Any Given Monday: The unanswered questions about Stephen Kearney's sacking

ANY GIVEN MONDAY

There are so many unanswered questions about Stephen Kearney's abrupt departure, not least this: who's next?

More than anything, though: why now?

Possibly the least interesting question of the lot is: did Kearney deserve to go?

The way Kearney was stripped of his employment over the weekend reflected poorly on the club as a professional entity. The decision looked reactionary; an emotional response to an atrocious performance.

If the greatest problem your club has is attracting established talent to Penrose, then making hair-trigger calls is not something you want on your prospectus.

"It's been a weird 24 hours... it's almost like we've had a death in the family," said assistant-on-Friday to interim-head-coach-on-Saturday Todd Payten. "It was out of the blue, very surprising, shocking. I can only put it down to the performance on the weekend, particularly our defensive performance."

If that is truly the case and it came "out of the blue" – and you have to assume it is because it would not augur well for your head-coaching prospects to start by being disingenuous – then it paints a picture of a club run by impetuous decision makers.

It's about now you have to understand that despite the marketing, the Warriors aren't the people's club, it's a person's club.

That is the owner's prerogative. Autex Industries CEO Mark Robinson clearly didn't like what he saw and moved with haste, thinking that another week under the coach was another week wasted.

Warriors coach Stephen Kearney in May 2018. Photo / Photosport.co.nz

It might be a callous call, but it was his to make.

It clearly wasn't Cam George's call. The Warriors' CEO made that abundantly clear in an interview with Channel Nine.

He described himself as a "rock-solid" Kearney supporter and painted the decision as having "come off the back of discussions with the owners… and we are where we are now".

He said Kearney was a "piece of the puzzle he wanted to change", with the emphasis on "he", not the standard "we".

He described his "discussion" with the owners as having been "long", the implication being that he tried to talk them around. If anybody was left in any doubt about George's position, he wrote it in black paint on a placard when he said the club's biggest historic impediment to success had been "stability", while immediately acknowledging that changing a coach mid-season "flies in the face" of attempting to redress that.

If you were the owner of a club who paid presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars to a chief executive to make the tough calls, would you want even a hint of dissent when fronting the media?

From the outside, it appears that George might be expecting the dreaded "vote of confidence" in the near future.

Another staffer under pressure must be recruitment manager Peter O'Sullivan, a man touted in some quarters as a genius but also someone who has chalked up few signing wins in his time at the club.

Stephen Kearney during Warriors training at Mount Smart in February 2018. Photo / Jason Oxenham.

If Kearney was bladed in part because he couldn't be trusted to build a title-contending roster with so many players coming off contract at the end of the season, then surely O'Sullivan is in the same boat?

People will have their own opinions as to the merits of Kearney as a coach. Just last week I listed Kearney as one of the more intriguing characters I'd met in sport across the course of my career and pointed to a couple of issues I felt were holding him back as a coach.

It was timely, I guess, as was the line about Autex Industries' short patience. Kearney seemed to base entire offensive game plans around completed sets of six, a metric ripe for boredom and false efficiency readings.

With all that in mind, it feels bizarre that the time to swing the axe was when your side was effectively two and two after the most unprecedented, asterisk of a start to a season.

The Warriors ownership will have you believe they're charting a new direction for the club but it's really just travelling the same old road with a different horse and cart: a shortcut to nowhere fast.

There's another question that sits queasily in the stomach like a delayed hangover, and it's a question few will want to ask: why in a sport that is increasingly dominated by Polynesian and indigenous talent, has it just got even whiter in the coach's box?

Approximately 50 per cent of the NRL's playing population is Polynesian, while 12 per cent are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island heritage.

With Kearney's departure, the percentage of Polynesian head coaches now stands at 0 per cent. The percentage of Polynesian NRL club CEOs is 0 per cent.

The Warriors did not sack Stephen Kearney because he is Maori but his dismissal does further skew what in these more enlightened and racially charged times is an awkward look for the NRL.

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The snap, crackle and pop of Super Rugby Aotearoa's first week was always going to be difficult to sustain but already there are some worrying signs, not least banks of empty yellow seats at Wellington.

That was easily explained away as a poor forecast putting paid to a bigger walk-up crowd but what happened further north was more difficult to make sense of.

The Chiefs completely ran out of ideas against the Blues on Saturday night. By the end, as they bashed away while waiting for the inevitable handling mistake from a front-rower, they were close to unwatchable.

The home side dominated territory and possession, comfortably "won" the penalty count and forced the Blues to make far more tackles than they did. For all that their attack looked impotent and bereft of imagination.

SR Aotearoa is neither a sprint nor a marathon, but already in this middle-distance race, the Chiefs are in danger of being dropped with a couple of laps to go.

THE MONDAY LONG READ

I went for a run in the weekend with a bunch of blokes, most of whom I'd never met before. We ran along forestry roads I was unfamiliar with, through corridors of pine, climbing, climbing… We'd been running for an hour and a half before the night conceded to a watery grey. We had more than an hour to go. I had spent good chunks of the day before worrying about how I'd go; I spent the rest of Sunday looking forward to the next big run. Jogging is a bit like that. This story from SI's Chris Ballard will help explain why it is the sport we all need right now.