The Eels enjoyed a breakthrough season in 2017. Not only did they finally end their post-season drought, they finished in the Top 4 and gave the eventual premiers in the Melbourne Storm one hell of a scare in their home fortress in week one of the finals. It was a critical juncture for our club after the torrid events of 2016 and at the heart of it all lies one man – Brad Arthur. Throw in the media and fan furor surrounding the recently announced return of one Jarryd Hayne and it felt like now was the right time to gaze back at the genesis of Brad Arthur’s Eels as well as contemplate what lies ahead for them.

A club, shattered

There is no delicate way to phrase this…the Eels were well and truly beyond a state of complete disaster after the events of 2013. The appointment of Ricky Stuart as Head Coach backfired spectacularly as Parramatta fell to their second consecutive spoon while the cumulative impact of years of mismanagement, corner-cutting and short-sighted strategising promised little in the way of hope for the future.

In an attempt to set things right, Stuart opted for a brash approach that involved not merely ripping off the piled heaps of patchwork Band-Aids – he damn near took a limb off. Projector Gate, as it would come to be dubbed, involved Stuart informing 12 players that their services were no longer required at the Eels by way of a projector. Not the awesome home theatre sort, but the old-school classroom overhead projector. Remember those?

Now, the only minor issues with this bold, albeit crass course of action was that it occurred in the middle of the season – in a clear boost for team morale – and it led to the club forking out in excess of a colossal $750,000 of payments to other clubs for these cast-offs. Shattering the psyche of an entire playing group while simultaneously crippling the future salary cap is an impressive 2-for-1 no matter how you look at it. Do not mistake my sarcasm laden words mind you. I absolutely agreed with the intentions behind Stuart’s actions. The Eels desperately needed a massive cleanout but the way he went about it went beyond counter-productive.

Indeed, it was perhaps this single, bizarre moment involving a bloody projector of all things that served as the catalysed to a sequence of catastrophic and mind-bogglingly stupid events that would ultimately serve as a defining moment in the history of our club. More on that later though.

Any seasoned NRL coach would be foolish, nay, insane to take on the task of rebuilding this embattled club after Stuart walked away. Never mind a rookie shot-caller that was intimately aware of the festering rot that permeated the club from its District Representative programs right up until the first-grade squad. Brad Arthur knew exactly what he was getting into at the Eels after his tenure as an Assistant Coach to Stephen Kearney at the Eels from 2011-2012.

Yet that didn’t perturb Arthur, if anything he coveted the poisoned chalice that was the Head Coach of the Parramatta Eels

A rebuild like none before it

When Brad Arthur assumed the mantle of Head Coach at Parramatta in 2014 he inherited a NRL roster that had run 14^th, 16^th and 16^th from 2011-2013. He wasn’t exactly flush with a bevy of talent from the juniors either given our NYC roster had finished 12^th, 15^th and 14^th in the same period of time. We are talking Punic Wars salting of the earth type stuff.

Yet from the humblest of beginnings, Arthur somehow did what Stuart, Kearney and even Anderson failed to do – he made this rag-tag bunch of footballers competitive. Spearheaded by a Dally M winning individual campaign by Jarryd Hayne, the Eels would ultimately fall painstakingly short of the post-season with last start losses to the Newcastle Knights and Canberra Raiders relegating them to 10^th place and outside the Top 8 on points differential.

Even so, the likes of Kenny Edwards, Manu Ma’u, Tepai Moeroa, Corey Norman, Junior Paulo and Semi Radradra emerged as core pieces internally while Isaac De Gois, David Gower and Nathan Peats added plenty as newcomers. Despite a crippled cap and unbalanced playing roster, the Eels were ascending.

Then, just as you would be forgiven for raising your hopes as a fan, a sickening body blow. Jarryd Hayne, the sole marquee player of the Eels, was leaving the NRL immediately to pursue a dream in the NFL. BA had extracted the best out of Hayne, spurring him to a second Dally M medal and now legendary heroics in the 2014 State of Origin series. Jarryd seemed poised to cement his legacy as one of the most dominant players of the modern era but in a blink of an eye he was gone.

It was tantamount to hitting the reset button for the umpteenth time. How could the club possibly recover from this set back? With the benefit of hindsight, it is the sort of question that we know the Eels, under the tutelage of Arthur, would answer time and time again.

Parramatta took their lumps in 2015. The high-profile recruitment of Anthony Watmough ended with a mid-year, season ending knee injury sustained against the Canterbury Bulldogs in Round 19. Fate would deign it that this game would ultimately prove to be the final time Watmough would play for the Eels. Incidentally, this was also the same game where Chris Sandow infamously quit on the team.

Arthur clearly took a risk in signing the aging veteran in an attempt to galvanise the culture of the battered Parramatta locker room.  It is hard to knock any fan that feels bitter about the legacy of the ‘Choc’ signing, but the same token it arguably helped pave the way for a wave of major moves in the impending free agency…which leads us to 2016.

Apocalypse now

2016 was always going to be different. Spurred on by the biggest recruitment drive since the arrival of the Canterbury 4 in 1996. With Beau Scott recruited to be the enforcer in the forward pack, Michael Jennings set to be a difference maker in backline the Eels and Michael Gordon brought in to be the mentor the highly touted prospect that was Bevan French the Eels were vastly improved over the park. However, beyond even these crucial additions was the crown jewel – Kieran Foran. A proven winner with a flawless record. The ultimate competitor. 2016 was going to be different, just for all the wrong reasons.

For all the pure, unbridled optimism shared by the fan base (or perhaps cautious optimism!) for the improvement in our playing roster, the pall of an arduous and almost unprecedently thorough salary cap investigation hung over every victory through the opening exchanges of the season. A stirring victory over the Bulldogs (seriously what is it with Canterbury and bad news for the Eels?) in Round 9 improved the Eels to a 6-3 record. It was then that the hammer dropped.

After repeated years of second tier cap and NYC cap infringements along with the systematic abuse of third party payments for a period of time extending from 2013 to the present day the Eels were stripped of all accrued competition points and differential earned across the first nine rounds of 2016. Their triumphant campaign in the Auckland Nines earlier in the preseason was scratched from the history books and a fine of $1,500,000 was levied against the club.

Nathan Peats was released to the Gold Coast Titans immediately in order to become cap compliant, lest the club incur further sanctions. The Canberra Raiders swooped in to sign emerging booked Junior Paulo amidst the before successfully pressuring for an early release. With Ryan Morgan already been released to the Melbourne Storm earlier in the season the immediate impact of the sanctions was an impressive bloodletting of the Top 25 contracted players.

All that and somehow the Eels still had not hit rock bottom. The absurdity of that statement resonates with me even as I type it a year and a half after the fact. The worst was most definitely still to come.

Originally recruited to become the lynch-pin spine player for BA and lead the Eels to a new era of prosperity, Kieran Foran fell into a pit of darkness. The story is well-known by all rugby league pundits these days but the crux of the matter is that the Eels were left gutted both by the illicit actions of multiple administrations as well as the personal life of their marquee recruit catching up with him.

So, there we finally have our sequence of catastrophic and mind-bogglingly stupid events that were first set in action all the way back in 2013. Under lesser leadership you could easily envision the Eels slumping to another decade of irrelevance. Thankfully though, all the drama, all the chaos and all the suffering did lead to a pay-off. 2016 was the making of the Eels under Brad Arthur.

In spite of falling short of their lofty goal to make the finals after the NRL sanctions, the Eels still recorded their first winning season (13-11) since the legendary run of 2009. Corey Norman stood up as a play-maker (before he was stood down for off-field silliness), Clinton Gutherson exploded onto the scene as the NRL’s Premier Mr Fix It while Bevan French electrified from the wing in his rookie campaign.

More than any win-loss record, the Eels were playing a brand of football that inspired belief from their fans. Vicious, swarming defence set the tone for plucky, if opportunistic raids while in possession. Despite the personnel losses, despite the sanctions, it was easily the most enjoyable half a season of football I have watched from the Eels since 2009. Freed from expectations fans were able to watch a band of footballers rally together for both themselves and their coach. And it was glorious. There was one more to thing to it though.

It was the birth of an identity.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

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