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THE NRL's buy of the year is a middle aged man with skin folds you could use for rock climbing.
He is a thousand miles from a peptide.
He looks eerily similar to St George Illawarra's Matt Prior, some at his club so concerned at this they regularly ask if he is Prior's twin.
No word on what Prior thinks of this.
The NRL's buy of the year is not really one for stats, a good thing because his four games in three years hardly has the Hall of Fame calling upon him.
Yet he is just 18 rounds into his new career and, already it must be said, Trent Robinson is emerging as one of the great teachers.
There can be no finer compliment for a coach.
Yes, the NRL's buy of the year is a coach, not a player.
Robinson has turned the Roosters from a roster of fattened talent, 13th last season, into this outfit we see now currently second on the table and now favourites with the bookies.
There was no more astute off-season signing.
He was hired as a hope and pray filler for the Roosters in the midst of their five-year rebuilding plan, which comes along annually, and he was hired for two very good reasons.
He was cheap and he was available.
Brian Smith was sacked with a year to run on his contract and the Roosters were forced to pay out his final year while, in the meantime, new deals to Wayne Bennett and Des Hasler had seen coaching contracts explode.
The pockets run deeper at the Roosters than anywhere else but even they were baulking at all those extra zeroes in coaching contracts, but they didn't mind: they knew they had the right man.
First, Robinson didn't care about the cash, he just wanted a chance.
And second, his hidden attraction was that from the moment Smith was sacked Robinson was the name on the players' lips as the one they wanted.
Chairman Nick Politis closed the deal.
Nobody believed it could have worked out so well.
And it is not just the talent, either. Off-season buys Sonny Bill Williams and Michael Jennings, James Maloney and Luke O'Donnell.
Robinson has resurrected Daniel Mortimer, found Jared Waerea-Hargreaves was more than a penalty waiting to happen, polished Sam Moa into a newly discovered jewel.
More, there is something else to him, something that rises above the mere improvement in the Roosters and suggests not just a longevity, but a gift.
"He's just got a presence about him where, I don't know how to put it, he's just ... he's very smart," Boyd Cordner says.
Cordner talks of Robinson, early in the season, coaching the Roosters through practice, and the simply philosophy of cause and effect.
There isn't a coach in the game these days that can't quote from the book of coach-speak. Completions, winning the ruck, it's all there as they reinvent the language and baffle the masses.
But what Chomsky once said remains true: if you can't explain something simply then you probably can't explain it at all, and in a lot of cases there seems to be a disconnect between coaches and their players.
Never a star player, Robinson was still an intelligent footballer.
He understood he couldn't take shortcuts as a player or he never would have got even those four games that he did, and so he knew he had to know the game.
Not just what to do, but why it had to be done. That now drives his coaching.
"As a team we might be going away from our structures and instead of stating the obvious, he seems to know what the players are thinking, their reasons," Mitch Pearce says.
"A lot of coaches get caught up with the visual stuff, what they see.
"He understands why you were doing it."
For instance he might tell them that their sets are poor, not because they're playing laterally, and they need to play more direct, as most coaches will.
He'll tell them why he believes they are playing laterally, which they'll recognise, and then he'll explain how playing more directly will in fact give them the result they are after.
"That reinforces in people that it does work," Pearce says.
It's a depth of knowledge beyond the ordinary, and reveals a coach intensely intelligent but with a common touch.
A coach who understands that you don't have to baffle them with brilliance to impress players.
A man whose great talent is his ordinariness, and was the smartest buy the Roosters made all summer.
THE NRL's buy of the year is a middle aged man with skin folds you could use for rock climbing.
He is a thousand miles from a peptide.
He looks eerily similar to St George Illawarra's Matt Prior, some at his club so concerned at this they regularly ask if he is Prior's twin.
No word on what Prior thinks of this.
The NRL's buy of the year is not really one for stats, a good thing because his four games in three years hardly has the Hall of Fame calling upon him.
Yet he is just 18 rounds into his new career and, already it must be said, Trent Robinson is emerging as one of the great teachers.
There can be no finer compliment for a coach.
Yes, the NRL's buy of the year is a coach, not a player.
Robinson has turned the Roosters from a roster of fattened talent, 13th last season, into this outfit we see now currently second on the table and now favourites with the bookies.
There was no more astute off-season signing.
He was hired as a hope and pray filler for the Roosters in the midst of their five-year rebuilding plan, which comes along annually, and he was hired for two very good reasons.
He was cheap and he was available.
Brian Smith was sacked with a year to run on his contract and the Roosters were forced to pay out his final year while, in the meantime, new deals to Wayne Bennett and Des Hasler had seen coaching contracts explode.
The pockets run deeper at the Roosters than anywhere else but even they were baulking at all those extra zeroes in coaching contracts, but they didn't mind: they knew they had the right man.
First, Robinson didn't care about the cash, he just wanted a chance.
And second, his hidden attraction was that from the moment Smith was sacked Robinson was the name on the players' lips as the one they wanted.
Chairman Nick Politis closed the deal.
Nobody believed it could have worked out so well.
And it is not just the talent, either. Off-season buys Sonny Bill Williams and Michael Jennings, James Maloney and Luke O'Donnell.
Robinson has resurrected Daniel Mortimer, found Jared Waerea-Hargreaves was more than a penalty waiting to happen, polished Sam Moa into a newly discovered jewel.
More, there is something else to him, something that rises above the mere improvement in the Roosters and suggests not just a longevity, but a gift.
"He's just got a presence about him where, I don't know how to put it, he's just ... he's very smart," Boyd Cordner says.
Cordner talks of Robinson, early in the season, coaching the Roosters through practice, and the simply philosophy of cause and effect.
There isn't a coach in the game these days that can't quote from the book of coach-speak. Completions, winning the ruck, it's all there as they reinvent the language and baffle the masses.
But what Chomsky once said remains true: if you can't explain something simply then you probably can't explain it at all, and in a lot of cases there seems to be a disconnect between coaches and their players.
Never a star player, Robinson was still an intelligent footballer.
He understood he couldn't take shortcuts as a player or he never would have got even those four games that he did, and so he knew he had to know the game.
Not just what to do, but why it had to be done. That now drives his coaching.
"As a team we might be going away from our structures and instead of stating the obvious, he seems to know what the players are thinking, their reasons," Mitch Pearce says.
"A lot of coaches get caught up with the visual stuff, what they see.
"He understands why you were doing it."
For instance he might tell them that their sets are poor, not because they're playing laterally, and they need to play more direct, as most coaches will.
He'll tell them why he believes they are playing laterally, which they'll recognise, and then he'll explain how playing more directly will in fact give them the result they are after.
"That reinforces in people that it does work," Pearce says.
It's a depth of knowledge beyond the ordinary, and reveals a coach intensely intelligent but with a common touch.
A coach who understands that you don't have to baffle them with brilliance to impress players.
A man whose great talent is his ordinariness, and was the smartest buy the Roosters made all summer.
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