From behind the paywall...................
"chairman Damien Frawley has declared he does not intend to scuttle the Super Rugby season before it has even started and will not rush any decision on the future of Reds coach Richard Graham.
Frawley was brought in as interim chairman until the QRU board can confirm him on March 19, replacing Rod McCall who had been in the chair since 2009. Increasingly, it had been looking as though McCall would not survive what is shaping to be a contentious annual general meeting and the succession plan had to be implemented one year earlier.
The expectation is that Frawley will be an agent of change, but indications are he will get his feet under the table before he begins making changes.
But speaking from Los Angeles yesterday, Frawley said he would not be doing what most people expected of him. “Most people would have thought new chairman, new world order, out with the coach and everything will be fixed. But it’s not that simple,” Frawley said. “There might come a point through the season where we (he and Graham) might need to have a ‘come to Jesus’ conversation, but that’s a little way off yet. Let’s get off his back and give him a chance to succeed.
“The reality is that we committed to Richard as coach last year. I’ll sit down with him when I get home and see how he’s going, but I think we need to take our time with it. I’m not going to come in and do anything straight away. The last thing that I want to do is derail the season before the season has even started. We need to give it a little time to see how it pans out.”
Certainly any initial discussion he has with Graham will focus on the team and its culture.
It may well be that wins and losses might not be the best indicator of how much the team is putting in but certainly all eyes will be studying how the team fares when it is behind. Any dropping of heads, any fall-off in urgency could have major repercussions for the coach — and indeed for the players.
“There are a young, inexperienced team,” he said. “But it really does seem to be a more unified culture now than there was in the last year or so. Culture is something that, if there is a change for the better, can quickly produce results. You only have to look at how far the Wallabies came in 12 months.”
Frawley is certain to concentrate on how the drop-off in Reds membership has impacted on the bottom line.
“The code is not big enough, the code is not financially stable enough to have all these different agendas,” he said. “One thing I am keen to do is to reset the clock with our membership, with clubs and with the schools. There has been a bit of negativity towards the organisation, unfortunately.”
"It is understood Frawley was not entirely happy with the way the Reds conducted an internal review last year, nor with the process that saw Graham reappointed as coach. “There was a lot of rumour and innuendo about that,” he admitted. “We have very vigorous debate about a lot of things in that review, but at the end of the day we as a board needed to unilaterally line up behind the decision.
