Staying Neutral 🙄

[Chunkytuna]

I don’t know if anyone else has heard the players repeating this mantra that they seemed to have adopted this year - “staying neutral’? I’ve mainly heard Ola saying it. I’m assuming it means not getting too high or getting too low. Great advice for general life but IMO not a great way of playing sport - particularly a high energy, high aggression contact sport.

To me, it smacks of a classic ‘Seiboldism’ - some kind of clever platitude that has some theoretical benefit, but totally useless in a practical sense.

If I’m a coach I’m telling my players that during a game, I don’t want you neutral - I want you in top gear and foot to the fuken floor!!! For the whole 80 minutes!!! That’s what the good teams like Penrith (and sharks at the moment) do. They’re not calmly staying neutral, they’re going full tilt all game! After the game fine, that’s the time to get neutral.

Interested to hear others thoughts on this but to me this is emblematic of how our team plays. Not ruthless or energetic enough and drift in and out of games - hence letting good leads go, and not winning close games. And actually, I think Olakuatu himself plays way too much ‘in neutral’. Nowhere near enough aggression. I think Seibold needs to rethink the whole ‘staying neutral’ thing because the team needs to be way more dialled in if they’re any chance of make a splash in this competition.

 

[Carl]

Staying neutral could refer to not panicking during a game and playing to a plan

Or to what you do between games. Don't get too caught up in the hype or the doom.

 

[Under the Sticks]

I don’t know if anyone else has heard the players repeating this mantra that they seemed to have adopted this year - “staying neutral’? I’ve mainly heard Ola saying it. I’m assuming it means not getting too high or getting too low. Great advice for general life but IMO not a great way of playing sport - particularly a high energy, high aggression contact sport.

To me, it smacks of a classic ‘Seiboldism’ - some kind of clever platitude that has some theoretical benefit, but totally useless in a practical sense.

If I’m a coach I’m telling my players that during a game, I don’t want you neutral - I want you in top gear and foot to the fuken floor!!! For the whole 80 minutes!!! That’s what the good teams like Penrith (and sharks at the moment) do. They’re not calmly staying neutral, they’re going full tilt all game! After the game fine, that’s the time to get neutral.

Interested to hear others thoughts on this but to me this is emblematic of how our team plays. Not ruthless or energetic enough and drift in and out of games - hence letting good leads go, and not winning close games. And actually, I think Olakuatu himself plays way too much ‘in neutral’. Nowhere near enough aggression. I think Seibold needs to rethink the whole ‘staying neutral’ thing because the team needs to be way more dialled in if they’re any chance of make a splash in this competition.

If we had a solid game plan and equally consistent strengths in defence and attack it would make sense.

Clearly we don’t so it is an inappropriate approach.

 

[SeaEagleRock8]

If I’m a coach I’m telling my players that during a game, I don’t want you neutral - I want you in top gear and foot to the fuken floor!!! For the whole 80 minutes!!! That’s what the good teams like Penrith (and sharks at the moment) do. They’re not calmly staying neutral, they’re going full tilt all game! Af

So how did neutral Manly beat full tilt Penrith?

 

[Terry Zarsoff]

So how did neutral Manly beat full tilt Penrith?

The answer to last week’s quiz, the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles, aka the ‘Switzerland of rugby league’.

The other two adopt a Wehrmacht-like attitude to the business of winning football games.

 

[Andrew..]

I'm a rusted-on Blues supporter but I remember one series when Mal Meninga was captaining QLD, he had the boys in a huddle before the game (they had the camera and the mic up close) and you could actually hear him say let's smash these Fkn C...s, in retrospect, I'm pretty sure the blues captain was probably saying the same thing.
That kind of passion is infectious that's the passion I used to see when I was standing on the hill at Brooky watching guys like Graham Eadie, Terry Randall, Ian Martin or even Stuart Davis.
I'm not denigrating or saying this current team doesn't play with effort, I just wonder how much they play for each other because sometimes that can be the difference between winning and losing, those 1% plays you make because you don't want to let your mates down.

 

[Nordburg]

Not sure if this “mantra” is of Seibold’s doing,but if it is,it wouldn’t surprise me.There were stories coming out of the Broncos during his tenure,that he was over complicating things with the players.Too much info and psycho-babble

 

[HK_Eagle]

An eye to future relocation?…

The Swiss Sea Eagles playing out of St. Jakob-Park

 

[WiseyEagle]

Staying neutral when defending the line, seems to be working well? Maybe time to start chanting something else.

 

[The '47ers]

Staying neutral means not fighting, so it figures

 

[Terry Zarsoff]

An eye to future relocation?…

The Swiss Sea Eagles playing out of St. Jakob-Park

They could hole up across the border at their near namesake, the Schloss Adler in Bavaria*:

*Actually the Hohenwerfen Schloss in Austria

 

[Ryan]

Staying neutral wins you 40 something percent of your games last year. Okay, we are at 50% of our games this year, but that"LL be in the 40's , possibly 30's over the next few weeks.

That's what being neutral gets you.

One of your best Siebs.

That neutrality shows in our paper thin Defense

 

[maxta]

I am not on the anti Seiblob train, but he does like doing the science 1 liners stuff and personally, my belief in footy is keep the symbolic strategies of yesteryear in the sense of - play tough, uncompromising footy - run harder than them - hit harder than them ....and I feel you will then earn the right to play that pretty footy and allow the DCE and Tom X factors to shine
Currently it seems in the wrong order
Let's shift all day and score enough points to win....if only Manly played that but tougher both mentally and pays and not worry about being or playing neutral and then we can exploit our X factor players so much more

 

[Ron E. Gibbs]

I think it comes from the "mindset coach", who was recently brought to the club. Mind you, last weekend I had somebody who purports to be a friend of our mindset coach telling me the bloke was an absolute idiot and has no idea what he's doing… Made me wonder what his enemies might say.

 

[Real Deal]

They could hole up across the border at their near namesake, the Schloss Adler in Bavaria*:

View attachment 26997
*Actually the Hohenwerfen Schloss in Austria

It could be called "1000 Pines Park".

 

[LeonardCohen]

Interesting...

I think the mindset is obviously the big problem at the club, given we've had no trouble getting out to leads and are stacked with talent. It's clearly a mental concern.

Someone mentioned in another thread that we defend like we are waiting to get the ball back. I think that's a pretty good way of summing it up. We play like we do not enjoy defending. We are simply getting through a necessity in preparation for what we will do with the ball when we get it back.

In some ways, the ease at which we are able to shift the ball and score at times, only feeds into that mindset. The fact that it always feels like we are a scoring chance, and will often either score or go within a whisker, we are itching to get the ball back and have another go.

Given the talent in our squad, I think it's madness to focus so much on using the ball. Strong, resolute defence and percentages with the ball, have won games for a hundred years.

My solution for fixing our mess is to buy a genuine 9 (use the Schuster money) that can bring our forwards onto the ball, so we do not need to rely on shifting in our own half to make yards. Kick long, tackle hard. Attack will come. It's a simple game.

 

[Nordburg]

Interesting...

I think the mindset is obviously the big problem at the club, given we've had no trouble getting out to leads and are stacked with talent. It's clearly a mental concern.

Someone mentioned in another thread that we defend like we are waiting to get the ball back. I think that's a pretty good way of summing it up. We play like we do not enjoy defending. We are simply getting through a necessity in preparation for what we will do with the ball when we get it back.

In some ways, the ease at which we are able to shift the ball and score at times, only feeds into that mindset. The fact that it always feels like we are a scoring chance, and will often either score or go within a whisker, we are itching to get the ball back and have another go.

Given the talent in our squad, I think it's madness to focus so much on using the ball. Strong, resolute defence and percentages with the ball, have won games for a hundred years.

My solution for fixing our mess is to buy a genuine 9 (use the Schuster money) that can bring our forwards onto the ball, so we do not need to rely on shifting in our own half to make yards. Kick long, tackle hard. Attack will come. It's a simple game.

It is a simple game,hence why the best coaches are the ones who keep it simple.Not the ones who feed the players too much information and complicate things.They’re not trying to split an atom.Although some of these players couldn’t split a banana

 

[Captain Moondog]

"Simplicity wins matches, complexity loses them." ...Jack Gibson.

 

[Terry Zarsoff]

"Simplicity wins matches*, complexity loses them." ...Jack Gibson.

*Plus working hand in glove with Perc Galea.

 

[Captain Moondog]

*Plus working hand in glove with Perc Galea.

Lucky Perce.