Stacey Jones set for farewell

Wednesday 2nd September 2009

STACEY JONES doesn't want a grand farewell when he plays his final game of rugby league on Saturday for the New Zealand Warriors against the Melbourne Storm on Saturday.
While this definitely, definitely, is the end for the man who has had more exits than a character in a stage play, the best Kiwi player of his generation wants to slip quietly into retirement. In fact, all he really wants is a win – which may be the one thing the Warriors cannot deliver him, given the Storm are sitting in fourth and his own team are in abject form and lie 14th.

What Jones hates most about rugby league, and playing in Auckland in particular, is the “fishbowl’’. While the rugby union-dominated Auckland bears little resemblance to the Sydney bearpit, where league players are stalked around nightclubs by young women, photographers and trouble, Jones’ status in New Zealand means he has become regarded as a national treasure.

It’s one reason why he escaped to France in 2006 to join Catalans Dragons, figuring that there, at least, he would be left alone. When he returned to Auckland in 2008, with stated ambitions to do no more than go to his Northland holiday home and fish for snapper, he happily took up a low-key coaching role at the Warriors.

It was the club who inveigled him into playing again this season, but at the start of the year all he was expecting was a few games off the bench. Yet by round three, he was the starting halfback and after a starring performance against Manly, was hailed by the New Zealand Herald newspaper as the “saviour’’ of the Warriors.

But the public quickly turned on Jones as the Warriors’ season turned sour. Within three months, the Herald were demanding the club punt him.

One of the biggest criticisms was of his defence, but when I analysed the statistics, they showed he was far from the worst tackling halfback in the NRL (that was South Sydney’s Chris Sandow, who misses 69% of his attempts) and was one of the more hardworking. I showed them to him, and he gave me a weary grin, saying: “I cop a lot of shit for my tackling.’’

His understudy at halfback, the former Leigh, Widnes and Halifax no7 Aaron Heremaia, said he remembers chatting to Jones, who told him the media had built him up too much after the Manly game then smashed him ever since. “That’s what happens when you’re the seven, they build up when you win, and they blame you when you lose,’’ Heremaia observed.

The club were as aggrieved as Jones. Why was he doing such defensive work? Because the blokes around him weren’t working hard enough. It was the same in attack – Jones couldn’t put on the plays if he didn’t have bodies in motion around him. Blaming one man for such a bad season was naive at best.

The coach, Ivan Cleary, was one of his biggest defenders and pushed him to re-sign for 2010. In the end, it was also Cleary who advised him, as a friend, to retire – he had seen how much stress the Little General was suffering.
The club tell me they will offer Jones a job next season, probably coaching their halfbacks. That’s ironic, because the issue this year wasn’t Jones, but that there is no one else like him – since he left the first time, the Warriors have been searching for a new halfback, and tried a heap of them without ever quite finding another Stacey.
After this Saturday, the search begins again.
 
THE CLUB season in New Zealand will also come to an end this Saturday; while most districts finished a few weeks ago, Auckland’s major finals are still to come. New Zealand’s most dominant club side of the past decade, Mt Albert, are again in the Fox Premier final with a familiar front row of Matt Sturm (ex Warrington) and Julian O’Neill (the former Saints prop) against a Dean Clark-coached Papakura, who made the final from third place. The second division final matches Howick against Glenora, coached by Duane Mann, and the third division final features Manukau against the Waiheke Island Rams, a team from a tiny Gulf island of 6.000 people.