Brown out

Next year it will be thirty years since the second most successful rugby league side in history, the Big Red V of Kogarah (and latterly The Gong), managed to win the big cheese on offer. It will be thirty years next year because thanks to the stellar work of the St George-Illawarra board, they will most definitely fail to win it this year, having turned incumbent coach Nathan Brown into the lamest of lame duck leaders by announcing the signing of the Broncos' grumpy grandpa Wayne Bennett for 2009 and beyond. While announcing your club's coach is to get the arse mid-season (or even mere weeks thereinto) appears to be a trend in both rugby codes at present - Ewen Mackenzie just picked up his pink slip from the Waratards, while the Cowboys couldn't even be bothered waiting until the NRL season actually kicked off to turf Graham Murray - the question of why a club would consciously sacrifice one entire season's opportunity to win the comp in favour of the potential to win in years to come seems almost as unfathomable as the question of 'What the fuck has Neil Henry done at the Raiders that's so bloody good to warrant getting the Cowboys gig anyway?' While most of the ink that's been spilled on the Bennett-to-Big-Red-V story has dwelt on the positives for the Kogarah concern going forward - with even Brown himself admitting he'd have signed Bennett had he been a club director - it's the fate of Brown which most have forgotten, or ignored. Other than the players of course, those who've had the most benefit from application of what Roy and HG have called 'the Brown polish'.

But first it's conflict of interest time, for Brownie, as you may know, is from the same bit of coastal NSW as your correspondent, went to the same school several years apart. His stepmother ran the aerobics class my mother went to. (Small hick towns, eh?) Less positively his stepbrother failed to give evidence as the crown's spectacularly ineffectual witness in an assault case where a good friend of the World of Bollocks got several shades of crap belted out of him by a bunch of pissed fucktards. By that stage Brownie was already a first-grader at the Dragons, and in accordance with recent tradition, had already lost two grand finals, 1992/93, both to the Broncos - the afterparty of the latter witnessed a very, very pished Darren Lockyer mounting the rostrum at the presentation to begin the chant of 'St George can't play'. The Dragons went on to utterly disprove Associate Professor Lockyer's hypothesis by losing another grand final in 1996 to the stinking cheating silvertail bastards of Manly-Warringah, and yet another in 1999 to the stinking cheating Super League corporate whores of the Melbourne Sturm und Drang, and the dodgiest, most illegitimate grand-final-deciding penalty try in the history of first grade rugby league grand finals in this country. A statement which absolutely cannot be argued against, as it was in fact the only grand-final-deciding penalty try in the history of first grade rugby league grand finals in this country.

Brownie pulled stumps on his league career shortly after, not realising at the time that he'd mixed his metaphors horrendously in the process, and as such was probably better suited to a position in football commentary. Instead he became an assistant coach and then head coach at the Dragons, where in five years in charge, despite his years of loyalty to the club (let's not mention his attempt to skive off to Super League in mid-'96, only halted by the club being granted a supreme court injunction) and despite leading the Dragons to the semis more times than not, he was invariably only three games away from being fired. His three games were finally up after the first three games of this season.

Which brings us to the two main reasons Brownie got the arse:
(1) His teams didn't know how to win, because neither did he
and
(2) His players were too young, immature and/or stupid to follow game plans on the field or conduct themselves properly off it, because he was barely 15 minutes older than them and still got carded at Liquorland when he went to buy beers.

For evidence of (2), you have to look all the way back to... last week against Incoming Cowboys Supercoach Neil Henry's Raiders side, whereafter only the Warriors' desperately inept Monday night performance v Manly managed to create more lopsided stats re incomplete sets and handling errors. The Dragons failed to trouble the scorers all second half, watching a comically impotent Canberra attack led by a white-trash-tattooed, drink-driving carney (Todd Carney to be specific) carve them up like, well, Saint George himself - he of the shiny armour and sharp pointy stabby ouch metal thing. As for off-field conduct, look little further than the quality of human - 'toey human' at that - who Brownie selected as his captain for the season: the 'Fire up bitch' man himself, Mark Gasnier. And the fact that in an early match in charge he had to slap Trent Barrett across the chops mid-spray in order to get the bogan prettyboy's attention to the fact that his team was losing and he might want to listen to his coach a bit. Then again, Brownie's reputation as one of the boys had its upside - if you can call 'winning' Dell back from retirement, who's been on record in the last 24 hours as saying Brownie was the reason he'd chosen to join the Dragons after his powder-related exclusion from competitive sport, an upside.

But in the end it's the inability to win which really did for Brownie, particularly up against the record of the grumpy grandpa from Brisvegas, whose CV runs to more pages than the Illawarra phone book. Whether it was ending up a perennial loser throughout his playing career, or having such a fucking loser for a stepbrother, Brownie couldn't inspire the final ruthless cutting edge in his sides needed for ultimate victory. They were perpetually pretty to watch, had brilliant backlines and could rack up fifty points on a side as soon as look at them, but they were a bit soft around the edges and could curl up like a centipede on a hot rock if you poked them with a sharp enough stick. Brownie's best chance was 2005 - Barrett's last year before heading off to England to get pissed in Earls Court and crash on a mate's floor like all the rest of the Aussies there (whaddya mean he actually had a paid job to go and do there? That's fucking un-Australian!) when they were almost unbackable favourites going into the semis, with all the experts picking a Dragons-Eels grand final. Of course the experts would prove to be less use than a busted arsehole when the NRL decider ended up being played out between the Tigers and the Cowboys, but that wasn't much consolation to the Dragons Army. Who, in the latter days of Brown's reign, supplemented their range of fabulously witty banners with slightly more political numbers such as 'Step down Brown' and 'Oust Doust', referring to the unpopular club chairman who gave Brownie the gig in the first place.

Ungrateful fucktards.

Like the England football fans who bellowed for Sven's head when all he managed to deliver were quarter-final appearances in two world cups and a Euro champs - only to belatedly realise after watching Steve McClaren flubber about in the job that making the quarters with that pack of bloated, overpaid, overrated tosspots was in fact quite the fucking achievement - the Red Army will one day admit (probably after Old Man Bennett fails to get them to win next year either, notching up an even thirty years since winning in '79) that Brownie mightn't have overachieved with the cattle he had, but he didn't underachieve either. That was probably about as good as they were going to be anyway. A bit like 'Brad' Kimmorley, Trent Barrett was handy, but he was never as good as he was made out to be - The Man might have been full of shit but when Mundine was playing six, noone even noticed Barrett playing seven. And the rest of that side of the early Naughties was also handy, but were they as good as the salary cap rorting Dogs of the same era? Or the 2000-04 Rooters, who almost managed to break the Dragons' record for managing to win their way through to grand finals and once there playing like busteds? Of course not. And even on a good day they couldn't live with the Melbourne Sternum playing to the best of their ability, or likewise the Shoncos, or even the Rabbitohs (on Charity Shield nights anyway, eh Craigos?)

So good luck with the Centrelink queue Brownie - unless the Broncos get a bit desperate, it might be time to follow your old happy-slapper mate Trent over to England, methinks. (Mind you it'd hardly be the first linkup between the two clubs, who've had a bizarre co-dependence over the years. Despite playin two lopsided grandfinals in the early 90s, there's also the flow of players between the two clubs, which was primarily northward in the beginning - Big Gordie and Big Stupid Dell started at the V and joined the maroon and gold; The Man left Kogarah during Super League, signed for the Broncs for about 15 minutes, then came straight back afterwards; and more recently Ashton Sims and Michael Ennis have made the trek. However, now with Saint Benny joining Saint George, the flow might just start to reverse. Which leaves only the question of how Bennett will react to having the much less deferential, much more antagonistic Sydney league media interrogating him in press conferences, rather than the hero-worshipping hacks of Uncle Rupert's northern outposts...

The Doctor is OUT like an out thing that's out. (I'm not paid by the simile folks.)