Outgoing Gold Coast interim coach Craig Hodges has challenged the club’s middle-aged players to dig deeper and its young up-and-comers to take after retiring veteran Michael Gordon after rounding out their dismal 2019 campaign with a loss.
The Titans made it 11 defeats on the trot on Saturday night, falling to St George Illawarra 24-16 at Cbus Super Stadium.
A standout moment for Hodges, who has signed as Easts Tigers coach for the next two Queensland Cup seasons, was a second half passage of play during which Gordon made back-to-back try-saving tackles.
“If at any stage, at the start had he walked for the first 2m or if he just had a jog and hadn’t have sprinted like he did, he wouldn’t have made it,” Hodges said.
“I thought that effort probably summed up his whole career. It was a career based on effort.”
Noting that the next 18 months of recruitment and retention decisions “will shape probably a generation of Titans success or failure,” Hodges left no doubt about the fact Gordon’s level of effort must now serve as the benchmark under incoming coach Justin Holbrook.
“The club has been pretty blunt (since) a while ago on (saying) that’s the sort of things they are going to value, and the sort of things that are going to keep people in positions. So everybody has got an opportunity to show whether they are willing to do that,” he said.
“We lose a very good effort player in Michael through his retirement.
“Hopefully some of those younger players coming through like Moe (Fotuaika) and AJ (Brimson) and Tanah (Boyd) … all these guys are right at the beginning of their careers.
“If they learn that stuff right from the beginning, it’s really important.
“And some of the guys in the middle of their careers I guess have a bit of a decision to make about how they want to finish the back end of their career.
“You can coast through being well paid and live a good life or you can knuckle down and everything is done five or 10 per cent better at training, and everything is done five or 10 per cent better in preparation, and they’ll find themselves making those sort of efforts that Flash made.”