South Sydney coach Jason Demetriou concedes he has ‘no idea’ if club officials will give him the time he thinks he needs to turn his team’s fortunes around, with a board meeting next week to address his future.
Demetriou knows the heat is coming after a horror show in Melbourne on Thursday night, the 54-20 loss to the Storm continuing a 19-year winning drought in Victoria.
HIs team conceded its biggest score of the year, giving up 10 tries, and Souths are now anchoring the NRL ladder on just one win having entered round eight hoping to show signs of improvement.
Returning from the bye, Demetriou had outlined a five-week plan to get his team up and going again, but he might not have that much time.
‘I love coaching this club, love coaching this team and I’ll turn up and keep giving me best and if someone taps me on the shoulder and says that time’s up, I can’t control that,’ he said after the heavy defeat, adamant their season was ‘salvageable’.
‘I said to the players, the talk’s over, we need to deliver, we need to get it done.
‘It’s not going to change unless we start putting in performances that get the results we want, but, more importantly, performances we know we’re capable of.
‘There’s patches in that game where we get back to 36-20, showed a lot of resolve, but it’s either side of halftime again, three weeks in a row, where we’ve let the game go.
‘The players have got to take some ownership of that and take some ownership of their own performances and start executing the things that we know we can.’
The next four weeks include clashes with the Panthers and then winnable games against teams outside the eight, the Dragons, Cowboys and Eels.
‘We set ourselves a five-week plan to improve and we’ll stay to that because it’s not going to improve in one night, in one week, but it will get better,’ Demetriou said.
Demetriou insisted he could already see an impact after former assistant David Furner rejoined the staff last week as the defence coach despite the massive scoreline in Melbourne.
‘David has come in and done a good job, he’s done what was required to make sure we’re identifying the things we need to be better at,’ he said.
‘We’ve trained at that but we didn’t put it on the field and that’s the difference at the moment.’