BY DAN

What had been reported for weeks has been made official: Michael Maguire will no longer be an assistant coach of the Raiders. In his place is blood, neither old nor new, in the form of their 2023 Cup footy coach, Justin Giteau.

Madge remains in an external consultant role with the club. While it’s hard to tell what means practically, it does appear that it would preclude as involved a role as he’d taken on as junior vice president senior assistant coach. At the very least his time as head of defence is over.

We’d provided our assessment of Madge’s time as defensive coach here, but the short version goes like this. Madge was brought on board to fix an elite defence that had been slipping from its silver era heights. Instead of being the salve the situation had worsened and the Raiders defence slipped to the sixth worst in the competition. Conceding 26 points a game is not a sustainable way to play footy.

It’s hard to solely put the blame on Madge for this. Lord knows there’s a myriad of structural, personnel and tactical reasons for this. And it may not have been able to turn around what had been ailing the Milk in one season. But it’s fair to say that at best Madge’s time as lead assistant was less successful than most hoped. What he’ll be able to offer as an external consultant is not immediately clear. Perhaps he’s more diagnostician than surgeon.

Canberra has both looked beyond the normal ‘retread’ replacement and instead promoted within. It’s a weird half-way house between new blood and the same old people. Yes Giteau is an internal promotion but he’s also been earning reputation in footy at a range of levels and experience well beyond Sticky’s orbit. From what we’ve seen and heard from him in Cup footy he seems to have a clear epistemology in his coaching mindset. In my view he succeeded in last season despite a bent order in reggies. He had to install Stuart’s flawed gameplan, deal with the shuffling in and out of his best players, and still managed to find wins.

So it’s kinda an old boy and kinda not. This doesn’t need to be a bad thing. While he’s part of Stuart’s system, he’s not been built by it, moulded by it (is Stick Bane in this scenario? Gotham? I don’t know). Old boys aren’t always bad. It was two of them (Cappy McFadden and Brett White) armed with better defensive players that turned around the Raiders defence in the 2019 preseason. In terms of the person I am optimistic.

The process though – unable to look beyond your nose either by choice or by circumstance – is what will worry people. This was a chance to inject new ways of thinking into a club that sometimes isn’t as innovative as it needs to be. When you’re not a big club you need to find other avenues to do things. Be it looking in different areas for talent (like the Raiders have done in Queensland, the Pacific, and England), or finding better ways to do things for less money. Being willing to embrace more radical ideas through your coaching staff should be easier for the Milk because the bright lights of the media have less power in Canberra, and the stability of employment for the coaching staff can sustain a failed shot at the moon.

In Corey Horsburgh’s recent ‘Bloke in the Bar’ interview revealed Coach Stuart sees certain players as a Raiders ‘type’ (and I’ve heard Don Furner say similar about recruitment). Perhaps the same extends to coaches. Perhaps Stuart is seeking a particular mindset in support. Smarter people than me, like ABC rugby league writer and NRL Boom Rookie raconteur Nick Campton, have pointed out the Raiders tend to play on emotion rather than strategy. It’s not hard to see that as something that reflects the coaching staff (and only emphasised by Maguire’s presence).

Finding someone that can expand their playing style while embracing that ‘heart on sleeve’ character shouldn’t be impossible. Treading through Stuart’s limited musings this off-season seems to suggest he’s ready for a new generation of football on the field. Hopefully that mindset is applied off the field as well, and that Giteau proves the man for the job.

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