Fixing our sporting conundrum

If the players can find the same loyalty as the fans, it could be the Warriors’ year

Every dedicated supporter of a struggling sports team is a coach. Every one of the supporters wrestles with the problem of what could be wrong and plenty of them have a theory of how to fix it. Auckland is full of coaches in grandstands or armchairs when autumn arrives. Whether it is the Warriors, the Blues or both, supporters yearn for a coach to find the secret of winning.

Last weekend both teams had a win, which makes this a good moment to consider their problems positively. Start by listening to a real coach, the Warriors’ Stephen Kearney, interviewed by Dylan Cleaver in the paper today. Kearney, like so many coaches before him, came to the Warriors accompanied by the high hopes of supporters who knew his rugged, dedicated, highly successful career as a player.

Kearney is characteristically not making too much of the win in Perth last Saturday night, their first since June last year. It will count for little unless they can win again at Mt Smart tonight in their first home game of the season. Inconsistency, to Kearney, is not much better than losing. The club’s inconsistency was the reason he said he quit the Warriors as a player 20 years ago and it was the fault he came back to address as a coach. Inconsistency, he says, can become as habitual as losing or winning.

Everyone who has tried to play sport seriously knows it is a mental as much as a physical exercise. Internal expectations are important. Winners win to a large degree because they expect to win. They know how they win and they set about doing what they know they need to do. Consistent losers lack confidence they can win and so do occasional winners.

It is easy to state the problem, hard to fix it. Coaches such as Steve Kearney and the Blues’ Tana Umaga must spend most of their waking hours trying to devise ways of planting the winning mindset in their players. They have the example of the All Blacks nearby, there is hardly a sports team in the world with a more consistent winning record and All Black coaches and captains, past and present, seem always willing to help Kiwi teams in both codes acquire the winning attitude.

Umaga is one of those former captains. He has the attitude but like many Blues coaches before him, he cannot seem to transmit it to the players. It is now a long time since the Blues were consistently winning the Super Rugby competition and yet Auckland rugby is still strong. The region’s secondary school competition is probably the strongest in the country and produces a constant supply of rising stars of