Shortage of quality No.7s suggests system failing to deliver straight answer at halfback
BY WARREN RYAN
28 Jul, 2010 04:00 AM
I DON'T know if the honchos at headquarters have too much on their plate to notice there is a serious shortage of quality halfbacks being produced, but the evidence is too obvious to ignore.
So many clubs have employed Andrew Johns to give their halfback tuition, we can only conclude they are not satisfied their No.7 is the finished product.
What they're saying is he lacks experience and needs help, but through necessity we've pushed him ahead of his time. It's also an indictment on the coaching staff. What on earth do they coach or teach if they can't teach the most important position on the field? More about that later.
How many potential inside backs don't survive junior league because they are physically incapable of competing with Pacific Island giants during the maturation ages? What 12 or 13-year-old will say "I'll be back in three or four years when I develop and have the size and muscle to compete?"
The halfback position is difficult to learn. It requires more mental application than any other position on the field. Dummy halves might take some offence, but their role is more instinctive and reactive. They work in a narrower corridor of opportunity.
The No.7s have to be creative. They call the shots, aim the team and read the defence with eyes that can barely afford to blink in the speed of the modern game lest they miss the half-chance.
Along with that, all the great ones like Sterling, Mortimer, Langer, Stuart and Johns carried their own array of skills that weighed heavily on the minds of opposition defences who knew these guys weren't out there to just pass and kick.
Peter Sterling spoke about experience and repetition in a conversation I had with him some time back, saying the more times you see a particular formation which presents attacking opportunity, the quicker you recognise it and react to it.
The age-old conundrum arises though: how does a promising young half get the experience required to play in the NRL unless he is given the opportunity to play in the NRL? The answer of course is, he can't get it unless he's pushed ahead of time.
So the buzzword of the day is "mentoring". The Eels want Trent Barrett to have a mentoring year alongside Daniel Mortimer, which sounds awfully like bad news to their current half Jeff Robson as he tries to help his team chase a spot in the top eight. It probably didn't do much for his confidence reading that over breakfast.
Why are the Raiders trying to entice Brett Kimmorley to play one last year for Canberra to "mentor" young half Josh McCrone? That makes even less sense because if Kimmorley is in, McCrone will be out and playing somewhere else in the Raiders feeder club. Surely five-eighth Terry Campese can help McCrone.
This begs the question that if mentoring is needed at all these clubs, who is not teaching them? If the development of quality halves isn't a serious problem, why did NSW have to keep recycling Kimmorley and Barrett? Were they heroic figures of the past who led the Blues to victory? Or were they there by default because there were no other younger contenders?
But back to Andrew Johns and his role as a roving coach of halfbacks. He popped in to the ABC box for a chat recently and confirmed something that I've been concerned about for a long time now. I'll endeavour not to bore you with the technical details here, but he told me when he has tried to explain to young halves where to stand width-wise at the play-the-ball, how flat and which defender across no-man's land to align themselves with in order to play "straight" - have you got it? "straight", not "a bit more direct" - they drop their mouths open, look at him in complete surprise and say something intellectual like "huh?"
So they don't know and evidently aren't being taught because if the coaching staff knew, they'd be teaching them. But for a long time now, the concentration has been on other things like winning the ground, the wrestle in the tackle, play-the-ball speed, dummy-half running, etc etc, all of which is important in the long list of requirements for victory.
But the science of straight play has somehow been blurred and is in danger of being lost in a sea of cross-field running where inside backs afford themselves the luxury of floating across field, bruise free, to turn a victim inside so he can take the hit.
All of this is done from the safety of five metres short of the defence, so the ball-carrier is easily identified and consequently hammered. How often after a loss, when something is radically wrong with the attack because nobody could make a break, do we hear the vague offering - we're going to play "a bit more direct"?
Straight play is scientific and has to be initiated with accuracy and precision. It doesn't live in the vague world of "a bit more direct". That's a world for those who don't know how specific the task is.
This begs the question, why wasn't it done in the first place? The answer is obvious. They don't know, and Andrew Johns's travelling tutorials have confirmed it.
The sad corollary to the story is that today's players will be tomorrow's coaches. They will in turn regurgitate the steady diet of vague, non-specific football patter they've been fed during their playing careers, thinking they're on the right track when in fact they're not.
