by Paul Cook –

The eagerly anticipated 2016 Shute Shield season kicks-off in just a fortnight’s time with 12 teams champing at the bit to contest the biggest and best club competition in Australia. Rugby News wraps up its look at how each team fared last time out with an in-depth review of last year’s grand finalists and their path to the big dance. First up – Manly.

After serving his apprenticeship at the Village Green under Tim Lane and Phil Blake, Damien Cummins took on the role of head coach with one target uppermost in his mind – to reach that elusive grand final. With Manly having bowed out in the finals series in the previous six years, the challenge to jump that last hurdle and become the first Marlins team to contest a title decider since 1997, was in danger of becoming more a mental than physical examination.

But faced with an exodus of 1st grade experience in the off-season, Cummins had enough on his plate simply gelling the remaining group of players with a host of new bloods in order to forge a team worthy of being in the mix by season’s end. That he did so successfully enough to see them finish as Minor Premiers AND break that 18-year hoodoo only to lose the Grand Final by a field goal, was testament to a job very well done and – as Rugby News found out recently – to a holistic approach that broke the moulds of team bonding and mental and emotional preparation.

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Give us a brief overview of last season from your perspective?

Damien Cummins: “I guess if somebody had told me at the start of the season that it would pan out the way it did, I would have taken it. It was a great year, the camaraderie in the team with the boys and around the club was great and we played a pretty good style of footy too. The forwards were able to link with the backs, it wasn’t a one-dimensional ‘fix bayonets and straight up the guts’ type thing and I think we gave the players the confidence to play their own way and be themselves, not tell them that they had to do this and they had to do that.

“We just gave them guidelines that they could work with and tools to use but ultimately, they had licence to play the style of footy they were comfortable with and let them express themselves. They were throwing flick passes and maybe over the last few years, that’s something they wouldn’t have done because they were worried about the repercussions.”

The team won it’s first 12 games in a row, you must have been pinching yourself at some point thinking this is all going too well?

“Again, if someone had told me you’d start with 12 wins in a row, and beat Eastwood at home by 40, and put nearly 30pts on Uni on their own patch, you’d be biting their hand off. It was a great run for a while but the cliché is that ‘a loss is better than a win’ sometimes, and to be honest, getting pumped by Eastwood at their place was actually a really good thing to happen when it came. You’d take 12 wins in a row but you do want to have one or two losses along the way somewhere just to sharpen the pencil a bit.”

That run included wins over Eastwood, Souths, Sydney Uni, Randwick and Warringah – realistically, all your main challengers. Did that go some way towards fuelling a belief in the players that it could be their year?

“I guess so. I suppose over the last few years, there’s been a lot of chat and everyone’s been looking too far ahead at getting to a grand final or ‘We must get to this point’ etc. But there’s such a process in between that and it’s not always about the results, it’s about what’s happening behind the scenes and how people are preparing and what we’re doing as a group etc. The results are merely a product of what has been done off the field.”

You lost your captain, Kotoni Ale, to a horrific injury in the local derby against Warringah. You went on to win the game, and again the week after at Norths in a close one, but what toll did that long afternoon at Manly Oval have on the players, the coaches and the club for a while?

“I think I said when it happened that I’ve been around sport and footy for a long time and I’ve seen some pretty bad injuries but I don’t think I’ve seen an injury affect a group of people as much as Kotoni’s did. And it wasn’t just us that were affected by it, it was the Warringah guys too and really, the whole community. He had an awful lot of support from hundreds of well-wishers and I think that just shows first and foremost, what type of fella he is on and off the field. But it’s one of those things where, yes, it does affect you but unfortunately, you can’t dwell on it, you’ve got to care about the person involved but move on at the same time.”

As a head coach, you know your game plan, how you want your side to play and to evolve, and you train them accordingly. But you can’t necessarily prepare for the unknowns such as the loss of your captain, particularly under such emotional circumstances. Did you find that management of the team as both players and people at the time, a challenge?

“We had some good things in place to help with that. If guys were affected by it, we had the facilities in place for them to go and talk to someone because we had a clinical psychologist doing work with us week-in, week-out across the year. Injuries are part and parcel of the game, you lose players here and there during a season, and – although the loss of Kotoni was potentially bigger because he was our captain – we managed to move forward without allowing it to become a big issue. We just had to deal with it and move on.

“It’s an interesting question because if I reflect on it now, nothing really affected us last year. There were no times where we said ‘S**t, we’ve hit a roadblock, what do we do?’ We just talked things through as a group and dealt with them, we didn’t let anything fester or stew, and I think, having a guy like Matt in place as a psychologist enabled us to deal with things as they arose, which was really good.”

How much impact did that work with the psychologist have on the mental preparation of the side across the season?

“Huge. In years gone by, Monday nights were reserved for a team review, a gym session or a field session but we turned them into a weight session first, followed by a good hour or more workshop, where we talked about various issues that might be about how to work our way out of stressful situations or what impact each person’s decisions had on those around us. We did that for about 16-18 weeks straight before backing it off to once a fortnight towards the end of the season and I’d have to say that both individually and as a collective, it really helped us on and off the field and Matt was a huge part of our success.”

You finished as Minor Premiers with 16 wins from 18 games and you mentioned at the time that the two losses to Eastwood and Warringah weren’t necessarily the worst things to happen. How much do you think the side benefitted from those defeats at the pointy end of the year, compared to the 16 wins you achieved?

“Obviously, you want to win as many games as you can but in some of those games when you win, you don’t play as well as you do sometimes when you lose. The first half against Warringah at Rat Park for example, was a pretty polished performance but we didn’t adjust to what they were doing in the second half. That opened our eyes to a few things that you don’t really address when you’re winning but you start to address when you lose. Towards the end of the season, we had a few key points we wanted to focus on, they weren’t huge things, they may have been two or three areas that we weren’t terrible at but that we also weren’t great at, so we just had to address them. We took that approach into the finals and it worked for us, and that all came out of the two losses we’d had.”

The biggest elephant in the room at Manly was obviously the fact that the club hadn’t made a grand final since 1997. How much attention did you give that through the season or was it something you only addressed when you actually got there?

“None at all through the season and even after the qualifying-final win against Randwick, there was no chest pounding or anything like that. There was an air of confidence, not arrogance, and we knew we still needed to work hard. Everybody kept themselves grounded and nobody mentioned ‘grand final this or grand final that’ and even with 20 minutes to go against Sydney Uni in the semi-final, it was still a case of ‘We’ve still got a quarter to go, we’re not there yet, Uni are a good side that can score tries easily etc’. It wasn’t until Cliffy [Wycliff Palu] scored that runaway try that I thought I could talk about the Grand Final now!”

Reece Hodge’s stellar debut 1st grade season earned him a contract with the Melbourne Rebels

How pleased were you with the performance that day against Sydney University because you didn’t just break the grand final hoodoo, you smashed it with a 42-22 win over a side that contained eight players with Super Rugby experience?

“It was a great win and it was great to win because it meant we were in the Grand Final, and it was nice to knock Uni out of the finals for a change instead of it being us going out again. In saying that, Uni controlled the first 15-20 minutes playing some pretty wide, expansive footy and were 14-0 up. Another score at that point to maybe make it 21-0, then it gets interesting, but 14-0 in rugby these days is nothing really. The biggest thing for us was our belief in each other, that if we stuck to our guns we could easily score 14pts or more and come back, and with the unity that we had, I just think the boys backed themselves to turn it around.

“It was a bit like the game against Eastwood earlier in the season, where they had the ball for the first 20 minutes. They didn’t score but they had all the ball and our guys had to be patient, not panic and back each other and each other’s roles in the team. Everybody believed in each other and that if they all did what they knew how to do, they would be alright, and we carried that with us all year.”

And then the final itself against Eastwood, a classic old school tussle that could have gone either way and ultimately came down to a field goal. How do you reflect on it now and how close you were to taking that trophy back to the Village Green?

“Like a lot of coaches and players who have lost grand finals, I haven’t watched it back. I’m sure I might have a sticky beak at it again at some point and pick up a few things from it but hey, we were pretty close weren’t we? We needed to take a few more opportunities in the first half and there were one or two things we could have done better but that comes with the territory in a grand final and the pressure involved. It was a cracking game and I was disappointed, not shattered, that we lost because I know everybody from both teams came off the field having put everything in they could. The big games usually come down to two or three major plays that can be the difference between winning and losing and they had one, which was the field goal that won it.”

Across the club, you were Minor Premiers in 2’s and Premiers in 4’s but your 3 colts sides finished 9th, 10th and 7th respectively. While your Shute Shield performance is paramount at the top of the pyramid, most clubs judge themselves on their club championship rankings as a guide to their strength in depth. Is there any concern about the quality or number of players coming through over the next few years at the Marlins?

“There always is but the only way you can control players coming and going is through performances and once your colts have a bad year or two, young players ask themselves the question ‘Why would I go to Manly?’ Colts are a huge part of the club and if you look at a lot of the guys who played 1st grade at the club last year – Harry Bergelin, Mitch Daniel, Sam Lane, BJ Hartmann, Reece Hodge, Richard Hooper, Chris Yarrington – they were all Manly colts. I think last year we had an average of 10 Manly juniors on field for pretty much every match in 1st grade. That’s huge so, over the next few years, we need at least one or two of our colts to be coming up each year pushing for 1st or 2nd grade.

“We’ll have a young colts side again this year and the majority of them may well stay in colts next year as well so we should get a good influx of them coming up to grade at the end of 2017. You tend to get a two-year cycle with colts, you get one good batch of guys come through and then it will take another couple of years for the next group and in between you’ll get a sprinkling of one or two guys. 1st grade colts is worth 15pts like 1st grade so it’s a big contributor to the Club Championship and something we are focusing on.”

Player of the Year?

“Ed Gower. You couldn’t not pick him, he was too good. He was consistently an absolute beast week-in, week-out and he was ruthless with his team mates as well, he just demanded the best from them. He was phenomenal.”

Rookie of the Year?

“Reece Hodge. He’d had a year off not playing because of a bad ankle but got himself into great shape and had the hunger to play footy with his mates at his junior club, and he just thrived in the environment he was in. It paid off for him with a contract at the Melbourne Rebels and he’s doing pretty well down there, which is awesome.” (Hodge scored 20pts in his winning Super Rugby debut last weekend against the Western Force)

Players rewarded at the next level:

Reece Hodge (North Harbour Rays, NRC & Melbourne Rebels); Matt Lucas (NSW Waratahs); Cadeyrn Neville (Brisbane City, NRC & Queensland Reds); Alex Northam (North Harbour Rays, NRC & La Rochelle, France); Dave Porecki  (Saracens Training Squad, UK); Ed Gower (North Harbour Rays, NRC & Saracens Training Squad, UK); Denis Pili-Gaitau (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Sam Lane (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Harry Bergelin (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Ryan Melrose (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Mitch Lewis (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Tim Donlan (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Mitch Daniel (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Vance Elliott (North Harbour Rays, NRC); Dane Maraki (NSW Country Eagles, NRC); B.J. Hartmann (Greater Sydney Rams, NRC)