Steve Deane: Warriors once blessed with Anderson wizardry

Anybody else see just a hint of the old Warriors in this year's Parramatta Eels? The willingness to keep the ball alive, the relentless changes of angles, the support running? That's the way our mob used to play. Sure they didn't have a Jarryd Hayne to make the impossible seem routine, but it's the same style all the same.

The obvious common thread is Daniel Anderson.

In turning the Warriors from a basket case into 2002 Grand Finalists, Anderson's recipe for success was adding a dose of hard-nosed Aussie pragmatism to complement the Warriors' razzle-dazzle. Players whose approach bordered on reckless reigned it in a little. A team that thrived on emotion and was great when it was up learned not to chuck the towel in as soon as a few chips went down. They weren't half bad, those old Warriors.

It's hard not to think that, at the Eels, Anderson has done the reverse. He's put the razzle back into a club that was once famous for it but in recent times had somehow lost its dazzle. Clearly it's a potent mix.

It's also hard not to wonder where the Warriors would be now had the club backed the coach instead of senior players when things went rapidly south in 2004.

As a rule, player power doesn't work. The lunatics never do much of a job running the asylum.

That said, there's little doubt Anderson's authoritarian style rubbed players up the wrong way. One player who left the Warriors, partly because of his displeasure with Anderson, but played under him for the Kiwis after his departure told me that the coach had changed his style completely, had gone from being too domineering to too loose. That didn't work either. The Kiwis won just one of eight games under Anderson.

The coach, though, appears to have learned some valuable lessons. At St Helens he oversaw a time of great success. That castle, though, had already been built by Ian Millward. Anderson just added the polish. The same can't be said of Parra. If Anderson's Eels win tomorrow he will be well on the way to establishing himself as one of the great modern coaches.

Letting him go won't go down as one of the better decisions made at Penrose HQ.