By PETER JESSUP
Turn the clock back and South Sydney are the most successful club in the Australian league premiership.
One of the eight foundation clubs in 1908, Souths have won 20 premierships, including the first, and have finished second in 12 seasons, but the last time they made their mark was in 1971.
Since then, they have had money worries, management worries, coaching worries and player worries.
The high-profile businessmen and politicians of Group 14, who took over the board with Rabbitohs' icon George Piggins, have yet to turn the club around.
Once more, the plan is to go into the market to secure a winning team.
Former player Terry Hermansson, now the coaching director for the Canterbury Rugby League, feels they need to buy a couple of key players, especially an international frontrower and a smart halfback or five-eighth.
But, he said, the problem was that the club had a losing culture.
"Winning is a habit - you know what it takes, you know you can push yourself a bit more, and you're confident that if you stick to your structure and do the little things right, the game will flow your way eventually.
"Losing is the same - you start to expect it. Little things don't go your way and you don't even notice it, but your body language starts to help the opposition. Your head drops a bit and then your effort drops.
"It might only be two or three per cent, but it comes in critical areas of the game, in effort areas, not chasing a kick that goes past you or something.
"You're thinking, 'here we go, we're going to get beaten again'."
New coach Paul Langmack appears to have won the job on the basis of a couple of reasonable efforts by the team when he was caretaker after Craig Coleman had been dumped.
It was no way to make the decision. Players can lift for a game or two, but then the culture sets in again.
The best candidate was former Gold Coast coach Phil Economidis, but he didn't even get an interview.
"It's up to the coach to turn that losing culture around and it's going to take more than one season," Hermansson said.
The players Souths bought in the off-season were good players in good teams, he said. That didn't make them good for Souths. Attitude was often better than a great sidestep.
The club had working-class beginnings, the colours maroon and cardinal coming from the Catholic and Protestant wharfies and labourers who lived around the Redfern area.
In the 1970s the licensed club that had supported the side got into financial difficulties for reasons ranging from drink-driving laws to gentrification of the inner city.
Over-expansion brought debt without sufficient income and a multi-million-dollar building project that took 10 years to complete.
The extension is not justified by turnover. The area remains crime-riddled and visitors worry their cars will be broken into. The banks of poker machines are not packed with gamblers.
Other, richer clubs poached Souths' best players because the club could not match the offers - something that's still happening, with the likes of Souths junior Craig Wing going next door to the cashed-up Roosters.
The club has produced 61 internationals. There are none there now, bar Russell Richardson, who earned that honour at Cronulla.
In 1989, Piggins was coach and took them to the minor premiership. But they couldn't go on and were eliminated early in the playoffs.
In 1994, under former Wallaby coach Alan Jones, they won the pre-season tournament, beating Brisbane in the final.
In the season-proper they were ninth of 16 teams, and that's the club's best finish up to now.
Oddly, it was after their best position of recent seasons, in 1999 - 12th of 17 teams, equal with the Auckland Warriors with 10 wins from 24 games but behind on points differential - that the club was expelled from the competition.
Piggins headed the outcry and the street marches. Group 14 led the court battles that led to the club's readmittance to the competition last year.
"It's great to have them back in the competition, but they're hardly doing themselves any credit with poor performance on the field and always shooting themselves in the foot off it," Hermansson says.
"There's always been good people there, but they've been let down badly by poor management. There's always been arguments at board level."
He believes a plan to shift to the Central Coast might be the answer.
"There would be more uproar before that happened," he said.
But if they keep losing, the NRL won't have to throw the club out a second time. It will have killed itself.
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