weren’t going to do with Cameron was burden him with huge amounts of structure,’’ O’Brien said. ‘‘We knew he had a really good footy player, a guy that had played a whole heap of games in the back yard and just knew how to beat a defender. I guess you get that from a country kid in Rockhampton, learning those skills, dodging sprinklers.
‘‘We weren’t going to try and make him this brilliant ball player and run dynamic shapes and come up with tricky plays. We didn’t want him thinking, we wanted him doing.’’
Some sessions in Sydney with Johns would ease some of Munster’s early concerns in the role. Those would feature some work on fundamentals but also stress to Munster to rely on the strengths of his game, not try to become an entirely new player.
‘‘He knows he’s better when he’s moving on to the football, not from a standing start with weird and wonderful passes. The answer usually appears for him,’’ O’Brien said. ‘‘When he came back to training, once he’d accepted it, he knew how we wanted him to play . . . he just ran with it.’’ The Sun-Herald