Catalans Dragons head coach Steve McNamara has delivered a candid and detailed assessment on where this season went wrong for his side.
After going agonisingly close to Grand Final success in 2023, Catalans set out this season with the intention of going one better and finally getting their hands on the main prize at Old Trafford. They spent much of the campaign inside the top six too, as they looked to compete with the likes of Wigan Warriors, Hull KR and Warrington Wolves.
Unfortunately for the French club, a dismal drop off in form over the final weeks, winning just four of their last 10 games in Super League, saw them drop out of the play-off picture and not even a final day win over Hull FC could rescue the situation.
As such, for the first time since 2019, the Dragons missed out on a play-off spot. McNamara came under some pressure at the back end of the season, with president Bernard Guasch even suggesting changes could be made following the club’s loss to London Broncos.
However, as he digests what has been a difficult period in Perpignan, McNamara has opened up on where he believes the Perpignan outfit fell short.
“I think before we talk about attack or defence or anything else, I take full responsibility for the team’s performance,” McNamara said in a press conference posted on the Catalans Dragons website. “That’s what the head coach does. We’ve had some really really good seasons and been involved, but this year we’ve been disappointing.
“Personally, from my own perspective, in 2023 we went all out for the Grand Final, I was a bit blinkered trying to get that win and get that Grand Final, it took too long for me to recover and I don’t think I evolved the team enough. We had lots of changes coming into the group and I own that.
“In terms of attack we found it difficult to score points, it’s quite clear. The previous year the points conceded was very similar we only conceded seven points more.
“But our attack and our inability to score points and finish off opportunities, you feel that there was no opportunities created but when you look back and see the opportunities we missed, there were chances. With that we lost confidence and with that we tried to coach more on our attack, improve it and spend more time on it.
“By doing that we probably put a little more pressure on it than was needed and we lost focus on some of the other really important areas of our game which has been the foundation of our game for a number of years.
“It was a double-edged sword, we tried to fix one thing, which we never actually fixed, and damaged other areas of our game which were important for us to win.
“When you review really successful seasons, and we’ve had some of those in recent times, when you talk in those reviews one of the biggest things that comes out is how well connected you were.
“That connection, we never got that. We’ve done lots of reviews this week as groups of coaches, groups of players, individual players and individual coaches and it’s the one common theme there that’s coming out. We never got the connection throughout the team but particularly in our spine.”
