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Kennel Legend
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Like a spruiker from Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party shoving how-to-vote flyers in your face on election day, Shane Flanagan is pushing hard to become the next coach of the Bulldogs.
So hard it won’t surprise if it costs him the job.
He reached out to the club a week after Trent Barrett’s departure and in recent days has pitched up on 2GB and Fox Sports — the two media outlets for whom he’s worked since the NRL deregistered him four years ago.
Flanagan told a Fox Sports podcast on Tuesday: “I’m sure Gus or whoever is in charge of that responsibility, if they’re interested, come and give me a ring over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go from there, but at the moment I’ll just sit back.”
You there, Gus? Something? Helloooooo?
If they’re to engage with him, the Bulldogs general manager Phil Gould and the club’s board will need to be sure they can trust Flanagan, who has been more than prepared to extol his own virtues but is still haunted by his past mistakes.
Indeed, the way some have airbrushed over his past indiscretions which had seen him twice suspended from the NRL as he agitates for the Bulldogs job has been quite remarkable.
It would be nice to know if Flanagan, after all these years, takes any responsibility as head coach for what happened at Cronulla in 2011 when controversial sports scientist Stephen Dank was allowed to administer players with banned substances.
It would be nice to know if Flanagan has learned anything from his four-year exile after the NRL discovered he breached the conditions of his year-long suspension in 2014 for failing in his “duty of care” to his players.
Meanwhile, as Flanagan eyes a possible return to coaching, the other prominent coach at the centre of the “darkest day in Australian sport” is considering his own tale of redemption.
Former Essendon coach James Hird joined GWS Giants as a “leadership consultant” in January but now finds himself on the coaching staff after head coach Leon Cameron resigned earlier this month.
It’s unlikely the struggling Western Sydney franchise will appoint Hird as its senior coach, especially with four-time premiership winner Alastair Clarkson on the market, but there’s little doubt he wants back in, as confirmed by his former Bombers mentor, Kevin Sheedy, in a recent interview.
Should Hird be afforded a second chance? Should Flanagan be afforded a third?
Some maintain neither man should be allowed anywhere near a group of young athletes ever again, such was the impact of the drug saga that occurred while they were head coaches of their respective clubs and playing groups.
Yet both the AFL and NRL insist they’ve done their time, ticked all the right boxes and can’t, let alone won’t, stand in their way.
Perhaps the relevant question is whether an AFL or NRL club would be interested to take on a coach carrying so much baggage.
In Hird’s case, there’s a belief he wasn’t a particularly great coach anyway. He returned to Essendon from his year-long ban but resigned at the end of 2015 with a winning percentage of 48 per cent.
Flanagan, however, won a premiership at the Sharks in 2016, their first in 50 years of existence. Success has many fathers but he deserves a large slice of the credit.
The Bulldogs need more than just a hard-headed coach prepared to make tough decisions. They need someone who can work hand-in-glove with Gould.
People join the dots and say the two men are represented by the same person — veteran agent Wayne Beavis — but so was Anthony Griffin. How did that work out?
Flanagan’s son, Kyle, is an issue, as it often is when a father is coaching his son. He told 2GB on Saturday he would be strong enough to drop him if he felt it was best for the team but not everyone at Belmore is convinced.
He gave unsolicited advice to Barrett last year about how to play his son, just as he tried to give advice to Trent Robinson at the Roosters the year before that.
If he was appointed coach, could the Bulldogs trust Flanagan to dispassionately drop Kyle if the time came? What if Gould didn’t want to renew his contract? What if he found a better halfback?
Flanagan says he could work with Gould, but he’s shown before he has issues with authority.
When he returned to the game in 2015, NRL officials suggested he address his peers at a pre-season coach’s meeting. It was a chance to tell the other coaches what he’d learned, what he’d got wrong, how they could avoid the same grave error of letting mysterious high-performance types wielding syringes full of unknown substances into their club.
Flanagan didn’t see the point but eventually got up, grumbled a few words and sat down. No contrition was shown for the damage the supplements scandal had done to the game. It went down like a bad prawn with his fellow coaches.
Then, in 2018, after Sharks chief executive Barry Russell self-reported possible salary-cap breaches, the NRL ordered a forensic audit of the club’s books.
In doing so, it discovered Flanagan had defied the rules of his 2014 ban by negotiating contracts with players.
The smoking gun was a series of emails sent from his Sharks email address to his private one — that old trick! — but what isn’t commonly known is how the integrity unit also discovered Flanagan cheating on his homework.
One of the conditions of his return was completion of a compliance and ethics course. The audit discovered Flanagan had asked others to do the essays for him. When challenged by NRL investigators, he thought nothing of it.
When contacted on Thursday, Flanagan strongly denied this, insisting “all the work was my own”.
Flanagan deserves his chance again. It might even be at the Bulldogs, although you sense they would’ve talked to him by now if they were interested.
But if this one-man election campaign is to continue, he should stop telling us what he’s done — and start telling us how he’s changed.
(For the record, Flanagan has rejected repeated interview requests from this column for over two months, saying he didn’t want to be seen to be pitching up for a job).
www.smh.com.au
So hard it won’t surprise if it costs him the job.
He reached out to the club a week after Trent Barrett’s departure and in recent days has pitched up on 2GB and Fox Sports — the two media outlets for whom he’s worked since the NRL deregistered him four years ago.
Flanagan told a Fox Sports podcast on Tuesday: “I’m sure Gus or whoever is in charge of that responsibility, if they’re interested, come and give me a ring over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go from there, but at the moment I’ll just sit back.”
You there, Gus? Something? Helloooooo?
If they’re to engage with him, the Bulldogs general manager Phil Gould and the club’s board will need to be sure they can trust Flanagan, who has been more than prepared to extol his own virtues but is still haunted by his past mistakes.
Indeed, the way some have airbrushed over his past indiscretions which had seen him twice suspended from the NRL as he agitates for the Bulldogs job has been quite remarkable.
It would be nice to know if Flanagan, after all these years, takes any responsibility as head coach for what happened at Cronulla in 2011 when controversial sports scientist Stephen Dank was allowed to administer players with banned substances.
It would be nice to know if Flanagan has learned anything from his four-year exile after the NRL discovered he breached the conditions of his year-long suspension in 2014 for failing in his “duty of care” to his players.
Meanwhile, as Flanagan eyes a possible return to coaching, the other prominent coach at the centre of the “darkest day in Australian sport” is considering his own tale of redemption.
Former Essendon coach James Hird joined GWS Giants as a “leadership consultant” in January but now finds himself on the coaching staff after head coach Leon Cameron resigned earlier this month.
It’s unlikely the struggling Western Sydney franchise will appoint Hird as its senior coach, especially with four-time premiership winner Alastair Clarkson on the market, but there’s little doubt he wants back in, as confirmed by his former Bombers mentor, Kevin Sheedy, in a recent interview.
Should Hird be afforded a second chance? Should Flanagan be afforded a third?
Some maintain neither man should be allowed anywhere near a group of young athletes ever again, such was the impact of the drug saga that occurred while they were head coaches of their respective clubs and playing groups.
Yet both the AFL and NRL insist they’ve done their time, ticked all the right boxes and can’t, let alone won’t, stand in their way.
Perhaps the relevant question is whether an AFL or NRL club would be interested to take on a coach carrying so much baggage.
In Hird’s case, there’s a belief he wasn’t a particularly great coach anyway. He returned to Essendon from his year-long ban but resigned at the end of 2015 with a winning percentage of 48 per cent.
Flanagan, however, won a premiership at the Sharks in 2016, their first in 50 years of existence. Success has many fathers but he deserves a large slice of the credit.
The Bulldogs need more than just a hard-headed coach prepared to make tough decisions. They need someone who can work hand-in-glove with Gould.
People join the dots and say the two men are represented by the same person — veteran agent Wayne Beavis — but so was Anthony Griffin. How did that work out?
Flanagan’s son, Kyle, is an issue, as it often is when a father is coaching his son. He told 2GB on Saturday he would be strong enough to drop him if he felt it was best for the team but not everyone at Belmore is convinced.
He gave unsolicited advice to Barrett last year about how to play his son, just as he tried to give advice to Trent Robinson at the Roosters the year before that.
If he was appointed coach, could the Bulldogs trust Flanagan to dispassionately drop Kyle if the time came? What if Gould didn’t want to renew his contract? What if he found a better halfback?
Flanagan says he could work with Gould, but he’s shown before he has issues with authority.
When he returned to the game in 2015, NRL officials suggested he address his peers at a pre-season coach’s meeting. It was a chance to tell the other coaches what he’d learned, what he’d got wrong, how they could avoid the same grave error of letting mysterious high-performance types wielding syringes full of unknown substances into their club.
Flanagan didn’t see the point but eventually got up, grumbled a few words and sat down. No contrition was shown for the damage the supplements scandal had done to the game. It went down like a bad prawn with his fellow coaches.
Then, in 2018, after Sharks chief executive Barry Russell self-reported possible salary-cap breaches, the NRL ordered a forensic audit of the club’s books.
In doing so, it discovered Flanagan had defied the rules of his 2014 ban by negotiating contracts with players.
The smoking gun was a series of emails sent from his Sharks email address to his private one — that old trick! — but what isn’t commonly known is how the integrity unit also discovered Flanagan cheating on his homework.
One of the conditions of his return was completion of a compliance and ethics course. The audit discovered Flanagan had asked others to do the essays for him. When challenged by NRL investigators, he thought nothing of it.
When contacted on Thursday, Flanagan strongly denied this, insisting “all the work was my own”.
Flanagan deserves his chance again. It might even be at the Bulldogs, although you sense they would’ve talked to him by now if they were interested.
But if this one-man election campaign is to continue, he should stop telling us what he’s done — and start telling us how he’s changed.
(For the record, Flanagan has rejected repeated interview requests from this column for over two months, saying he didn’t want to be seen to be pitching up for a job).
Should Shane Flanagan and James Hird coach again?
The two coaches at the centre of the “darkest day in Australian sport” want a second chance. Do they deserve it?
