Michael Maguire has certainly rehabilitated his coaching career over the last 12 months, an orchestrated campaign to remove the stain that his two club tenures have left through representative football. It has clearly succeeded.
The Broncos have hired the NSW coach just days after sacking Kevin Walters, something hindsight will quickly tell us is very much connected.
This is a seminal moment for the Broncos. They messed up the second coming of Wayne Bennett. They messed up bringing in Anthony Seibold. They clearly pulled the wrong rein in meekly taking Kevin Walters over the more qualified Paul Green.
Broncos chairman Karl Morris, in particular, will be sweating that Maguire is, at a minimum, not an unqualified disaster and can set the Broncos north to Alaska.
Time and results and signings and team selections will soon tell whether Maguire has genuinely changed enough to succeed at club level in 2025. His stints in rep football though means nothing for what awaits at Red Hill.
Coaching a club and coaching at rep level are two very different beasts, something the Broncos may not realise.
There is no disputing what Maguire has achieved at rep level across the last year.
Following on from a close World Cup loss with the Kiwis at the 2022 World Cup, he led the Kiwis to a stunning 30-0 win in the final of the Pacific Championships, handing Australia their largest Test defeat. That led him to the NSW job, a position he was set up to succeed in after the weird and wacky Brad Fittler era that had gone completely cuckoo by 2023.
Maguire returned to a more traditional football approach. He replaced walking on wet grass barefoot and playing Damien Cook in the centres by picking more palatable teams and firing them up by bringing in old greats to talk.
Coaching at rep level though is about bringing together the most talented players together and bonding them for a short time. It is about inspiration and it is about connection. It is an executive chairman role. Someone like Mal Meninga, who desperately struggled with the never-ending cycle of club football, has thrived at rep level.
He has been ego-less enough to hire intelligent assistants and has done a near-incomparable job at enhancing the prestige of the Maroons and Kangaroos jerseys. He sits above the operational and focuses on the strategic.
A sound football base, an ability to deliver the rah-rah speeches, finding unique ways to tap into the history of a jersey and finding ways to connect players is what rep coaching is about. Club coaching in 2025 is so much more complicated.
Club coaches are paid such a significant sum because they are generally the most important figures in an organisation. They set the standard at a club. They manage both up and down, leading an entire conglomerate that has an impact on both football and non-football people.
They are in charge of elite talent and all the pathways below. They are key tools in recruitment. They manage salary caps and recruitment calls and retention decisions. They are father figures and disciplinarians and a shoulder to cry on.
They are the voice of a club week in and week out, advocating and venting and explaining and justifying. They manage highly paid talent, rising stars and fading veterans. They set defensive strategy and offensive style and training workloads. On and on it goes.
It is no eight-week hideaway where you cherry-pick the best talent available in the game, spend 24 hours a day together and prove yourself in three games.
The Broncos job is arguably bigger than most with a vitriolic old boys network, a club that expects success, the most money of any club in the league and the pressure that goes with being a team in a two-club town.
Intense passion works in bursts. It does not work for full seasons, where the smart coaches understand when to press and when to breathe, when to push and when to let off, when to use the stick and when to use the carrot. They also understand that different players require different handling, that different teams require different strategies.
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Maguire’s record in club football certainly does not suggest he will be the saviour the Broncos are desperate to anoint.
His first three years at South Sydney were exceptional, culminating in the famous 2014 premiership. That was a decade ago. He has not won a final since in six campaigns. His last winning season was 2015. It was hard to believe that the coach who brought Souths back to premiership glory after four long decades would be rissoled three seasons later but that is what happened.
His time at the Tigers was disastrous and speaks to his stubbornness, his delusions and his desires. Maguire genuinely believed he could turn the long-term basket-case Tigers around. Naturally, he could not.
He went 29-51 in three-and-a-half damning seasons where he was like a bull in a china shop, continually trying to beat a square peg into a round hole to jam a second metaphor into a single sentence. The insightful documentary ‘Tales From Tiger Town’ did not reflect well on Maguire, who came across as passionate but frustrated, a poor communicator, overly intense, lacking in the ability to get the best out of his team and/or improve the team by bringing in better players, tactically short and alienating in style.
Stylistically there are concerns. Maguire is known for his intensity but that style has absolutely gone out of fashion not only in the NRL but across sport.
Craig Bellamy, the king of the ranters and the ravers, remains an unparalleled success but his is done within the framework of unbreakable standards and two decades of unwavering success. Ivan Cleary, Trent Robinson, Wayne Bennett, Paul Green – the leading coaches over the last decade – are known for taking a much quieter, culture-focused, positive approach.
Sure, they all have a bake in them but they realise that kind of approach does not wash with this generation of players. There are very few authoritarian ranters and ravers running clubs these days – Bellamy, Ricky Stuart, Des Hasler, Shane Flanagan.
When Maguire was in his last season at South Sydney, he wanted to bring a snake into the dressing room at Redfern to show what happens when you wrap up a body and squeeze. It required Shane Richardson stepping in and stopping the coach. That is the kind of offbeat, intense, eccentricity Maguire brings and it is not a style the game or professional sport is moving towards.
Some would call Maguire’s style idiosyncratic. One former assistant, though, calls him an extremist in his coaching methods. He sits at the very opposite end of a coaching continuum that has Robinson and Cleary at the other end and over the last decade the pendulum has swung their way. Clear, calm and concise communication has become key. Maguire, simply, does not possess that.
Other areas that don’t grade particularly well for Maguire are tactically, recruitment, development and culture building.
Nothing stood out in the dying years of the Rabbitohs or his entire period at the Tigers that suggested he offers anything of statistical note. He revs players up. Talks about defence. But three of his four seasons his teams conceded more than 25 points per game. Attack has been consistent block runner nonsense that is as dated as a back-of-the-fridge yoghurt.
Kevin Walters and Adam Reynolds chat. (Photo by Albert Perez/Getty Images)
He could not recruit big names to the Tigers. Ryan Matterson came and left but others – Joey Leilua, James Roberts, Ken Maumalo, Tyrone Peachey – were on their last chance. Few players came through and developed into cornerstones of the Tigers on his watch.
Culturally, Maguire did not leave an imprint on the Tigers, perhaps the biggest indictment one can hit a coach with. He had the best part of four seasons. The Tigers were no better when he left than we he arrived. Players had clearly given up on him by the time he was gone.
People change. Coaches change. There is no doubt that the Broncos are a bigger and better opportunity for Maguire than the Tigers. There is no history outside of an elite few – Bennett, Gibson, Sheens – of a coach thriving at a third club.
Maguire is an upgrade on Walters. The evidence on hand though does not suggest he will be a success at the Broncos, particularly at a club the size of the Broncos. In the rush to get rid of Walters, signing Maguire so quickly seems like panic at the disco.
The smart money will be on this signing not working out and ending within the next three years.
Nick Tedeschihttps://https://ift.tt/FiHLcO8 is an upgrade on Walters – but his dated methods and dismal club record suggest it will end in tears at the Broncos
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