Flanagan’s candour,though,is to be admired. This is the first year of the club’s most important rebuild. It doesn’t have too many left to get right before fans start walking away.

Dragons bosses held on too long with Paul McGregor,missed the ball by a metre with their Anthony Griffin air-swing,and are now relying on Flanagan to save their football side.

People judge teams too soon on two elements:their ladder position and the quality of the player they can sign.

Flanagan was criticised during the off-season for failing to pluck a sizeable name from the player market. He missed out on Cowboys half Tom Dearden and Warriors prop Addin Fonua-Blake in the space of a day back in December.

He couldn’t entice St Helens star Jack Welsby out of the UK,and not even $1.2 million a season could get Roosters centre Joseph Manu even remotely interested.

The Dragons signed Warriors playmaker Ronald Volkman but club medicos didn’t check under the bonnet before agreeing to terms and he’s been cut loose because of an existing shoulder injury.

So the 2024 gains column looks like this:Hame Sele (Rabbitohs),Kyle Flanagan (Bulldogs),Tom Eisenhuth (Storm),Corey Allan (Roosters),Jesse Marschke (Bears NSW Cup) and Raymond Faitala-Mariner (Bulldogs). Allan suffered a torn ACL at pre-season training and will miss the season.

The inability to sign any marquee players isn’t a reflection on Flanagan but the club and how far it’s fallen after years of dysfunction.

This is the problem with mediocrity:soon enough you’ll give off the same stench as the Tigers.

Superstars aren’t always the answer. Paying well over market value for a marquee player or two might generate favourable publicity in the pre-season,but it comes back to bite you when you’re in the grind of winter.

Remember how we were all talking about a Tigers’ finals appearance a year ago because they had signed hooker Api Koroisau and back-rower Isaiah Papali’i?

The last thing the Dragons need is a sugar hit. They need a slow,methodical rebuild,starting with a team that might not make the eight but will always compete,as Flanagan indicated.

So ladder position shouldn’t mean much this year,although I’ve got no doubt that Flanagan was lowering expectations around himself when he asked fans not judge his side on what happens in 2024.

He keeps saying all the right things publicly about Ben Hunt,but that doesn’t mean the captain and halfback still doesn’t want out of the final two years of his contract after requesting a release last year.

He also argues Hunt’s running game will complement Kyle Flanagan’s so-called game management.

Fathers coaching their sons is happening more and more in the NRL for some reason. However,it’s tricky when the player isn’t Nathan Cleary,but a fringe first-grader plagued by doubt.

Flanagan wants the best for his son,who debuted under him in 2018 when he was coaching the Sharks before rocky stints at the Roosters and,more recently,the Bulldogs.

But each time Flanagan made suggestions to the Roosters and Bulldogs about how they should play his son,it did more harm than good and the pressure on Kyle became unfair. Nobody wants to see a young player break down with emotionlike he did during a May 2021 media conference when the Bulldogs dropped him.

According to Shane Flanagan,the long-term strategy with Kyle was to turn him into a hooker – but you could see a path opening up to the No.6 jumper as soon he signed.

The Dragons,for some reason,had released Jayden Sullivan from the final two years of his contract to allow him to sign with the Tigers. Another local junior cut adrift.

The club did so knowing five-eighthTalatau Amone was still facing serious assault,stalking and intimidation charges following a rooftop hammer attack on a tradie in October 2022.

If Amone was found guilty,he was looking at either jail time or,at the very least,an NRL deregistration. He dodged jail but a two-year corrections order served to him in December was enough for the NRL to tear up his contract.

Amone has appealed his conviction and wants to come back to prove his “haters” wrong,but the Flanagans have just as much to prove.

This is the father’s chance to turn his son into the player he thinks he can be. It’s also the father’s chance,in his first head coaching job since 2018,to show that rugby league hasn’t passed him by.

Every Dragons coach since Wayne Bennett has been coaching for his life,chopping and changing teams and the way they play.

Flanagan wants sustained success and,in doing so,every St George Illawarra stakeholder — owners,directors,management,and especially weary fans — needs to give him time.

Which,by the way,starts now.

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