The Warriors have united a nation with a rookie head coach who describes himself as ‘a player who was slow, very unathletic and lacked any ability’. So, how did Andrew Webster get here?
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Of all the places to have a working holiday in Europe, the bottom of lifeless concrete steps at a rugby league ground in northern England, picking up papers, would be for very few people. Croatia and Crete and countless other exotic locations are options, but a ginger-haired footballer who knows his playing career is done prefers Craven Park.
“I think the players [like Marshall] that have played 100 or 200 games have earned the right to walk into big jobs,” Webster says. “They can transition straight from playing to coaching. But if you’re not that guy, you’ve got to find another way to go down that avenue – and you’ve got to take a risk.”The lazy option would be to describe Webster, 41, as the NRL’s overnight success story, a first-year head coach in charge of the Warriors, the season’stale after years of perennial underachieving.
Former Tigers premiership-winning hero and family friend of the Websters, Parramatta general manager Mark O’Neill, knew from a young age Andrew was destined to make it as a coach.“He’s got a curious mind and he loves to work,” O’Neill says. “He’s got an appetite for knowledge, but at the same time he knows what he wants and what he needs to do to get it. People see him as an overnight success, but he’s been coaching for a long time.
George had considered Webster for the role when Brown was appointed before the 2021 season, but Webster had already agreed to join Ivan Cleary’s staff at the Panthers . This time, he sent a text to Webster asking about his contract status. George’s phone rang straight away.“I said, ‘Would you be interested if [a job] came up here? I think the time is right’,” George says. “His exact words were, ‘f--- yeah, George’. I said, ‘Righto, the next time I call you it will be your job to lose’.
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