THE pressure is starting to show - and it's only round one. St George Illawarra coach Nathan Brown can feel his red club tie tightening around his neck. Yesterday, he admitted he had never been so disappointed in some of his players as they capitulated to Wests Tigers, not in all of his five years of coaching the team, nor in his lengthy playing career with the club. It was, he said, "disgraceful".
The problem, Brown said, was the Dragons were playing to the long-held view by opponents that they are a weak team with a couple of pretty players who will easily turn over the ball, either through dropped ball or penalties.
"As a whole performance, I have never been so disappointed in some people at the club since I have been coaching, even playing, to be honest," Brown said.
"It was not good enough."
Brown said all of the players and coaching staff discussed the issue throughout the off-season and thought they had turned things around.
The coach reckons the club has been stuck with the weak label ever since the merger in 1999 but, as the architect of the team's results since 2003, he said the claim was baseless.
Brown knows the buck stops with the coach, and said the players had to want to play for themselves, rather than try to protect his coaching career. But the players are conscious of the off-field talk.
"He does [deserve better], he is a good coach, we are all behind him, we have got to turn our performance around," noted forward Dean Young.
Brown wouldn't name the players who may cop his wrath this week with a stint on the sidelines, but he must be thinking of the poor ball-handling skills of fullback Josh Morris or halfback Jamie Soward, who couldn't even find the sideline when awarded a penalty. The poor timing of Chase Stanley, over-running the dummy-half Rangi Chase in a set play, summed up the team's woes: the Dragons are disjointed and unstructured in attack, and flat-footed in defence. At times, they seem clueless. Brown could only squirm in his seat, occasionally burying his head in his hands at yet another error.
By the second half, the team had reverted to the most basic game plan of running the ball from the ruck and kicking on the sixth tackle. Brighton Seagulls players learn this as under nine-year-olds, but they don't have the most skilful players of the ilk of Gasnier or Cooper hanging out wide barely able to get their hands on the ball. The worry for Brown is not that his team lost the two premiership points, but that there was no evidence it knows how to win.
"We've got to learn to play good, hard, tough football," Brown said, stating the blatantly obvious.
But the time is quickly running out. St George Illawarra chief executive Peter Doust has been instructed by the board to conduct a review of the long-term coaching plans of the club.
"I have been anxious and careful not to put a time on it," Doust said yesterday. "We are conducting a special and complete review of the future direction of the coaching. The board is very interested to look at the options of how best we can go forward in the coaching directions long-term."
The former St George and Cronulla Sutherland player Perry Haddock has recently come on board as an attack coach, and he, too, was shaking his head in despair in the dressing room.
Captain Mark Gasnier said the on-field play "was the complete opposite to what we trained to do … we spoke about how we wanted to play and we didn't".
It may be a long season for Dragons fans, but perhaps a short one for Brown.
