How play-off pain is helping the Sharks hone their killer instinct

1 month ago 18

Sharks coach Craig Fitzgibbon knows better than most the pleasure and pain of reaching NRL grand finals.

As a player, he appeared in five deciders, losing four. The fact that he was man of the match in the Sydney Roosters’ triumph against the Warriors in the 2002 premiership decider doesn’t erase the memories of the heartache he suffered in 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2004.

Sharks coach Craig Fitzgibbon has steered his team to consecutive preliminary finals.

Likewise, the Cronulla coach can’t bring himself to reflect on the past two seasons from a glass-half-full perspective, even though the Sharks advanced to consecutive preliminary finals.

“No, we’re not satisfied,” he said.

“It’s cut and dried. You’re always disappointed if you don’t win the comp, and they’re bloody hard to win. Quite frankly, there’s not that many teams that have been winning lately.

“It’s filled with: ‘What are we going to do next? How do we get better? What margins can we get better at? How do we improve? How do we connect again? How do we get back to that level and add some?’

“It’s a constant search for getting better. If you’re not winning competitions, you’re disappointed. It’s filled with pain.”

Despite the pain, the 48-year-old believes his team are on the right trajectory.

Since he took the helm at Cronulla in 2022, after an apprenticeship at the Roosters, the former NSW and Kangaroos back-rower has steered the Sharks into four play-off series.

Last year they knocked out the in-form Roosters and minor premiers Canberra, before a gutsy 22-14 loss in Melbourne ended their season, a week before the grand final.

Cronulla are hoping to continue on an upward trajectory.

Ten years on from their maiden 2016 premiership, the Sharks are hoping to get closer.

Fitzgibbon has at his disposal a settled squad and a nucleus of elite players, including Nicho Hynes, Blayke Brailey and Addin Fonua-Blake.

They need to find improvement from within, as opposed to rivals, who might be banking on recruits to transform them.

“It’s so hard, because you’ve got to get so much right,” Fitzgibbon said. “The more we spend time together, we figure out exactly how much you’ve got to get right.

“And it’s timing – timing of your run, timing of your form, timing of a healthy squad, timing of other teams and where they’re at. All those come into it …

“We feel like we’ve incrementally got better each year, and we’ve got a good core group that have a stack of upside and a higher ceiling. So our job as staff and coaches is to get the best out of them.”

Fitzgibbon subscribes to the theory that a team’s hunger for success determines its destiny. And he likes what he has seen from his troops during the pre-season.

“I can only compare it to last year, and it’s at a different level, based on the desire and the hunger of the players and the way they’ve come back,” he said.

In a competition as even as the NRL, which prompts coaches to fixate about the “one per centers” that can make a vast difference, Fitzgibbon chooses his words carefully when asked about Cronulla’s training facilities.

Most of their rivals have a taxpayer-subsidised centre of excellence, or are building one. The Sharks are making do with amenities from a bygone era.

“So for every other club that has one, that’s a little one on us, but in saying that, we don’t walk around sooking about it. We don’t walk around whinging about it,” Fitzgibbon said.

“We’re not going to finish a year and go on and whine about it because we don’t have one. But do we want one? Absolutely …

“We’re not going to shy away from it. But we’re still happy at Shark Park. We love it here.”

Cronulla 2016 premiership-winning captain Paul Gallen, who still works for the club as a coaching consultant, agrees they deserve better facilities.

But he added: “I think if you’re training in a tough, hard, rugged environment, you play tough, hard and rugged footy, and that’s what the Sharks are about.”

Gallen made the point that this group of players “know each other inside out” but might not be together much longer, so now is as good a time as any to realise their potential.

“You want your best players playing well at the back end of the year and being fit and healthy,” he said.

“I think if they can get that happening, then they’re a big chance. They’re a very settled team and they’ve been in the finals four years in a row.”

Those four years were under “Fitzy”, who was unaware that Wayne Bennett, Craig Bellamy and Des Hasler took five seasons to win their first titles with Brisbane, Melbourne and Manly respectively. A good omen perhaps?

“I don’t know if those coaches will be wanting their omens to rub off on me too much,” he said with a wry smile.

The straight-shooting Fitzgibbon might not place much stock in superstition, or sentiment, but he knows the value of disappointment.

“We’ve had to learn via pain, to be perfectly honest,” he said. “We haven’t had in our squad anyone who’s won a premiership. We didn’t have any Origin players, for big-game experience, when I came here.

“I think Jesse Ramien was the only player who actually, prior to ’24, had won a semi.

“So all of our learnings have come the hard way by exposure and experience of what semi-finals are about.

“Now we’ve had four years of that and then the first two were filled with pain, and then the last two have been improvements at the highest end of the game.

“So we’ve got to get back to a level we know we’re at and we’ve also got to time our run. But there’s a lot of footy that we’re going to pass under the bridge before we get anywhere close to it.”