Wayne Bennett has a stock-standard response when rival coaches say they judge their success not by how many premierships they’ve won but how many players they’ve made better.
“I’d say the same thing if I’d never won one,” he often grins.
Bennett has won seven premierships, all of them with teams loaded with international and Origin players. The 1993 and 1998 Broncos are among the strongest club teams of all time.
But Bennett’s finest hours have come when coaching spare-parts sides, top-heavy with players who are either past their prime or discarded by other clubs. He coaches best when his side is the underdog because he considers himself to be one, too.
Widely written off at the start of the season, almost to the point of ridicule, the Dolphins are fast becoming his greatest piece of work.
Their 36-16 mauling of Cronulla – in Bennett’s 900th match as coach – was the performance of a magical Magic Round.
Dolphins coach Wayne Bennett at a training session.Credit: Dan Peled
They are fifth on the ladder after 10 rounds, sitting above Melbourne, the Roosters and Parramatta with six wins and four losses, and have their first bye this weekend.
The season is still young, but they’re playing so well it will feel like a missed opportunity if they don’t qualify for the play-offs.
The victory over the Sharks was a signature Bennett big-game ambush, blowing away their more-fancied opponents in the early minutes and building an unassailable lead.
After failing to land a marquee player, with millions of salary cap space unspent, the fear for the Dolphins was the depth of their squad.
The belief was they would show some resolve in the early rounds, as all Bennett teams do, before the grind of the season dispatched them to the bottom of the ladder.
So far this season, Bennett has grappled with injuries and suspensions as much as any coach, including a serious pectoral tear to starting halfback Sean O’Sullivan.
But he keeps finding solutions, although none as successful as Valynce Te Whare, the 22-year-old minibus-sized centre who made his debut on Saturday night.
A pet project of Bennett and recruitment guru Peter O’Sullivan, who plucked him from the obscurity of New Zealand schoolboy rugby, Te Whare is the type of player who needs the right number of hugs, the right number of harsh words.
Some players can leave their unhappiness at the sideline when they take the field. Te Whare cannot.
Bennett has made a career out of extracting the best out of players like this and, in his own special way, has done it with Te Whare.
When Bennett is happy with him, he calls him “Val”. When he’s not, it’s “Valynce”. He’s tried repeatedly to pronounce the youngster’s surname but becomes so tongue-twisted he jokingly calls him “Val Smith”.
Selecting him was a risk. His form for Redcliffe in the Queensland Cup has been indifferent at best. But Bennett had little choice but to play him because Brenko Lee (hamstring) and Jack Bostock (nose) were injured.
He could also identify in Te Whare what he’s identified in generations of players: that the kid plays at the level at which he is picked. Te Whare was craving the big stage and playing a top-four team. Squaring off against another minibus like Siosifa Talakai, in front of a packed Suncorp Stadium, was such a stage.
They are intangible traits that can’t be found on a spreadsheet or the video room. That are felt by someone who has coached for 50 years, long before video was a thing in rugby league.
When Bennett named his team last week, and read out “Val Smith”, Te Whare was shocked. He looked at the coach and teared up.
The result: two tries, two line-breaks, six tackle-busts, one haka in front of his family and friends in the grandstand.
There were times, even in the first half, when Te Whare was out of gas, but he kept going because he didn’t want to let anyone down, especially the coach.
“Wayne didn’t overcomplicate it,” Te Whare said. “He told me to run hard and tackle hard and have fun. Those were the three main things he told me to do, and that’s what I did tonight.”
Valynce Te Whare’s hakaCredit: Nine
While Bennett is dismissive of coaches who have never won premierships, some people – including rival coaches – are dismissive of his record and methodology.
They argue he’s been gifted the best players who require managing more than coaching.
At the Broncos, with whom he won six premierships, he had Allan Langer, Kevin Walters, Glenn Lazarus, Darren Lockyer, Gorden Tallis, Shane Webcke and a score of internationals.
The Dragons, with whom he won a premiership in 2010, had far fewer representative players but still featured Darius Boyd, Mark Gasnier, Matt Cooper, Ben Hornby, Dean Young and Jeremy Smith.
Dally M judges have been reluctant to honour him.
He’s been named coach of the year just three times: at Canberra in 1987 when he shared duties with Don Furner; at the Broncos in 2000 when his physically superior team monstered the opposition; and the Broncos in 2015, when he returned from Newcastle and came within a heartbeat of a grand final victory against the Cowboys.
It would surprise people that Bennett considers the last half of his final season at the Knights in 2014 as his finest coaching performance when he steered the club through the trauma of Alex McKinnon’s broken neck, Russell Packer being jailed for assault, Boyd checking into rehab, and owner Nathan Tinkler handing the licence back to the NRL because he couldn’t pay the bills.
Bennett often rattles off the eight wins from the final 11 matches that season as “the best I’ve ever coached”, although the good people of Newcastle and the Hunter might disagree after he abandoned them a year earlier than expected, leaving behind a broken roster.
He says he’s coaching the Dolphins no differently to what he’s done over half a century: simplifying his message, giving them a simple gameplan, showing them he genuinely cares for them. He was doing Ted Lasso long before Ted Lasso was Ted Lasso.
But even in his quieter moments, I’d suggest Bennett has rarely felt so vindicated by what he’s achieved so far.
Centre Euan Aitken is playing the type of football that had him pressing for NSW selection a few years ago. Hooker Jeremy Marshall-King and five-eighth Kodi Nikorima have never been so polished. Rookie halfback Isaiya Katoa is playing beyond his years. Jarrod Wallace has cut the rubbish from this game and now just offloads at will in the middle.
Oh, and who thought Jamayne Isaako – the leading points and goal scorer – could play football like this?
Bennett did. He and the Dolphins won’t win the premiership, but they’ve already won the year.
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