Ivan Cleary says Warriors "didn’t want me"

By Neil Reid

Ivan Cleary says he left the Warriors head coach role because club management “didn’t want me”.

The modern-era league super coach – who both played for and coached the Warriors – has opened up in his new book about the highs and lows of his career, Not Everything Counts, But Everything Matters.

That includes the highs such as four premiership successes with Penrith and coaching his son and one of the world’s best players, Nathan, and lows such as battling depression, Sonny Fai’s tragic death and his messy exit from the Warriors.

And in a revelation that would make long-suffering Warriors fans shudder, mentor and former All Blacks coach John Hart – who was the Warriors’ executive director of football – says if things were handled better, both Ivan and Nathan Cleary could be at the Warriors.

Cleary became head coach of the NRL club in 2006.

And in his new book – released in Australia on Wednesday – it was a job he wanted to keep, asking Warriors management in mid-2011 for a contract extension after he was approached about a potential shift to coach the Penrith Panthers.

“The club replied that they wanted to wait before they extended me, which only confirmed my suspicions,” Cleary reveals in the memoir.

“It was my sixth season in charge, and although we’d made the finals consistently, the management – not including John Hart – didn’t think I had what it took to take the club to its maiden title.

“I hadn’t wanted to leave the Warriors, but they didn’t want me. They wanted someone to take them to the next level. It was a business decision, which was their prerogative.”

Cleary said he had feared after the 2009 season – where the club was rocked by tragedy and finished 14th – that he was “on borrowed time as head coach of the New Zealand Warriors”.

He felt then club owner Eric Watson and the board wanted a Kiwi coaching the side, with Brian McClennnan the favoured choice.

McClennan did ultimately replace Cleary.

But it was a decision that started a coaching merry-go-round at the club, with McClennan quitting within a season of his two-year deal.

“John tried his best to convince the Warriors to keep me,” Cleary wrote, “but when he realised that he too wasn’t being supported any longer, he was instrumental in orchestrating an early exit for me so I could join the Panthers for season 2012.”

Hart also writes about Cleary’s exit from the Warriors at the end of the 2011 season in the book’s foreword.

He said the pair had a “close bond” and that he “held him the highest regard”.

“I thought he could be the Warriors coach for decades to come. He could still be there now,” Hart wrote in the book.

“But he’d asked for a contract extension earlier that year after Penrith came calling, hoping to lure him back. When management wasn’t prepared to give it to him straight away, preferring to wait until the end of the season, the relationship broke down.

“I often wonder how those leading the Warriors look back at 2011. Had they made the right decision and kept Ivan Cleary, he might well still be the club’s head coach today. And who knows? They might have Nathan, his son, as well.”

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission