'Clueless' - Dragons Expose Themselves in Flanagan Farce
What unfolded in that press conference wasn’t leadership. It wasn’t strategy. It was confusion, contradiction, and a staggering lack of preparation from people who should know better.
Let’s call it for what it is. Embarrassing.
This was a club that marched out its CEO and chairman to confirm what everyone in rugby league already knew that Flanagan was gone yet somehow hadn’t thought far enough ahead to answer the most basic follow up question.
Who’s coaching the team this weekend?
Silence. Shrugged shoulders. No answer.
You’d expect that from a club blindsided by events. But this wasn’t that. Flanagan’s fate has been hanging in the air for weeks. The board meeting was looming. The loss on the weekend simply sped up the inevitable.
And still they weren’t ready.
Chairman Andrew Lancaster even pointed out he’s got 30 years of media experience. Thirty years. And he didn’t anticipate the first question that was coming?
That’s not just a slip up. That’s a window into how this club is being run.
Because the truth is the Dragons didn’t have an answer because they couldn’t agree on one.
This isn’t about a lack of options. There are two obvious interim candidates sitting right there Dean Young and Jason Ryles. Both qualified. Both available. Both logical.
But logic doesn’t apply when a club is split down the middle.
This is what happens when the St George side and the Illawarra side are still fighting their old civil war behind closed doors. Every decision becomes a tug of war. Every appointment becomes political.
And the football club suffers.
You can dress it up however you like. Process. Due diligence. Taking our time. But what we saw was paralysis. Pure and simple.
No alignment. No clarity. No leadership.
And here’s the bigger issue. If they can’t agree on an interim coach for this weekend what hope have they got of landing the right long term coach?
Because that decision matters far more. Get it wrong and the Dragons aren’t just rebuilding they’re resetting again in 12 months’ time.
There are names floating around as there always are. There are whispers, backroom conversations, managers circling. That’s rugby league.
But until this boardroom sorts itself out it doesn’t matter who they target.
No serious coach is walking into a divided club.
The Dragons had a chance here to show some authority. To show that yes the results haven’t been good enough but there is a plan. There is direction. There is control.
Instead they showed the exact opposite.
They showed a club still stuck in its own past still wrestling with its own identity and still incapable of making a clean decisive call when it matters most.
Sacking the coach was the easy part.
What comes next will define them.
Right now you wouldn’t back them to get it right.
