Departing interim coach Craig Hodges has challenged Gold Coast’s players to match the effort level of retiring veteran Michael Gordon after they rounded out the worst season in the club’s NRL history with another loss.
The wooden spooners made it 11 defeats on the trot on Saturday night, falling to second-last St George Illawarra 24-16 at Cbus Super Stadium to finish the season with just four wins against 20 losses.
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 in which fullback Gordon made back-to-back try-saving tackles.
“If at any stage, at the start had he walked for the first two metres 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.”
The 35-year-old Gordon signed off, just as he played the rest of his 261-game career with five different clubs, giving his all.
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 Gordon’s level of effort must 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,” said Hodges.
“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 (Gordon) made.”
