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Spray or say: The truth about half-time blasts after Broncos NRLW coach unloads — Barrett There is something about a good old-fashioned halftime spray that still feels very rugby league. The coach storms into the sheds. Players are told exactly what they are doing wrong. Voices are raised. Doors might be kicked. The message is unmistakable: lift, or else. We have seen plenty of it throughout rugby league’s history. Watch every game of every round of the NRLW Premiership LIVE with no ad-breaks during play on FOX LEAGUE, available on Kayo Sports | New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1. But when footage emerged of Broncos coach Scott Prince delivering an animated halftime address to his team, it prompted a different question. Does a spray actually still work? It is a difficult question to answer from a few seconds of footage, particularly when we have no idea what had been said in the sheds before the cameras arrived, what the players were told afterwards or what their relationship with Prince looks like behind closed doors. The Broncos did appear to come out with more urgency in the second half – there’s no doubt about that. Whether that was because of the spray is impossible to know. And that is the point. Coaching is a highly personalised business. The same message can land completely differently depending on the person receiving it. Former Jillaroos coach Brad Donald is firmly in the say it, don’t spray it camp. Donald has said it was “a big no” when it came to using a spray to lift performance, particularly with women. His reasoning is simple. “Players are already down in confidence and want to hear a way out,” he told foxsports.com.au. “They normally need one or two things at the most to fix to help them win the game.” Donald has some pretty compelling evidence from his own coaching career. In his first game as Queensland coach, I was fortunate to have very clear insight into his coaching style, as one of the players. Despite having never lost an interstate game at that point, we were down at half time. Donald recalls players panicking in the sheds, and sensing the expectation from players the new coach was about to come in and tear strips off them. Instead, he walked in and asked two questions. “Had they done what they set out to do in the first half?” No came the answer. “Could they do what they had set out to do?” Yes was the reply. That was it. We went back out and won comprehensively. It is a simple story, but it gets to the heart of what a halftime address is supposed to achieve. You have perhaps 10 minutes to change the direction of a game. The players are already exhausted, emotions are high and there is barely enough time to process what has happened, let alone recover from being verbally dismantled. That does not mean coaches should sugar-coat poor performance. As a former player and current teacher, accurate feedback is vital. If you’re only ever telling people they’re amazing and they’re doing a great job when, in fact, they’re not, then at worst it’s harmful, at best it’s uninspiring . The answer is somewhere in between. Be direct. Be honest. But give players something they can actually take back onto the field. Interestingly, there is research that backs up that approach. That doesn’t mean players don’t respond to emotion. Quite the opposite. They can respond to passion, intensity and genuine feeling. But perhaps the lesson is that emotion is not the message. The emotion needs to serve the message. And that distinction matters in the modern game. Rugby league has changed dramatically. The way coaches speak to players has changed. The expectations around leadership, communication and player wellbeing have changed too. That doesn’t mean the passionate coach has disappeared, or that every player wants to be spoken to like they are sitting in a boardroom. There will always be athletes who respond to a challenge. There will be players who need a coach to look them in the eye and demand more. There will even be players who walk away from a spray thinking: He’s right. I need to be better. But there will be others who hear exactly the same words and think: He doesn’t believe in me. And once confidence drops, particularly in a game where decision-making is everything, the coach may have created another problem while trying to solve the first. That is why Donald’s distinction is so important. He isn’t saying coaches should never get angry. In fact, he remembers giving only one genuine spray throughout his coaching career. It came after Australia’s 2017 World Cup semi-final victory over Canada, and it had nothing to do with performance. It was about protecting the team from internal division before the final. “I basically outlined that the only people that were going to stop them from winning the World Cup were themselves if we fell into the trap of trying to run each other down,” Donald told foxsports.com.au. That spray worked because the situation demanded it. It wasn’t a default coaching method. The Jillaroos went on to win the World Cup. And perhaps that is where the conversation around Prince’s Broncos address should land. Not on whether women can handle being yelled at. They can. The better question is whether this particular group of players needed to be yelled at in that particular moment. Prince knows these players far better than we do. He has spent a pre-season with them. He knows their personalities, their strengths, their weaknesses and, presumably, what has worked with them before. Maybe the surprise of seeing a passionate coach explode was exactly what some of those players needed. Maybe others needed something completely different. We simply don’t know. What we do know is that the days of believing there is one magic coaching formula are gone. Sometimes you need to spray. Sometimes you need to say. And the best coaches know the difference.