Warriors trainer Alex Corvo looks an unlikely saviour
OPINION: Conditioning tends to be the last resort of the inept.
If you can’t coach your players to be better or have exhausted every idea to enthuse them, then it’s time to run them into the ground.
At a real rugby league club Alex Corvo’s existence wouldn’t be common knowledge. But, since arriving at the New Zealand Warriors, the new head trainer’s been repeatedly held up as a saviour.
And the credentials are excellent. Melbourne Storm, Kangaroos, Brisbane Broncos, Queensland. This isn’t a shot at Corvo; merely what all the twaddle about him signifies.
For starters, it implies the other 15 clubs in the NRL come into the opening round of the season on a beer-and-fish-and-chip diet, with a bit of training thrown in.
Not the Warriors. They’ve got Alex Corvo. He’s the best.
As if to say the trainers elsewhere have no idea.
The Warriors are a soft touch; and almost always have been.
But not this year, apparently. No, Corvo’s worked them hard.
There’s an edge. There’ll be effort and grit and all that kind of good stuff.
Again, it’s the route you go down when you don’t know what else to do. You get the players fit, hope to catch a team or two out, get some early momentum and then try not to run out of gas.
The good teams are built for the finals. The others hope to start fast and hang on.
It’s a method the Blues Super Rugby team know only too well.
Sadly neither Corvo nor chief executive Cameron George can get out there and do it on the players’ behalf.
George has come in and talked a good game; largely around what the team will do and how proud fans will feel when they see it. It’s not uncommon for a chief executive to act as spruiker-in-chief, but the Warriors are in a position where only actions can remedy the years of empty promises.
Adam Blair’s recruitment has been called a coup. Blake Green’s too. Not to mention the retention of Roger Tuivasa-Sheck.
But, as ever, it won’t be the physical state of the players nor quality of the supporting cast that determines the fate of the Warriors’ season. It’s all about star halfback Shaun Johnson.
If he can regularly find tired forwards to skip around, or the confidence to ball-play at the defensive line, then the Warriors will win games.
If it’s going to be another season of him sitting deep and playing sideways, then they won’t.
The Warriors don’t possess anyone with an adequate kicking game, nor the ability to control games and manipulate the opposition.
They have quick, elusive guys such as Johnson, Tuivasa-Sheck and Issac Luke. If they’re not running at defenders, then they’re not much use to you.
In a game as, occasionally, robotic as rugby league, it’s those flair players – the ones who have the imagination to see opportunities and ability to exploit them – who make the difference.
Yet the favoured method of Warriors coach Stephen Kearney is completion rates. Control the ball and you’ll inevitably score points. Right?
That didn’t work in year one of his tenure, so in comes Corvo to try to get everyone fit.
It’s hard to see Kearney getting many more rolls of the dice if this doesn’t work.