Posted By Staff Reporter
OUR Kumuls will again struggle in the World Cup. That cannot be denied.
In sport, one is only as good as your last performance and Papua New Guinea’s most popular sports team will not cut the mustard in England if the past two performances are to be used as a gauge. An extremely dour Kumuls trial match followed up by a 40-point spanking at the hands of the Australian Prime Minister’s XIII last week point to a bleak future. Someone needs to be held accountable for these below par showings by our supposedly best players. But while the players are the easiest to target, the coaching team must be looked at because it is the coaching that has a telling influence on any team. The obvious question is what have the highly paid Adrian Lam and Mal Meninga done to boost our World Cup chances of success? On performance they have done nothing substantial. After the Kokopo result no one in the Kumuls management spoke at length about what the loss means and how Papua New Guinea could bounce back. Why the silence from Lam Meninga? Lam has mostly been unscathed by criticism over his long tenure as Kumuls coach (2007-2013 and counting). The question that everyone should be asking is have we made any progress under Lam? He failed in the 2008 World Cup and today we are nowhere any closer to beating teams like Australia, New Zealand and England? We cannot even beat an Australian PM’s XIII. Lam’s winning percentage with the Kumuls is in a word abysmal. There was much ado about Meninga taking over as head of the high-performance unit. What high performance we ask. PNG have never reached a World semi-final. If they do not make the quarter-finals at least, then heads must roll, starting with Lam and Meninga. Comments are closed.
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