Hiding in the grandstand, PlayStations and those sprays: How Flanagan revived the Dragons

It’s a tricky balance being an out-of-work rugby league coach. It’s not like you can log onto Seek and find a plethora of jobs right in your hitting zone.

When one of the 17 vacancies for an NRL head coach comes up, how do you approach it? Tell the board what you really think? Or tell them what you think they want to hear? Bust out the PowerPoint and reams of analytics to dazzle? Or just casually push your resume across the table?

It’s especially tricky when you haven’t landed one of those jobs for several years, and it’s getting close to a decade since you won an NRL premiership.

So, Shane Flanagan walked into the Wollongong home of Dragons chairman and powerful media executive Andrew Lancaster, someone he’d never met before, and maybe with his final shot to be an NRL head coach, hit him right between the eyes.

“A number of your players are unfit,” he said. “They need to be fitter, faster and stronger. That’s the first thing that needs to change.”

Lancaster sat and listened intently.

But the words really resonated with Dragons favourite son Ben Creagh, a club director who was the only other person at the meeting. Creagh would naturally feel a sense of conflict, his former premiership-winning teammates Ben Hornby and Dean Young had also auditioned for the job, which was Jason Ryles’ until the moment he had to put pen to paper. He left knowing Flanagan would be the man to take on one of the hardest jobs in rugby league: pleasing a suffocating fan base which demands success.

“[Those interviews] are always tricky ones, but I’m confident in my own ability,” Flanagan says. “I was more than content at Manly [as an assistant coach], I was happy there, but I wanted to be a head coach. If it came around, it came around. I wasn’t going to go, ‘shit, my time is over’.”

As Australia basks in the golden glow of a record Olympic Games haul, Flanagan’s fitter, faster, stronger blueprint seems apt.

Shunned as wooden spoon contenders before a ball was kicked this year, the Dragons play their biggest NRL match for years against another rejuvenated team, Cameron Ciraldo’s Bulldogs, at a sold-out Netstrata Jubilee Stadium on Saturday night.

It’s been six years since St George Illawarra played finals, eight for the Bulldogs. It’s an eternity for two of the NRL’s most passionate fan bases, in a competition where the pendulum is supposed to swing regularly thanks to the salary cap. There will be no more popular man at Kogarah than Flanagan, who led the Dragons’ arch rivals, the Sharks, to their maiden premiership. He’s given Dragons fans hope.

Having been cast into the shadows in his coaching career - Flanagan was indefinitely deregistered by the NRL in 2018 for breaching the terms of his ban during the supplements scandal by contacting Cronulla officials - his unofficial start at the Dragons began quietly in the darkness. In the final months of last season, he would sneak into WIN Stadium and sit at the top of the grandstand to watch training.

“While they didn’t know I was there, I was there,” Flanagan says. “I didn’t hide, but I would watch how they walked out on the field and trained and prepared. I was calling games for Fox too, so I watched them in warm-ups. I went to games just as a spectator. I was well prepared.”

What he wasn’t prepared for was how dire the Dragons’ training facilities were, largely based out of the ageing southern grandstand at WIN Stadium. When the Panthers, Broncos, Cowboys, Knights, Tigers or Sea Eagles want to sign a player, they take them on a tour of the best services a professional rugby league player can have. The Cowboys even have a sleeping room for players, replicating being at altitude. Dragons players would sit on a dressing room floor between sessions (the club had a DA approved this week for a new high performance centre at a University of Wollongong campus).

It might not seem much, but Flanagan insisted on having a demountable room where the players could play pinball, cards, PlayStation … whatever as long as they could take their minds off things.

“The players had nowhere to go between training sessions, or if they were eating their lunch,” Flanagan says. “They were lying around in dressing rooms, which I thought was crazy. We extended the gym to make it much bigger. It wasn’t just a lick of paint.”

In one of his first official duties as new Dragons coach, Flanagan headed up an intimate and high-powered function for a number of corporate supporters and club legends. It was named the Dragons Way, borrowing an idea he’d picked up from a study trip to AFL heavyweights Carlton. On the day, Lancaster wanted the club to ban any future reference to joint venture, given St George Illawarra was on the cusp of 25 years as a single entity.

But Flanagan had the most telling admission: he expected the team to be playing finals in his first year. Even though almost every person in the room had one red and one white eye, including former Test cricket captain Mark Taylor, how many do you think truly believed him?

“Did I expect to be where we are? Yes,” Flanagan shrugs. “I knew the squad was better than a lot of people have been talking about.”

Maybe he was right.

He’s talked his captain and halfback Ben Hunt off the ledge after repeated release requests last year and watched him celebrate their stirring win over Melbourne last week more than any other. He got so sick of Zac Lomax’s agitation for a new club, he simultaneously let him go from the rest of his deal and helped him reach the heights as arguably the game’s best winger this year.

Jaydn Su’A is skittling defenders like ten pins. A leaner Moses Suli has been awoken, the destructive centre everyone thought he could be. Flanagan sprayed Francis Molo in pre-season and told him he was free to leave, only for him to play his best football in years.

But perhaps his best, and trickiest, assignment has been with son Kyle, whose NRL career was at the crossroads last year after being cut by the Bulldogs, but has revived his career under his father.

It was always going to be a delicate act for father and son. But Flanagan junior has been a steadying presence in the halves alongside Hunt, and with the Dragons’ hanging on for their most stirring win in years last week, it was lost on few Kyle forced a last-gasp error from Harry Grant as the Storm surged at the St George Illawarra line.

Flanagan leapt out of his chair and hugged his assistants Dean Young and Ryan Carr.

“He’s direct, and he knows how to get a team up for a game,” Dragons forward Ryan Couchman says. “A lot of people had us to run last this year, but it was all rubbish … for us internally. We always believed we could do something this year.”

Says Luciano Leilua: “He’s actually cool. So cool. He’s the man. He tells you how it is, and he knows how to work with you individually.”

What about his infamous sprays?

“Up there,” Leilua laughs.

Says Flanagan: “Compared to when I was younger, I haven’t even gone close.”

The problem for the Dragons is while this has been their best season in years, they’re only just inside the top eight and know they haven’t achieved anything yet. They’ve copped some horrific losses this year, including one against the Bulldogs when they led at half-time, by margins which read like a good set of lotto numbers: 38, 22, 20, 42, 32, 30, 36. It hardly screams like a finals team. But every time they cop a heavy defeat, Flanagan has dusted them off, and they’ve turned it around.

“The impact Shane is having on the field for us is replicated in his impact off the field as well in the club culture and connection,” chief executive Ryan Webb says. “It’s good to see how people are excited about where we’re going and where we’re heading. I hope they understand there’s still a long way to go.”

There is, and no one knows that more than Flanagan, who instead of watching solo from an empty grandstand, will have almost 20,000 people crammed into Kogarah on Saturday night watching his new team.

Fitter, faster, stronger.

“We’ve started the engine, but we haven’t got to where we need to be,” Flanagan says.

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