Tony Smith and his nephew Rohan dominated the Rugby League news in this country last week.
Rohan has landed a plum job as the new head coach of Leeds Rhinos and the club’s chief executive Gary Hetherington clearly has great faith in him, to judge by the fact that he has been given a three-and-a-half-year contract.
Gary is clearly backing his own judgement of the ability of his new coach and I hope, for everyone’s sake at Leeds, that he is proved correct. I don’t think that Rugby League can afford to have a Leeds team that is struggling.
I was at Headingley on Friday night and, although the Rhinos were good enough to overcome the challenge of Toulouse Olympique, they certainly weren’t playing with great confidence. If the bounce of the ball had taken a different direction on a couple of occasions on Friday night, then the margin might have been even closer than eleven points.
Many Leeds fans appear somewhat underwhelmed by the appointment of Rohan Smith, largely because he hasn’t had first-grade experience in the NRL, although he has been involved as an assistant coach at several NRL clubs and last year coached the Norths Devils to Grand Final success in the Queensland Cup.
I don’t know who the fans might have been expecting to get the job, but Rohan is the man who is now in possession and everyone must hope that he can put all that experience to good use.
And it’s worth reminding ourselves that Kristian Woolf, who is the outstanding coach in Super League, also had a relatively limited degree of experience at NRL first-grade level when St Helens appointed him at the end of 2019.
He had taken over as interim coach of Newcastle Knights in August 2019 when Nathan Brown had stepped down from the job, but I can only assume that the Knights didn’t fight to retain him and they allowed St Helens to step in and bring him to the UK.
Given that the Knights went down 2-39 at home to Parramatta on Sunday, I suspect that Newcastle officials may regret not appointing Kristian to their head-coaching role.
Of course the Rhinos have made some coaching appointments in the past that didn’t work out. Dean Lance and David Furner immediately spring to mind.
But I suspect that the research Leeds have done into Rohan Smith’s credentials gives them much more grounds for confidence that they’ve made the right appointment this time around.
What’s bugging Tony Smith?
One of the problems with reporting on events is that sometimes you don’t get the whole story.
I was involved in the Zoom conference at which Tony announced his departure from Hull Kingston Rovers at the end of this season.
Tony made it clear that he had a conflict with someone else in the club, which, putting two and two together, led everyone to believe that he was referring to the club’s chief executive Paul Lakin.
But what is the cause of the disagreement?
Tony wasn’t saying, although he did talk quite a lot about the need for the club to develop its own players, seeming to imply that the Robins aren’t doing enough in that regard.
On the other hand, the dispute may be based on something simpler than that.
Tony’s current contract runs out at the end of the season. and I assume that negotiations for a new contract had already commenced.
Was it just that club’s valuation of Tony’s services didn’t match his own valuation?
No one seems keen to tell us.
And Tony has insisted that he won’t be heading to Leeds to work with Rohan. And I can fully understand that Rohan probably wouldn’t want Tony breathing down his neck in an official capacity.
The other thing that Tony made absolutely clear in his press conference was that he is keen to carry on coaching next year, even if it isn’t with Hull KR.
He will certainly be a major catch for someone.
Hastings doing a Salford at Wests Tigers
One of the best matches I’ve seen this season was last Monday’s NRL clash between Parramatta and Wests Tigers at CommBank Stadium in front of more than 28,000 spectators on Easter Monday.
The high-flying Eels came into the game expected to hammer the Tigers, who were at the bottom of the league with five defeats from five games. It looked a no-brainer.
The Wests coach Michael Maguire has for a long time been a candidate for becoming the first NRL coach to be sacked this season.
And yet on Monday, with Jackson Hastings back in the side after suspension, and playing at scrum-half with Luke Brooks as his partner, the Tigers matched the Eels all the way and Hastings landed the winning field-goal in the last minute from almost 40 metres to grab a sensational victory.
It could hardly have been more exciting and it reminded me of Hastings’ role in helping transform Salford into a Grand Final team in 2019.
I read one statistic that suggested that Hastings had handled the ball 90 times during the game, which is almost unheard of in the NRL.
And it wasn’t just last Monday that Hastings inspired his team-mates.
On Saturday the Tigers defeated the much-fancied South Sydney, gaining another one-point victory, 23-22, with another late field-goal, this time by Brooks.
Revival stories are always a great part of the sporting environment.
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