Kieran Foran once stepped away from league a broken man. Now he has to fix a broken club
Opinion
It’s almost 10 years to the day.
Kieran Foran and his Parramatta teammates were doing an hour-long media session where all members of the NRL squad were available for interviews.
The sessions are mandatory for all clubs and take place pre-season, mid-season and on the eve of finals.
They’re an opportunity for television, newspaper and radio journalists to do one-on-one interviews. They are a kind of organised chaos.
At the Eels’ temporary training base on the site of the old Parramatta livestock sale yards in July 2016, Foran was hot property. He had left Manly, where he played in the 2011 premiership win, and joined the Eels as captain.
It’s a big job at a big club. While sitting with my colleague Danny Weidler from Nine News as the cameraman set up the lighting, the three of us made small talk and cracked a few jokes.
Foran was there, but he wasn’t there. He was polite, smiled and tried to be engaged in what was happening, but he looked pained. He was fidgety, couldn’t concentrate and looked like he wanted to disappear.
Afterwards, I said to Danny: “Is Foran OK?” He said he wasn’t, and had a lot going on in his private life.
Days later, Foran walked out on rugby league and went to rehab. His life had spiralled. There was a marriage breakdown, plus gambling and substance abuse, including an overdose.
He was a young man, only 25.
That he was able to work on his demons, put himself back together and play a further nine seasons of NRL and finish his career in his beloved New Zealand Test jersey in November last year shows what kind of character Manly has installed as its interim coach.
From where he was in life, it wasn’t an easy fix.
On top of his off-field issues, he dealt with an unending list of injuries but fought back time after time in a way only the toughest do.
It’s now impossible to find anyone in the NRL community who will bag him.
His greatest strength was putting aside all the outside noise and concentrating on the task at hand. The first of those was to sort himself out. If he didn’t do that, he couldn’t play rugby league again, let alone be a father and role model to his children.
He also had to restore his relationships with people in the game.
He looks you in the eye, shakes your hand and knows your name. It mightn’t be PC to say this these days, but he’s an old-fashioned man’s man in many ways.
Those strengths will get him through the 2026 season as Manly’s NRL coach.
Whichever way you look at it, Manly is broken. The reasons are many.
First and foremost, they don’t have a playing roster capable of featuring in finals football. Foran will coach on a philosophy of pride in the jersey, but that only gets you so far.
Factional fighting and an odd ownership structure only compound the problem.
Like many clubs, Manly are both blessed and cursed by golden eras. Blessed because they won premierships in the Bob Fulton era of the 1970s and again in the golden Des Hasler years which yielded titles in 2008 and 2011.
But eras such as that empower that playing group who go on to become loud voices on any issue at their old club.
Think the Broncos of the 1990s, Parramatta of the 1980s, the Wests Tigers of 2005, and Newcastle from around the turn of the century.
In times of trouble, clubs turn to those eras to haul them out. So Manly have gone to Foran and have another favourite son, Jason King, also a member of the Hasler era premierships, as CEO.
They’ve done it before. Many times.
The club was dominated by Fulton and his family for decades in a reign which served it both well and poorly, depending on who you listen to.
And, despite Hasler quitting the club immediately after winning the 2011 premiership following clandestine talks with Canterbury, the club went back to him cap-in-hand in 2019 after the Trent Barrett disaster, where he walked out because of a lack of investment in high performance.
After buying furniture himself to help with meetings, Barrett took legal action, a path Hasler also took when he was axed for Anthony Seibold at the end of 2022.
You get the picture. There’s always something happening at Manly because nothing good is happening at Manly.
Maybe something will happen now. Despite one off-season and three matches as an assistant, Foran takes the top job, having served no coaching apprenticeship at all.
Even Wayne Bennett served one under Don Furner at the Raiders in 1987, despite having won premierships in the Brisbane competition.
It may be in an interim capacity, but the task is immense. They have started with three straight home losses, the worst of which was in round two to Newcastle, when on a sunny Sunday afternoon they were so bad you had to wonder what they actually did all off-season.
Foran will be given nothing but respect from both the Manly faithful and the wider NRL community.
The same can’t be said for owners, the Penn family. Once and for all, they owe it to everyone to show what they actually stand for.
Neil Breen is the national sports editor and a Walkley Award-winning journalist.Connect via X.