It’s crazy how quickly into a season the ‘same old, same old’ chants begin from the same old, same old people. It only took the Warriors two weeks before they had to suffer them, losing 26-10 in weather conditions best described as ‘biblical’ to a Melbourne Storm side considered one of the premiership favourites. Clearly it’s all downhill from there, right?

I mean, if the Warriors thought they were getting a fresh start with a new coach and a new captain then they were dreaming. Nothing short of winning a premiership (and even then some people would moan that it took them long enough) is gonna shed the reputation that’s been carelessly tacked to them. They’re consistently inconsistent. They’re reliably unreliable. That’s the Warriors, folks.

What do they ever do except build us up to knock us back down? Too many errors in their play, not enough class and composure. They don’t put in the effort, you know? If only this team had some backbone, maybe a bit of Aussie VETERAN LEADERSHIP. There’s so much talent there but none of them can tackle - where’s the DEFENCE!? There’s no focus. There’s no game-plan. What they really need is a complete overhaul of the team culture. They need an IDENTITY! The day they sort it out is the day they’ll become champions but it just doesn’t look like it’s ever gonna happen…

Haha, no. If you want a list of stupid clichés about the Warriors then you can read a different website because that for damn sure ain’t what were about at the Nichey Niche. The real situation is less that the Warriors are still the same team as they were five, ten years ago and more that the media are still covering them using the same paint-by-numbers formula. Pick your euphemistic buzzwords, change the names to suit the times and click publish, pretty much. The same goes for the Auckland Blues these days - which is funny considering they’re both based in Auckland, isn’t it?

It’s that idea of IDENTITY that really gets people fussy. Apparently a team with identity is a team that… actually what does that mean? The Melbourne Storm have an identity but the NZ Warriors don’t… but if the Warriors don’t have an identity then what the hell are all those clichés about, isn’t that an identity? A false one, sure, but the same people who say that crap are the same people who moan that the team doesn’t have an identity, so make of that what you will.

Team identity isn’t a myth, it’s a symbolic idea based on continuity and performance. The Storm’s ‘identity’ is that they play hard on defence, complete at a high percentage and win on the back of that. Not the most dashing team but one of the most dependably great. The thing is, that identity isn’t something that the team creates from within so much as something that’s projected onto them from the outside. They’ve been a winning team for a long time now and the fact that people assume they’ll keep being one is down to the enduring presence of Craig Bellamy as coach and dudes like Cameron Smith and Cooper Cronk out on the paddock. Take them out and, well… consider Manchester United in the English Premier League for a second.

Under Sir Alex Ferguson, they had a similar identity (note how it’s always related to winning). They played football with flair and balance and they won a lot of stuff. Fergie inspired that same thing from his first trophy to his last, from the days of Bobby Robson and Steve Bruce to those of Eric Cantona and Roy Keane to Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs to Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. His team won the Premier League in his final season and Fergie retired a satisfied man. In comes David Moyes and that so-called identity disappeared in a flash. They were now a team that crossed the ball into the box a record 81 times in a 2-2 draw with Fulham at Old Trafford. Out went Moyes and in came Louis Van Gaal who had them taking few shots at goal in his last season than Watford, Sunderland or Swansea (they were 15th out of 20 teams) despite having the second most possession. Under Jose Mourinho it’s all changed again.

So if team identity is a measure of a long-serving coach (and their reputation) then the Warriors, who are onto their fifth coach in less than six years, are clearly doomed. But Moyes and Van Gaal both brought particular styles of play to that club, obviously they did or their reigns wouldn’t be so easily defined. Those are identities right there… just not good ones.

The Warriors under Stephen Kearney will have an identity too, eventually we’ll come to expect how this team will try to play. In individual contests it’ll be flexible but from a wider perspective we’ll understand what sort of things they’re looking to achieve in order to win games. It might mean Shaun Johnson running the ball a certain amount of times or maybe Roger Tuivasa-Sheck getting however many metres. It’ll be reflected in the match day squads that are named and the bench rotations that are used. We’ll see it in how they shape up defensively and we’ll see it in the decisions that they make on the park – take the two or kick for the corner, for example. We’ll understand all of that eventually… but we won’t understand it in week two of the bloody season. Seriously, come on.

A theory here: People who moan about the lack of Warriors’ identity are people who themselves don’t know what they want that identity to be. Otherwise they’d use specific rugby league examples instead of those coded/capitalised words which mostly don’t even relate to sport at all – only random attitudes. Attitudes which are pretty hard to judge without being in the dressing room.

With each new season comes an evolution in playing identity, good or bad. The Melbourne Storm of Jesse Bromwich, Cameron Munster and Suliasi Vunivalu is pretty different to that of Greg Inglis, Adam Blair and, hey, Ryan Hoffman. The reputation is the same because of the continuity of Bellamy, Smith, Cronk and Slater (when fit) but the squad is drastically different after a decade of footy. It’s all entwined with those familiar faces and that’s been earned over many years. Opposing players talked about Man United losing an ‘aura’ when Ferguson retired, it’s mind over matter stuff. Same as the concept of power. Power is something that we give, not something others take.

Now we skip over to America – Texas to be specific – where the San Antonio Spurs do their thang. The Spurs have an identity too, they’ve won five NBA championships in 18 seasons doing things the same way as the Melbourne Storm do (without the salary cap cheating). A strong team-first ethic, a pragmatic approach to winning games, a history of developing players from unexpected places into genuine role players, etc. Yet the only constants, from year one to eighteen, have been coach Gregg Popovich and centre Tim Duncan… and now this season Duncan’s retired and the Spurs are still on course for 60+ wins.

Kawhi Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge don’t play basketball like Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. Manu Ginobili doesn’t even play like Manu Ginobili anymore, the legend that he is. The success rate is similar but the aesthetics are way different.

See, when the Spurs won in 2014 they had a team that thrived on the back of late-peak Tony Parker. His ability to make those slashes towards the basket, to pick that perfect pass which then led to another perfect pass on top of it – those Spurs always made that extra pass to turn a good look into a better look – was essential. They played ball like a Spanish soccer team. But at other times they’ve been a side that relied on slow-down post-up basketball. Tim Duncan’s youth was spent around grinding veterans and once he got to that stage of his own career he was surrounded by speedy kids.

Point being that these identities change from year to year and every season is unique. If you have a quality coach then it happens organically but chopping between leadership doesn’t allow for that (again, see: New Zealand Warriors). Sport moves fast. No dynasty or identity or whatever survives without evolving in the process, the Spurs will play in whatever way gives them the best chance of winning. And winning is all we’re really talking about here – losing teams don’t tend to have much roster/coach continuity.

How about the New England Patriots? Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are the consistents and the rest come and go. Year after year the Patriots somehow field a team that’s right up there come playoff time and somehow they just won the flippin’ Super Bowl again, without Rob Gronkowski and from 25 points down. Sooner or later it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As for the Warriors, they haven’t ever won a title. They’ve lost two grand finals in 21 seasons. The narrative drama is that season after season they underperform… wait, but if it keeps happening then where are these heavy expectations even coming from? It’s so dumb: the Storm, the Spurs, the Pats, etc… it’s all based on prior success. We expect them to win because they always win. The Warriors’ expectations are the opposite – we expect them to win because they didn’t win last time and when they do exactly the same as before everyone’s still surprised for some reason.

Last time, for once, there was a genuine reason to get hyped and that was Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Issac Luke joining forces with the team. Well, RTS played seven games before he was ruled out for the season and if you’re a regular reader of these pages then you already know that the Diggity Doc has summed that one up perfectly: for people’s expectations of this team to stay the same after RTS was ruled out was beyond illogical. If Johnathan Thurston breaks his leg then the North Queensland Cowboys’ title hopes get reassessed. If LeBron James does the same then the Cleveland Cavaliers enter full-on panic mode. It’s already happened to a lesser degree with the Golden State Warriors and Kevin Durant and that’s not even a serious injury – he should be back for the playoffs. Roger Tuivasa-Sheck is the best player in the squad. You lose your best player and things change, seasons are ruined. It happens all the time in sports.

Also, guess who went off with concussion in the defeat to Melbourne on the weekend with the score at 12-10 late in the first half?

Sometimes an identity is something else entirely, not so much a proud flagship as a buoy afloat on choppy seas. Back to the Premier League, when Sam Allardyce was let go by West Ham United there was all this talk about the ‘West Ham Way’: Big Sam didn’t fit it. He’d gotten them promoted and settled in the top flight again, sure. That’s progress. However progress is meant to continue and when the team hit its ceiling in the Premier League mid-table things got stale. Allardyce was let go and his defiantly old school and defensive style was a major factor in that. It wasn’t the West Ham Way, a phrase which conjured visions of Trevor Brooking slicing through defences, Bobby Moore making crunching tackles and Geoff Hurst scoring hat-tricks in World Cup finals. (Yes, nostalgia is a big part of this too).

Sir Alex Ferguson spent the initial few months after he retired updating his autobiography. In it he offered sympathy for Big Sam’s plight there with some scathing bluntness:

Fergie: “I hope that before I die, someone can explain the 'West Ham way'. What is it? They last won a trophy in 1980, the FA Cup. I never played against any West Ham team that played football I was afraid of. They were always surviving, or lucky as hell against us. I had to sympathise with Sam. He couldn't win. There is this preconception with West Ham fans that Big Sam is a survivalist who tells teams to boot the ball up the pitch. The truth is that he stayed up with a team of very average players. That's management. He drew the best from them."

Same here, I’ve literally never seen a West Ham team that thrilled like they seem to think they always do with the exception of 18 months of Dimitri Payet… who was ousted from the squad for not showing the “same commitment and respect to West Ham United that the club and fans showed him”.

Fergie’s right. You really can’t win, can you?

And neither can the Warriors who are continually compared to disappointing teams that this current side bears almost no relation to other than a couple of lingering players, a name, a stadium and a whole bunch of damaging narratives. The thing that clever and committed fans understand is that when it comes to the Wozzas, words like ‘identity’, ‘culture’, ‘leadership’ and all those other ones are just easy/false solutions. They’re not real – concepts about ‘effort’ and all that, you may as well be clutching at straws in the dark. They don’t mean anything.

The problem is there’s a certain type of person out there who doesn’t cope well when he doesn’t have something definitive to say on a matter. Any matter. This collective personification is probably a Rugby Man who sees league as a threat rather than as a perfectly unrelated other sport. He’s probably a certain age too, driving a certain type of car and listening to a certain kind of music. It doesn’t matter which, what matters is that he is right and they are wrong. This song is great and songs he doesn’t like are terrible, because his opinion is fact. When the government debates an issue he knows exactly what side he stands on and when the Warriors lose a game he knows exactly why.

Every team loses games, eight of them lose each week. In reality the Warriors are beginning a new campaign with a new coach and new captain and expecting immediate change is another illogical thing – it’s almost like the vultures were already circling in readiness. Of course, when people write (and more commonly: ‘ring up talkback’) to complain about identity and culture, that isn’t actually what they’re talking about. They just want some indefinable idea to vent their fury through, as if that’ll solve everything. These men are always so angry…

What it seems to me after thinking deeply on all this is that there are three kinds of ‘identity’. Fake Identity is the one offered by entitled ‘experts’ and it’s meaningless. Playing Identity is about style and form but it’s inconstant beyond a few years and has nothing to do with success. Reputational Identity does and it’s earned over many years of sustained winning.

If the Warriors are lacking identity then it’s because Stephen Kearney hasn’t had enough time to build one yet – not even close. Their Playing Identity will come in due time, their Reputational Identity doesn’t exist because they haven’t been a top four club recently. Maybe in a few years, but not yet. The only reputation they have at the moment is a completely unfair one lingering from past eras where, sure, they’ve let themselves down… but the past has been and gone. A little cumulative fan angst is expected after all that pain; insane overreactions after two weeks of a new season are not.

But then what did you expect if you were reading those sites in the first place?