Church gives chance for redemption

Hello everyone, welcome to the second edition of Church’s comments in your favourite rugby league newspaper — The National.
There has been a fair amount of conjecture around players being offered second opportunities with the SP PNG Hunters after disciplinary action in the past. I understand it’s easy to pass judgment and critique these players being offered another chance.
There’s a thought process that they are professional players and therefore should be held to a higher standard. What gets lost in that thought process is that some of the country is expecting these young men to be perfect.
We need to remember that most of them are in their early to mid- 20’s, most living away from families and friends and without their usual support network.
They are going to make mistakes but it’s about education and learning from those mistakes. I wasn’t privy to the circumstances that led to their actions so I can’t really comment on individual indiscretions.
What I can say is that when I arrived I had a squad of 40 players recommended to me by Michael Marum. I hold Michael in high regard so invited the players on his list in and only made replacements when some of those chose not to come into the Hunters programme.
I am, as their coach, and the Hunters as an organisation are looking into ways to offer more support to the players for welfare and education purposes.
It’s important to me and the club that we educate them, so they make better choices and that we show them the way to become better people not just better players.
The players are aware that I have a motto around behaviour and habits. I speak every day about these aspects. So they understand that THEY will act their way INTO the team and THEY will act their way OUT of the team.
I know this a country of faith, so redemption is something we are all familiar with.
Forgive me for the play on words but I wouldn’t be much of a Church if I didn’t offer them the opportunity and support to seek that redemption. It’s now up to them.
On the training field, we have ramped up our training this week. Monday was a grueling session, training in the heat of the day at 2pm. While extremely tough, I impressed on the group that we are the only team training in these conditions.
All other ISC teams train in the cool of the night. It’s our little badge of honour.
We are basing a lot of our training above game speed. This allows us to train hard but also make quicker decisions.
This should help us when we get into games and there’s a little more time to make decisions.
There’s a lot more game sense training also. The boys are starting to unlock the skills we’ve learned as a group since we started. Most of all, our training has been around the effort areas of the game that takes little to no skill.
Things like effective support play and not giving up on trying to chase someone down, even when you can’t get there. It’s those little efforts that can be the difference between the opposition kicking from in front of the goal posts or from the sideline. This can be the difference between winning and losing.
Some of our younger, less experienced guys have really improved. Steven Bruno is relatively new to the sport but has come along with his knowledge and effort.
Players like Ila Alu, Junior Rop, Casey Dickson just keep working hard and keep turning up on plays. We still are a “work in progress” with our knowledge and understanding of the new playing style but we will get there. It’s like correcting a bad behaviour or bad habit. It’s going to take a little patience and support to get there.
I’ll be back in two weeks on Feb 6 for more updates. And from then on, we will have weekly comments.
Until then “let’s respect and be kind to each other”!

Cheers Matt