Coaches wait for date on their fate

Whether Graeme Cheetham and Lofty Stevenson are re-appointed as joint coaches of the Wairarapa-Bush rugby team next season could be known by the end of this week.
Cheetham and Stevenson will be the centre of a debriefing session by the WBRFU board tonight and a decision is likely to be taken there on whether they will be given a second successive year in charge or the coaching position will be advertised.
The latter action would not necessarily mean, of course, that Cheetham and Stevenson were out of the reckoning but they would then have to withstand challenges from other contenders.
Just how the WBRFU board see the form of Wairarapa-Bush in the 2007 Heartland championship is likely to go a long way towards deciding the fate of Cheetham and Stevenson.
On the face of it their effort to make the Meads Cup semi-finals was, in fact, a step or two backwards from the previous two seasons when, under Peter Russell, they followed up their victory in the very last NPC third division competition by winning the inaugural Heartland title.
But whether that should be held against Cheetham and Stevenson is debatable because they had only a handful of the 2006 squad available to them and were therefore forced to introduce something like 15 players to the rigours of Heartland rugby.
They could argue with some justification then that making the top four in the Meads Cup section was a very creditable performance considering the circumstances.
Cheetham said from his Eketahuna base yesterday that he personally was "very keen" to have a second term in the coaching role but that he was taking nothing for granted in that respect.
"It's not up for us to decide, the board will obviously listen to what we have to say and the process will go from there," he said
"There are no guarantees, none at all."
Cheetham said being on a one year contract in their debut season as joint coaches meant he and Stevenson were always acutely aware of the need to "do well or probably be fired" and he is fulsome in his praise of the support given them by their players.
"To have so many of them playing at Heartland level and doing so well spoke volumes for the players, we couldn't have asked for any more from them," he said.
At the same time, however, Cheetham admits the 2007 season was also a learning curve for the coaches and that he and Stevenson had benefited from the experience as well.
"Knowing what we do now it's fair to say we should have done some things differently but then we were on a big learning curve too," he said.