When the New Zealand Warriors lost Ivan Cleary to the Penrith Panthers because they didn’t want to commit to him long term it was a terrible mistake.
As a replacement the Warriors signed Brian McClennan who didn’t even see out his first season at the club before being replaced by interim coach Tony Iro.
The club then signed Matthew Elliott to a long term contract. Elliott was sacked just a few rounds into his second season at the club and his assistant Andrew McFadden took over.
McFadden has only been in charge of the Warriors for a month, and already the club has rewarded him with a long term deal to coach the club through to the end of 2017.
Do you see the pattern here?
Who ever is in charge of appointing coaches at the New Zealand Warriors is making a real mess of things. Not only are they appointing the wrong coaches to the job, they are offering them long term deals that they simply haven’t earned.
It is absolutely impossible to judge Andrew McFadden as a coach after just a month of football. McFadden has taken over someone elses team and is really still in a state of damage minimization after the previous coach was sacked so early in the season.
Sacking Matthew Elliott was the right thing to do, there is no doubt about that. You have to be careful in appointing an assistant coach though because a lot of the time an assistant coach tends to step in and keep doing the same things his previous mentor had been doing.
You would think it would have made far more sense for the Warriors to give McFadden a few more months to show what he could do with this side and then make a decision on extending his contract or looking to go in a completely different direction with a new coach.
The New Zealand Warriors really worry me with some of the decisions they make. They have everything they need to be a successful club, it just seems like some of the decision makers there don’t really know what they are doing.
I have a feeling that Andrew McFadden will be a decent coach for the Warriors, but this early into his coaching career, it is absurd to offer him a long term deal. Lets hope McFadden’s name doesn’t get added to the long list of coaching mistakes the Warriors have made.
