Sporting Declaration: What Wayne Bennett thinks of the Knights

In the lead-up to the 2013 NRL season, I sat down with the then powers-that-be at the Newcastle Knights - chairman Paul Harragon, CEO Matt Gidley and coach Wayne Bennett - to discuss how the club was travelling after Bennett's underwhelming first season at the helm.

Two moments stuck in my mind. First, when we asked for them to pose for a photograph, Bennett grumbled "but I haven't shaved today". I would never have realised the great man was so vain.

Then, after dissecting football matters for the best part of an hour, I tossed one last random question at the master coach.

"You've been living here for a bit more than a year now. What is about Newcastle that you like?" I asked him.

He sat there for what seemed an eternity with a puzzled look on his face. Gidley and Harragon started giggling, and one of them said: "Come on, there must be something."

Eventually he replied along the lines of: "We've got a lot of really good people at the club who are all working really hard, and I enjoy working with them."

And that was that. No mention of our beaches, nor the laidback Novocastrian lifestyle, nor any of the other myriad attractions and attributes of what we all know is the greatest city in Australia, if not the world.

In light of all that, I had a fair idea what to expect when the review copy of the new Bennett biography, The Wolf You Feed, arrived in the post last week.

If Bennett has ever had a good word to say about Newcastle, I must have missed it, and I certainly didn't find one in the 434 pages penned by Sydney Morning Herald journalist Andrew Webster.

History would suggest that Bennett's three-year stint at Newcastle was the greatest failure of his career, notwithstanding the fact that barely six months after I interviewed him, Harragon and Gidley, he steered the Knights into a preliminary final.

A decade on, he seems convinced that whatever went wrong was not his fault.

"I'd spent 24 years at the Broncos and Dragons and they were high-performing clubs that has standards, with players who wanted to win premierships," he tells Webster.

"That didn't exist at Newcastle. I'll get criticised for that statement but I'm telling you I know. If I had known what it was like, I wouldn't have gone there. Because I went there to win."

Moreover, in defending his star signing Darius Boyd, Bennett declares: "He's like me: he's a high-performing bloke. He was with a mob of guys who weren't interested. It's hard, I'm telling you."

Remarkably, Bennett reveals that before his first season had even kicked off in 2012, he seriously considered quitting the Knights.

"I had to decide if I was going to destroy the club or drop my own standards and make it work," he says. "The way I coached and what I'd done in the past wasn't going to work with this club."

Bennett is entitled to his opinion, and maybe he's 100 per cent right.

But there were three issues during his tenure that, quite apart from on-field results, I regard as indefensible.

The first is that he continued to publicly vouch for then Knights owner, Nathan Tinkler, despite making it obvious in the book that behind the scenes he knew exactly what the "Boganaire" was really like.

Secondly, Bennett stood by new recruit Russell Packer, despite the club knowing full well that the former Warriors prop had bashed a man unconscious and stomped on his head during a night out in Sydney.

Bennett had sacked players for far less. But it wasn't until after Packer was jailed that the Knights terminated his contract.

Finally, Bennett was responsible for assembling a "Dad's army" roster of mercenaries and blow-ins, most of whom fled as soon as he did, leaving the club in disarray.

Good luck to him in trying to re-write history. I can't imagine too many in Our Town will be buying what he's trying to sell.

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