Coach could just be first casualty at unstable Warriors

There are so many unanswered questions about Stephen Kearney’s abrupt departure as Warriors coach, not least this: who’s next? More than anything, though: why now? Possibly the least interesting question of the lot is: did Kearney deserve to go?

The way Kearney was stripped of his employment over the weekend reflected poorly on the club as a professional entity. The decision looked reactionary; an emotional response to a poor performance.

If the greatest problem your club has is attracting established talent to Penrose, then making hair-trigger calls is not something you want on your prospectus.

It’s about now you have to understand that despite the marketing, the Warriors aren’t the people’s club, it’s a person’s club.

That is the owner’s prerogative. Autex Industries chief executive Mark Robinson clearly didn’t like what he saw and moved with haste, thinking that another week under the coach was another week wasted.

It might be a callous call, but it was his to make.

It clearly wasn’t Cam George’s call. The Warriors chief executive made that abundantly clear in an interview with Channel Nine.

He described himself as a “rocksolid” Kearney supporter and painted the decision as having “come off the back of discussions with the owners

. . . and we are where we are now”.

He said Kearney was a “piece of the puzzle he wanted to change”, with the emphasis on “he”, not the standard “we”.

He described his “discussion” with the owners as having been “long”, the implication being that he tried to talk them around. If anybody was left in any doubt about George’s position, he wrote it in black paint on a placard when he said the club’s biggest historic impediment to success had been “stability”, while immediately acknowledging that changing a coach mid-season “flies in the face” of attempting to redress that.

If you were the owner of a club who paid presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars to a chief executive to make the tough calls, would you want even a hint of dissent when fronting the media? From the outside, it appears that George might be expecting the dreaded “vote of confidence” in the near future.

Another staffer under pressure must be recruitment manager Peter O’Sullivan, a man touted in some quarters as a genius but also someone who has chalked up few signing wins in his time at the club.

If Kearney was bladed in part because he couldn’t be trusted to build a title-contending roster with so many players coming off contract at the end of the season, then surely O’Sullivan is in the same boat?

People will have their own opinions as to the merits of Kearney as a coach. Just last week, I listed Kearney as one of the more intriguing characters I’d met in sport across the course of my career and pointed to a couple of issues I felt were holding him back as a coach.

It was timely, I guess, as was the line about Autex Industries’ short patience. Kearney seemed to base entire offensive game plans around completed sets of six, a metric ripe for boredom and false efficiency.

With that in mind, it feels bizarre the time to swing the axe was when your side was effectively two and two after the most unprecedented, asterisk of a start to a season.

The Warriors ownership will have you believe they’re charting a new direction but it’s really on the same old road with a different horse and cart: a shortcut to nowhere fast.

There’s another question that sits queasily in the stomach like a delayed hangover, and it’s a question few will want to ask: why in a sport that is increasingly dominated by Polynesian and indigenous talent, has it just got even whiter in the coach’s box?

Around 50 per cent of the NRL’s playing population is Polynesian, while 12 per cent are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island heritage.

With Kearney’s departure, the percentage of Polynesian head coaches now stands at 0 per cent. The percentage of Polynesian NRL club chief executives is 0 per cent.

The Warriors did not sack Stephen Kearney because he is Maori but his dismissal does further skew what in these more enlightened and racially charged times is an awkward look for the NRL.