OK, now the dust has settled i thought it would be interesting to hear on peoples thoughts on how good of a job McNamara did overall with the England and whether you would keep him.

Personally i think poor. 3 years he has had. He's has all the resources and been given a chance to do things his way. He's also had the best set of players for a number of years. Yet has achieved very little. 1 win in 7 against NZ & OZ is a terrible record! Add to that embarrassing losses to the exiles, Italy and scrappy victories over Fiji & France. Yet one excellent performance against NZ is enough to convince some people he is a good enough coach? We were playing in front of 65+ at wembley, in a semi final of a home WC against the world champion. I think most coaches could have got us motivated for that. Yet when all said and done we still lost. In the most brutal game i've ever seen, Mcnamara player effectively 15 players. One player played 10 minutes and the 17th man didn't get on at all. Great tactics!

Then there is the selection farce. For two years Mcnamara went with Chase/Sinfield. It was obvious to most it was never going to work. But Mcnamara stuck at it almost ignorantly. Our best half back who won every individual award going this year went on to play for Scotland as it became obvious to every person involved in the sport Mcnamara wasn't going to pick him. He then realises on the ever of the Semi final that it's not going to work and changes the half back combination to a completely new one. What if Mcnamara had have been left stubborn/ignorant and tried Sinfield/Widdop more before (IE warm up games/ or the group games against the minnows) maybe they would have worked that extra 1%. Then there are the laughable inclusions of Ben Cockayne and the original non inclusion of Brett Ferres who turned out to be one of our best performers. Or the fact he chose Mossop & T Burgess, quickly realised neither were good enough and didn't select either again. All this time Crabtree who was one of the best props this season, was sitting in the studios!

Just don't see why people think he's the man for the job on one decent performance. Comparing it to 08 is ludicrous. That squad contained Calderwood, lee Smith, Wellens, Gardner and Senior in out back line.

All the above is my opinion of course, wondered what others opinions are.

I'd say poor at the most. we never really looked like beating Australia. yes we did beat new Zealand in a couple of games over here but that was against a poor NZ team IMO. as you said the persistence of having a sinfield and chase half back combination was just stupid and also the forwards leaving out crabtree when he had a great year. leaving out graham against Australia in the first game and putting hock in the squad who IMO had not deserved to be there and ultimately letting him down and getting kicked out due to bad behaviour. And that's really all in just one tournament.

sadly (for him) the difference between 'poor' and 'very good' all rested on that semi-final....but it has to be poor for me! We were the second best team in the RLWC and yet we didn't make the final.

I personally wouldn't be devastated if he is still coach for the 4 nations as i think England have improved technically leaps and bounds but it would be last chance saloon certainly!

Average bordering on poor for me.

We are actually at the stage now where I am quite positive about the future of England/GB because of the quality youngsters breaking through, but that's nothing to do with him. By and large he stuck with the safe options which just didn't work. He waited far too long to bring in Widdop, he alienated Danny Brough and dealt with the media very poorly.

ATEOTD we are a better team than NZ, especially on home soil, and we blew it. Based on that alone he can't be judged to be a success.

When you don't have the players for the key positions and use only make do and mend tactic then anyone who expected anything else was seriously deluded.
McNamara did the best he could with the talent at his disposal.
One day, and it isn't going to happen soon , by the amount of overseas crocks being signed, the clubs may realise there is a problem but then my club, my club, my club, my club, is all that you get along with bigger blinkers.

It's got nothing to so with me wanting players from my club. There's no one from my club who deserved to be picked (Crooks and Lineham will be internationals but not yet). Decisions like picking T Burgess over Crabtree and leaving it until the final to play comfortably our best half are the kind of things I'm talking about.

There is no "OK" option. I am realistic, most of the reasons are out of his control the main being the number of players he has to choose from. Also the Aussies & Kiwis are improving as well. As I have said to the point of boring everyone untill the game is in schools & the game of choice for 10 times the number now playing we won't get anywhere near winning no matter who we have as coach. He is a good organiser & coach, let him stick with the job

He was terrible at Bradford and the same for England.
His squad selection was awful and team selection worse.
It seems well known in the game that he didn't know his best team, didn't have any tactics or gameplan and couldn't motivate his squad.
His man management was obviously poor with a third of his squad out drinking disobeying his instructions. Their respect for him comes into that too.
Sending Hock home was fully justified but leaving Graham out of the first game v Australia was ludicrous. Many other forms of disciplinary action were available and could have been taken leaving Graham to play.
His media relations were a disaster with him saying Hardaker was ill when it took Leeds just a coupe of days to contradict that.
McNamara was one of the worst coaches England have ever had.
I see in the trade press the RFL are talking to him about a new deal!

He did everything he could, but was seriously let down by a small number of players who disrespected the jersey and acted like children. Mcnamara took the right course of action by trying to keep matters internal, but again certain players made that difficult. Selection aside, which IMO is always a matter of personal preference he did a good job and was moments away from seeing us reach the final. If you got rid, who would you replace him with?

Darryl Powell. Been in the setup before.
Superb coach and wouldn't let club loyalties get in his way. The role does not need to be full time anymore.

Too many bad calls. We were 'learning on the job' with regard to Tom Burgess. It took us 4 games to pick the right half back combination and we chopped and changed the hooker system, Roby, Roby and Burrow, Roby and McIllorum...

We have been preparing for years for this competition, none more so than the two weeks in SA to decide these combinations. We learnt nothing from SA, the Italy game and not much from there on in.

The quality of the playing group has improved since 2008, but they were not prepared as well as they could have been.

Correct, we had the best forwards, comparable backs, but after that nobody to actually make use of either both at coaching level and through that with the halves and hooker decisions

So success or fail?

Fail

Chris Irvine ‏@Chrisirvine

As we've been writing for weeks @England_RL head coach Steve McNamara is to cross codes to become attack/skills coach at @bathrugby

To me he was average he made to many mistakes is biggest was playing chase, I said loads of times I would not have chase in my team and I would not have let a x druggy near my team, no matter how good people think he is he proved that with is up and maybe cost us the win against the AUSSIS we need to get a good no nonsense coach that can deal with players

Ultimately he failed, losing to Australia and NZ has to be seen as failure no matter how well we played. Especially at home.

Two votes for him being excellent? Must have been the man himself and the other must have been Hock not knowing what the word meant!!!

I've been very critical of McNamara in the past. He achieved little at Bradford other than presiding over embarrassing club records (e.g. first team to lose to the Crusaders, squandering a 30 point leads over Wigan in the play-offs and Catalans in the CC, Tansey-gate etc), and left a poor legacy. He signed and picked one of the worst backlines I've seen in SL - Halley, Platt, Sherriffe, Sykes, and Tupou - and before the money problems really hit. He had a track record for signing/picking journeymen players from other SL clubs: Finnegan, Jeffries, Nero, Tadulala, Worrincy etc, who were all picked regularly without showing much improvement. Mick Potter came in and turned Bradford back into a respectable team in his second year, but by that time the Bulls were a financial basket case.

With this in mind it was baffling why McNamara was chosen for the most important coaching job in English RL. That said, a few selection issues aside, McNamara's track record in the world cup was pretty good for me. He's successfully managed to recruit a healthy mix of SL and NRL players, and above all, the performances of the team against Australia and NZ were far superior to the efforts a British team have put in since before the inception of SL IMO. England were playing with more confidence and style than the last moderately successful 'safety first' team mentality we had under Noble. How much this is down to the coach himself is debatable, although it would be nice for him to stay for a few years to make sure the momentum of the gains made in the WC are not immediately squandered.

Average bordering on poor for me. Home advantage, best set of forwards for an age, should have done better. Not a go at Sinfield this but the 2013 world cup imo was a competition too far for him and Widdop along with Brough should have been our halves from the word go.

Kevin Sinfield smashes Shaun Johnson into the royal box, England are competitive in the final (as they were in Cardiff) and this poll looks a whole lot different.

Then it would be "good, despite being massively let down by some of his squad".

As it was, England won the games for which they were favourites (pretty much at a canter) and lost the ones for which they weren't

Andy,

It's a question of how good a job did he do, not how good a job might he have done if things had gone differently. He is judged on what he delivered, which wasn't any different that what you or I would have achieved and therein lies the issue. He delivered nothing to the role that a gobby layman (myself included) couldn't have done.

Actually, if I was head coach there is no way on this planet we would have lost to Italy and thereby we wouldn't have had the crap that followed.

I keep hearing about all these different things he put in place, like training camps and a pathway from the second string to the first team. Forgive my ignorance but surely these existed prior to his arrival? What would have been the point of the under 21s in the eighties and nineties. Did Reilly/Noble/Smith not bother with training camps or was this something that they had no clue about and therefore McNamara was actually light years beyond his peers (if he was how is he ending up as a rah rah skills coach rather than going onto a leading club role?

It took him till his last week in the job to realise, what everyone on this site knew for a very long time, that his team wasn't functioning. Now that is poor.

So it is very fair to say he failed.

The poster who said the line between good and poor came down to the semi final (and, actually, the last 20 seconds of the semi), is spot on. Had we got through, I'd like to think we'd have given the Aussies a better game than NZ did on the emotion of playing in a home final alone.

I think he did a lot of things well politically to put the 'team' in the best position to win (seems to have drawn more budget and resource out of the RFL than any previous international coach, and the team's preparation looks to have been second to none).

On overall squad selection, not sure anyone on here has the qualifications to critisise individual player selections, we've all got our own opinions on individual players / positions and that wouldn't change regardless of the coach.

However, to not know your preferred half back combo until the semi-final of the World Cup having had 3 years to prepare is criminal. That, in itself, is enough for me hope he moves on.

No it isn't fair at all. If all you want to know is the result, then that is a completely different subject. I think this thread is probably meant to be about how well or badly McNamara has coached the England team, as we can all look up the basic results in the paper if we don't know them.

I was at the NZ game and thought the peformance was in most respects excellent, and it was heartwarming to see England play that way, and for much of the game dominate NZ. An of course but for one rash headshot by George Burgess, we would have been playing Australia in the Final, on the back of the best overall England team performance I can remember for many a long year.

So in fairness, McNamara didn't do great, but surely he did very well to get us to peak at that level in that game? Bearing in mind those who have hobby-horses about different individual players will never be pleased if their pet didn't play, but such is coaching, few fans would ever agree on the single best team. My biggest personal issue with selection was, if you were always going to go with Widdop in the crunch game, why not select your halves to play together in the bigger games previously, so they can get a feel for each other's games. But then, he clearly had a plan with Chase, and I have no idea why Chase didn't play against NZ.

All in all in my opinion, and based significanty on how much I enjoyed watching England play at the level they did play in the NZ game, McNamara did a very good job, and he, and England, were unfortunate that we didn't do better.

Aardvark,

You can't stick a one line quote in and then argue against my points. The final line of my post was my summing up of the rest of the pointers.

He lost to feckin Italy!

Don't get mugged into believing they were strong enough to turn us over. No coach worth his salt would lose to a side when the differences in quality were so vast.

And as for the semi final. I totally agree it was England's best performance, probably since Melbourne when we won in the rain (Steady dancing around Meninga like he wasn't even there). But I would have expected every player to lift themselves for a WC SF with that crowd behind them, hardly his coaching genius (remember 10 minutes for Burrow and nothing for Ablett?). A quality coach would have used his bench correctly.

He failed mate. You or I could have used the bench better, motivation for a SF isn't required on such a day.

1. I can do what I like.
2. I'm not arguing against your points, I'm stating my opinion.


Indeed. An irrelevance, and an embarrassment to a small degree, but not relevant in the bigger scheme of things. How relevant would it be to you, or to the question of how well McNamara has done, for example, if England had won the World Cup?


I get that those who are unable to be unbiased always do this. If we win and win well, it is the team that did it despite the coach. If we play very well but get pipped, it was still all down to the team, and despite the coach.

But if we just lose, or lose badly, that is always and inevitably the fault of the coach.

That's not a very sensible way to view things.


Well, he clearly didn't, in the total way you infer. He failed to make the Final. He succeeded in us playing extremely well in the semi-final and all but making it to the big game. Which would have been deserved.


That is a silly view, with respect. I'm cool with all of us having our views as to what we could or would do, but you have no clue why theactual changes were made, who was or wasn't fit etc. It's a reasonable subject to debate, but you confident claim is just OTT nonsense.


I see. So, the most successful teams in the world give the coach a day off on Finals day, do they? Or not bother with a half time address? Hmm. news to me.

Also, motivation is just one of very many things needed from the coach before and during the game. But, if you're right, then your argument must, to you, absolve McNamara from the loss, as presumably you argue that the sole reason was NZ were that bit more self-motivated than us?

Agree with every word. The ones who say Mcnamara did a good job only seem to be referring to the NZ game. Mcnamara was in charge for 3 years as what about he rest of the WC tournament. We won't exactly brilliant in any of the games prior to NZ