When Brisbane Broncos legend Steve Renouf heard that Manly stars Tom and Jake Trbojevic were weighing up their options after the sacking of Sea Eagles coach Des Hasler, his immediate thought was ‘jump now while you can boys’.
Renouf, like many Broncos past players, officials and supporters, has greeted news that Manly is close to signing former Brisbane coach Anthony Seibold as Hasler’s replacement with disbelief.
‘He’s sucked them in with all his psycho-babble,’ Renouf said. ‘He did it to us and now he’s done it to them.’
As one Brisbane insider said of the Manly board, ‘Didn’t they learn anything from the Broncos debacle? They’re going to learn the hard way.’
Like Brisbane, will Manly now have to learn the hard way that Anthony Seibold is just the master of self-marketing instead of top footy coach?
Broncos legend Steve Renouf believes Manly have been sucked in by Seibold’s ‘psycho-babble’ and will have to learn the hard way
Should Seibold succeed Hasler, as is strongly tipped, the circumstances will closely mirror his replacement of Wayne Bennett at the Broncos prior to the 2019 season.
Like two-time premiership-winning coach and club stalwart Hasler, who was sacked by the Manly board on Friday, Bennett was dismissed by the Broncos after leading the club to six premierships.
Like Hasler, Bennett had a year to run on his contract and, like Hasler, he was keen to honour it. Instead, he was sacked via text message and swapped jobs with Seibold at South Sydney.
Bennett had a successful three seasons with the Rabbitohs, guiding them to two preliminary finals and the 2021 grand final. Seibold, who signed a lucrative unprecedented five-year contract, with an option for a sixth in his favour, lasted less than two torturous seasons with the Broncos before quitting the club at the lowest point in its history.
Anthony Seibold, pictured with his wife in 2018, will take over from Des Hasler at Manly
Under Seibold, the Broncos snuck into the 2019 top eight with 11 wins – nine less than minor premiers Melbourne Storm. In the first week of the play-offs, they lost the qualifying final to the Eels 58-0, the club’s worst ever loss.
It was a record that lasted just four rounds into the 2020 season, when they were beaten 59-0 by the Roosters.
After 15 rounds of the season, with the Broncos having won just two matches and Seibold and his family being the target of a despicable social media vendetta, he handed his resignation to club chairman Karl Morris.
Less than two years later, it was Morris who gave Seibold a glowing reference to Manly chairman Scott Penn, much to the shock of Broncos insiders.
Are Manly headed for more disaster like 2022 with Seibold leading the way next season?
‘It just goes to show you that Karl Morris might be successful in business, but he doesn’t know a thing about rugby league,’ said one former Broncos premiership player.
Another said, ‘Morris has to say that Seibold is a good coach. If he doesn’t, he’s admitting that the Broncos board made a huge mistake in appointing him for five years, and when you’re as rich as Karl Morris you never have to say you’re wrong.’
The question of how the Broncos came to offer Seibold such a long-term contract in the first place has been debated long and hard.
While he had taken a star-studded South Sydney team to the 2018 preliminary final in his only year as an NRL head coach, winning the Dally M Coach of the Year award in the process, Seibold’s overall coaching record was inauspicious.
Anthony Seibold had a torrid time at the Broncos after being headhunted for the role despite just one successful year at the Rabbitohs
With Bennett on the outer at the Broncos he was on a shortlist of three contenders for arguably the biggest job in the NRL, along with Kevin Walters and Jason Demetriou.
Walters had won five premierships at the Broncos as a player and was considered one of the club’s favourite sons. Demetriou, highly regarded by the players, was Bennett’s assistant responsible for the analysis behind the team’s weekly game plans.
At their final interviews Walters spoke passionately about his love for the club and its culture. Demeteriou was more pragmatic, presenting a report directly comparing his career to that of Seibold, specifically that while Demetriou had taken Queensland Cup side the Northern Pride to back-to-back minor premierships, the 2014 premiership and the NSW State Championship title, Seibold’s Mackay Cutters had failed to make the finals in the two seasons he coached them, finishing ninth out of 13 teams each year.
But what Seibold had in his favour that the other two didn’t, was fluency in the type of marketing razzle dazzle – ‘psycho-babble’ as Steve Renouf calls it – that the non-rugby league businesspeople on the Broncos board were obviously impressed by.
Renouf believes Seibold, pictured at an England rugby union training session, is well-versed in the art of ‘psycho-babble’
It would seem that the Manly board have been equally bedazzled. Significantly, when Scott Penn outlined Seibold’s qualities to a television reporter last week, his ‘intellect’ was high on the list.
Much has been made of Seibold’s academic qualifications. He has completed a Bachelor of Teaching degree and also a Masters of Education. He is often described as being ‘Harvard educated’. In fact, he undertook a four-day leadership course run by Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education prior to the 2018 season.
Equally influential on Seibold have been the philosophies of marketing guru Todd Sampson, fashion show director Kannon Rajah and psychologist Carol Dweck, whose pet theory ‘growth mindset’ has become a Seibold catchword.
It, and other terms favoured by Seibold, such as ‘peakless mountains’, ‘transferable learning’ and ‘tactical periodisation’ were front and centre when he addressed an auditorium packed with Broncos supporters and media at a luncheon in Brisbane to launch the 2019 NRL season.
Anthony Seibold addresses England players as their defensive coach earlier this year
As he was interviewed on stage by Fox Sports’ Yvonne Sampson, it was the first chance for many in the room to see and hear the Broncos’ new coach in action. The response was mixed to say the least.
Seibold’s marketing-speak and buzzwords might have impressed the Brisbane board members during the interview process, but they left the majority of the rugby league rank and file in attendance that day completely nonplussed.
As Seibold left the stage, veteran league reporter the late Paul ‘Scobie’ Malone turned to me and said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I wonder how some of the Broncos forwards are going to make any sense out of that.’
Not very well as it turned out.
Steve Renouf spoke to a number of the senior players during Seibold’s disastrous stint in charge and said they were totally confused by the coach’s instructions.
Broncos legend Steve Renouf believes that Manly are about to have the same issues Brisbane did when Seibold was at the helm
‘I spoke to multiple players and they told me they didn’t know what was going on,’ he said.
‘You could see it on the field. They’d be standing behind the line after they’d had a try scored against them and no-one was talking. They weren’t even looking at each other. No-one was taking charge and saying, ‘come on, we’ve got to do this’ because they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing.
‘Anthony had his ideas of how things should be done, and that was it. Trouble was, the players couldn’t understand what he was talking about.’
Renouf, the Broncos all-time leading try-scorer who won four premierships under the coaching of Wayne Bennett, says Seibold made things too complicated.
‘We footballers are simple people playing a simple game,’ he said. ‘Wayne always used to say to me, ‘you’re thinking too much. Don’t think, just play.’ That was the problem with Seibold. He had the players thinking too much. It stressed them out. They didn’t want to try anything in case it went badly.’
After a tough year in 2022, Sea Eagles players will look to turn it around under new coach Anthony Seibold
Two young players who failed to progress under Seibold were playmakers Tom Dearden and Brodie Croft. Since leaving the Broncos they have blossomed, with Dearden starring for the Cowboys and Maroons and Croft, now with Salford, winning the Golden Boot award as the best player in the Super League.
Renouf has his doubts about whether Seibold will communicate any better with the Sea Eagles players than he did with the Broncos.
‘Good luck to Manly, but I just can’t see how it can work,’ he said. ‘They’ll know in six months.’
Former Penrith premiership player Scott Sattler, who has worked in the media with Seibold, believes he can be a success with Manly if he makes some adjustments to his approach.
‘I’ve enjoyed working with Anthony and listening to his analysis,’ he said on his SEN radio show on Friday. ‘He’s a very clever guy but if I could give him one piece of advice it would be this, ‘dial it down a bit mate, dial it down. Not everyone is a smart as you.’
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