Okay I'm not good at writing in the third person thing but stay with me.
We all know and love the "Don't Worry, Manly Hates You Too" mantra but I feel we are not hated as much as we used to be and that is impacting our onfield performance and motivation. I think what has led to this has been:
It feels that the club has recognised this and has started to deliberately address this in a number of different ways.
In this new era of "everyone must like me" I am personally looking forward to being hated a bit more again as a Manly fan.
We all know and love the "Don't Worry, Manly Hates You Too" mantra but I feel we are not hated as much as we used to be and that is impacting our onfield performance and motivation. I think what has led to this has been:
- the Dessie "fly under the radar" days
- the lack of recent premiership success
- the emergence of the loveable Trbos
- the attractive style of footy we played in 2021
- the bravery / stupidity of the club during rainbowgate (which other club would go there)
- the meekness of late 2022 and a lot of 2023 (other clubs just laugh or don't care).
It feels that the club has recognised this and has started to deliberately address this in a number of different ways.
- upgrading Brookvale Oval and encouraging attendance to make it feel more of a fortress
- maintaining DCE as our captain (which he deserves to be) as he is such divisive and outspoken figure in the game outside our club e.g. his role in the RLPA
- getting a whole club offside in one go by recruiting Luke Brooks
- getting some hated hard heads into the team i.e. Matt Lodge and Nathan Brown
- clearly roughing and hardening up established players attitudes such as Saab and Schuster with the latest boxing thing
- being ruthless with recruitment in moving on known mistake ridden players
- Being more pushy with the NRL to get compo for SOO Trbo injury (and not spend it) and being part of Las Vegas in year 1
- changing the club's logo to be more agressive
In this new era of "everyone must like me" I am personally looking forward to being hated a bit more again as a Manly fan.