The Melbourne Storm were uniquely placed to consider such a prospect. Their captain Cameron Smith was a commanding figure whose understanding of the game and its people had done much to establish the club’s pre-eminence. As captain–coaches go, he had all the qualifications, and plenty in the club considered him the perfect solution should Bellamy leave. The idea of an on-field supremo, however, had been largely abandoned a few decades back. It was considered too onerous a job for a player in an era of intense professionalism, with an ever-increasing demand on players. But as Smith’s particular qualities raised the prospect again, it triggered some entrenched thoughts in old rivals. No men were more qualified to offer a view on the subject than Norm Provan and Arthur Summons. Provan had been captain–coach of St George in four premiership years and loved the job. Summons had been captain–coach of the first Kangaroo side to win the Ashes. He didn’t like the dual role at all.
NORM PROVAN
When I was appointed captain–coach of St George, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the combined role. Ken Kearney had filled it very successfully with Saints over the previous five seasons, and since I had been a first-grade player for eleven years, I certainly wasn’t overawed by it. It seemed the natural thing to do, and I was happy to have the job. It must have had little discussion by the powers that be at Saints as well, because they never even asked me what I thought about it. There was no seeking me out to see whether I wanted the job. Frank Facer, Len Kelly, Alex Mackie and the rest of them ran the place, and democracy wasn’t their thing. They worked out what was right for the club, made the decision and just did it, no matter the subject. They told me I was appointed, and that was that. I don’t even remember feeling surprised.
When people have asked me about the pressures of being captain–coach, or the desirability of the combined job, I have always said the same thing. It is the best way to run a team. Even today, if I was investing in a club competing at the very best levels, I would insist on appointing a captain–coach, rather than just a coach. It has to be the right person, of course, but when it is, the system works so much better. For my part, I enjoyed the responsibility of it. It focused the direction of what we were doing. There was never any argument about the coach wanting one thing and the captain wanting something else. A captain–coach can respond immediately on the field to any circumstance. He is not limited by instructions that may or may not be sufficiently flexible to cope with any given event. He can make his decisions on the run, according to need, and in the best interests of the moment.
My last experience of a non-playing coach had been the first of our premiership years in 1956, when Norm Tipping was our coach and Kearney was captain. They didn’t see eye to eye about very much at all. Norm was a back and Killer was a forward, and Norm was focused on fancy moves and the like, and Killer was focused on forwards who didn’t give an inch. Tipping thought we should be light on our feet and should play the game high, wide and handsome. Kearney was more about hammering it out up front, getting on top, subduing the opposition, and running things only when they had been pummelled into submission. Killer was no diplomat, and on the field he would override Norm Tipping’s ideas whenever he felt like it. The captain should have that prerogative, but Killer probably overdid it and as complementary personalities, they just didn’t work. Norm contributed many things to that first premiership, but I doubt that Killer would ever have conceded that. It certainly worked better in the years that followed, when the strength of Kearney’s personality had full sway, and there was absolutely no doubt as to who was boss.
I certainly enjoyed the flexibility that total control gave me. I didn’t have to over-analyse things. I could think on my feet and respond quickly to whatever needed to be done. I wasn’t dogmatic about it. I used to operate by what I called communal coaching, where I would open the process up to any ideas the team wanted to put forward. The young backs had plenty of input. They would devise all sorts of moves, some of which were brilliant and some of which were crazy, but we would give them all a go at training, and I would have the final say as to what might work and what would not even be attempted. Reg Gasnier and Graeme Langlands had plenty of input on that basis, and later on Billy Smith did too. As high-range internationals, they could make things work that other players couldn’t, and we would make some allowance for that. But when they were clearly too ambitious or too complicated, I just said ‘no’ and that was the end of it. They accepted that. So long as they had a chance to have their say, they were generally happy, and many times of course they made a real contribution.
It was also a benefit to me personally, I think, that I could stand a little distant from the players. I was past 30 by the time I took over, so I was quite a few years older than a lot of them. When Don Bradman led The Invincibles through England at the end of his cricket career, he was touching 40, and a young gun like Neil Harvey was nineteen. Bradman had spanned a couple of eras, and the young players of his last tour looked up to him as a bit of a father figure. That made for a very successful team. A lot of us had been a bit like that when Killer Kearney took over, and when my turn came I think the fact that I was a little older than most of them helped. With seniority comes authority—or it did in those days, anyway. The other thing that helped in my case is that I wasn’t really a drinker. A lot of players who fill the coaching role as well either resent the fact that they can no longer be one of the boys, or fail if they try to be. The St George boys of those days would enjoy a drink at the pub after training, and a good night after the games. I joined them at the pub on training nights only rarely, and if I did it was usually to announce the team. I would sit on a soft drink. It allowed me a little distance from them, which I always thought was necessary to properly perform the captain–coach function.
A lot has changed, I know. Modern coaches spend lots of time in front of computers, isolating and analysing and working out very complicated responses to what they see as very complicated problems. A player could never comfortably do that, at least not to the extent that some of the coaches do these days. But I sometimes wonder whether the whole thing is overdone. Rugby League is not a particularly complicated game. The intricate standards by which modern coaches operate tend to over-complicate and confuse, in my view. They also seem to diminish the role of the captain.
Communication is a wonderful thing, but in today’s world there is an argument to be made that too much communication leads to information overload, and information overload leads to gridlock. You see the incessant chattering into the walkie-talkies, the constant incursions of water boys with messages. There is a lot of remote control. The downside of that is that it can undermine the initiative of the captain and the players on the field. A captain–coach doesn’t need any of that. He’s not looking to the sideline for instruction. He does what needs to be done and the team is more flexible, more responsive, as a result.There’s no passing the buck or dodging responsibility. He can’t blame anyone for not following the game plan.
•
When Arthur Summons was appointed captain–coach of the 1963–64 Kangaroos, he was more than a little surprised. It took him some time to come to terms with what the role actually meant, and he had serious doubts about whether he was really qualified. But there was no avoiding the responsibility that the position entailed, so he grabbed it with both hands. After the Kangaroos scored 50 points in the second Test at Swinton to secure the Ashes in England for the first time—perhaps the greatest Australian performance ever—he was glad he had. But he remained sceptical about the value of such a role. He still does.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
If you were going to think about a modern player to take on the captain–coach role, I suppose Cameron Smith would be at the top of the pile. But there are good reasons why the captain–coach job went out of fashion about 30 years ago, and I think those reasons are only more entrenched now. It is too big a job for one man. And there are too many variables that can throw a spanner in the works. When Norm Provan was
captain–coach of St George, it was perhaps the best circumstance in which the role could be managed. Norm was a giant on the field whose form never wavered. He had a team of champions around him, and they kept winning almost as a matter of course. But there are not many Norm Provans, and for lesser mortals the pressure can be asphyxiating.
What if his form drops off? Does his credibility go with it? How much psychological pressure builds on a poorly performing captain–coach? Then there is all the off-the-field pressure. Dealing with administrators. Organising recruiting. Managing the press. Maintaining the discipline of the group. Evaluating strengths and weaknesses within the team and responding to them. Staying in control when hard decisions are necessary and your team-mates are less than happy. None of these things are easy, and I imagine they would be a lot harder now than they once were, given the added sophistication of modern coaching, team preparation and management. It was tough in my day. I reckon it would be impossible today.
My selection as captain–coach of the Kangaroos was the first time I had ever been engaged as a coach. It was bizarre. I had been in Rugby League barely three years, I had taken one year at least to learn the game, I had no experience of coaching, and here I was both captain and coach of perhaps the finest team of champion internationals the game had ever thrown together. At first I didn’t know what to believe. Nobody had canvassed the options with me beforehand. Even once the team was announced, nobody actually told me what the role involved.Was it right that I had pretty much sole control? Did it all fall to me? Basically all I knew was what I was reading in the papers, and as I fought to subdue mild panic, I set about finding out how it all worked.
My first port of call was Arthur Sparks, the Queensland manager of the team, who was a very sound man and the sort of bloke you could talk to. He must have thought it all a bit weird too when my first inquiry of him was, ‘Who is actually coaching the team?’ ‘You are,’ he said. I tried to sound confident. I’m sure I didn’t, but once the role was clear I took a deep breath and promised myself I would leave no stone unturned to make it all work. There had been some talk of assistance available in Britain. Arthur Clues had been a Test second rower in 1946 who went off to England to play with Leeds and never came back. He was a bit of a legend in the north of England. His football brain was respected in both hemispheres, and apparently some discussion had taken place and he’d suggested he would help out if we thought that would be useful. I mulled over that on the journey to England, and could see both pluses and minuses.
On the one hand I would have loved some help and a little sharing of responsibility. But then I wondered how that would look. Would the team see it as some sort of cop-out? As far as they were concerned, I was appointed coach, and if I started announcing that I didn’t think I was up to it and needed some local back-up it might not have done a lot for confidence. I thought the best thing to do was to be up front about it. So I called a team meeting and explained to them that an offer had been made to use Arthur Clues as part of the coaching team. I outlined the good and bad points, and said that all I wanted was what was best for the team. But I didn’t wimp it. I was pretty clear that if the job was mine alone, I would do it, and there would be no argument about how we went about it. I said I would like them to be involved in determining how we should proceed. They voted and the decision was unanimous. ‘We’ll stick with you, Artie,’ was the consensus. It meant a lot to me. It did worlds for my confidence and my outlook, but I also think it did a lot to weld the team into a unit. It was us against the Poms. We’d sink or swim together, but it was our show and we wanted to keep it that way.
The last long tour I had done to Britain was with the Wallabies some six years previously. That was a good team with fine players, but it was very poorly directed. There was virtually no coach, and it irked me that a huge opportunity was wasted because nobody was prepared to take control and lead that team as it needed to be led. I determined when I got the Kangaroo job that I would not make the same mistake. I set about establishing standards and disciplines that I knew would be needed if we were to beat a team that had given us a lesson only a year before. I made it clear that I would listen to everything the team said, but in the end I would make the decisions that had to be made. If I was right we would all be right. If I was wrong, we would all be wrong. But we would all be on the same page. In the end it worked fine. My initial apprehension about leading a group of players with greater skill and far more international experience than me faded on the back of their commitment to the cause. You hear a lot about the wild boys of Kangaroo tours, but these were men who gave all they had to give. I was troubled by the responsibility of control, but I needn’t have worried. They were great tourists, they achieved great things, and I have the greatest respect for them still.
Part of my aversion to the captain–coach role—then and now—is a personal thing. I know I would have enjoyed that tour more had I been able to be one of the boys. Holding back was not my style, and it frustrated me, but I knew I had to keep some level of distance if I was to make it work. The off-field pressure worried me. I could handle the speeches and the press conferences and the rest, but it was the having to do it that got to me, when I would rather have been in the bar with the boys. The saving grace to some extent was the fact that I injured my knee early on and missed a lot of games, including the English Tests. It allowed me to concentrate on coaching. But it is always a downer when you are on a tour as a player and injury knocks you down. My spirits were low, and I knew that wasn’t good for the team.
On the Wallaby tour I would write home to Pam every night. On this one the letters were few and far between. There were just too many other things to do, and I felt a certain exhaustion. At one point I told the managers that the team was well capable of coaching itself, and since I was injured I thought I should go home. Graeme Langlands got wind of that and upbraided me. Langlands didn’t say a lot normally, but he got stuck in. ‘Stop whingeing,’ he said. ‘You’re the coach. Just get on with it.’ It was perhaps the best advice I had ever had. I’m glad he brought me to my senses. I suspect that I would never have forgiven myself had I walked out on that team. I have always blamed the job for the pressure I felt. I don’t know whether it was to save money on an extra person, or whether a coach was considered a bit of a luxury. But I finished that tour convinced that at that level at least, the role of captain–coach was too much for one man, and ultimately counterproductive.
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A TEAM FOR THE AGES
THE SUCCESS THAT Arthur Summons’ Kangaroos of 1963–64 achieved in Britain was unprecedented. It was the first time in eleven tours that Australia had been able to win the Ashes in Britain. The only previous winning team, in 1911–12, was labelled Australasia and contained New Zealanders. The second Test win—celebrated as the ‘Massacre of Swinton’—created all sorts of records for points scored as Australia won 50–12. The ’Roos scored twelve tries that day. Personal point-scoring records also fell, most of them to Graeme Langlands, whose 20 points at Swinton was a new mark for an individual in a Test. He also passed 112 points for the tour, which made him already the leading Australian point-scorer on a tour of Britain. It was a champion team, loaded with champion players. For Arthur Summons, it marked the supreme achievement of a relatively short time at the helm of Australian Rugby League. In his book Straight Between the Posts, legendary broadcaster Frank Hyde summed up the effect Summons had on the tour. ‘My room at the Troutbeck was right above the lounge where captain–coach Arthur Summons used to gather his players for the team talks,’ Hyde wrote. ‘Summons’s addresses were positively Churchillian. He was an inspiring, articulate leader.’
ARTHUR SUMMONS
As we kicked off the Kangaroo tour of 1963–64, there were certain realities that I knew we would face. First up, we knew that if the English found themselves in trouble, or maybe even if they didn’t, they would be ruthless in the way they attacked us. There would be nothing soft about the football. They would want to disrupt
us any way they could. We resolved that we would stand up to that. Second, I was convinced that if we were to win the Ashes we had to win the first two Tests.They would never let us win a decider. I know that sounds bad, but it was the way it was. Whatever the pressures that built upon their referees, subconscious or otherwise, they were always at their height in third Test deciders. There was a sort of subterranean patriotism that caused them to really believe that the sun never set on the British Empire, and their referees lived by it. So the first Test at Wembley became very important to us, and we set ourselves to win as if it was the only game, the ultimate decider.
One of the advantages of being a novice coach was that I relied heavily on recent lessons. In the series against England at home the previous year, Harry Bath had been our coach, and there was nothing Harry did not know about English football. He had made the point strongly that the only way to get on top of England was to contain them in the forwards, dominate them if you could, and worry later about letting the backs score tries. There had always been a natural inclination in Australian football to play what is loosely termed an attacking game. We interpret that as seeing fancy backs running and passing with abandon, and with the sort of talent we had in that team, the temptation certainly was there to play that way. But Bath had leaned more to the English view that smart attacking football starts with the forwards, with deft popped passes aimed at creating space, with fast-running forwards surging into gaps, with hard-nosed defence that denied momentum to the opposition no matter what.
That became my tactical approach from the first team meeting. I told them that no matter how good our backs were—and this team had the likes of Gasnier, Langlands, Irvine, Dimond and the powerhouse fullback Ken Thornett—the reason we had not beaten England for a long time was that we had never beaten them in the forwards. ‘That’s where we will take them on,’ I said. I appealed to the egos of proud men like Brian Hambly, Ian Walsh, Noel Kelly and Dick Thornett. The winning or the losing depended on them, I told them, and there was no avoiding that. Despite my early misgivings, I was pleased with the way the team responded to my coaching outlook. I had taken a lot of ideas from a lot of people, and I think they all understood that. I worked hard on thinking through our strategies and tactics, and I made it clear that the standards we set, once agreed upon, would be maintained. Discipline was important if we were to succeed, and I had determined that since I had been thrust into this job, I would not take a backward step.
The Gladiators Page 16
