Tactical Change: What should Paul McGregor change to save his job?

We're only three games into the 2020 NRL season and Paul McGregor is already in the hot seat.

It's steaming with the Dragons coach said to have two weeks to save his job. The pressure comes from a 0-3 start, capped off with woeful performance against a Warriors side many have tipped to win the wooden spoon. 

The Round 1 24-14 loss to the Tigers offered some encouragement. Two competition points were there for the taking if the Dragons could have executed late.

While they led until late in their Round 2 loss to the Panthers, it could have been a lot different had Matthew Dufty not claimed an intercept to avoid an early 18-0 deficit.

In Round 3 against the Warriors, well, it's an early contender for worst performance of the season. They entered as favourites but never looked like scoring in the 18-0 shutout. Ben Hunt is copping plenty of criticism in the aftermath. So too is Corey Norman. However, it's McGregor that will lose his job if the Dragons can't beat the Bulldogs and Sharks in the next two weeks.

So, what needs to change?

It's best we take a look at what went wrong in Round 3 to start with.

The Dragons ran for 2,116 metres on Saturday afternoon. It's the most they've made in a game since at least 2009 and just the fourth occasion over 2000 metres in the same period.

Pretty good, right?

Not really. Numbers can be misleading. With the Warriors completing 46 of 48 sets, the ball was in-play for 70 of the 80 minutes - up from an average of 53 minutes throughout the Red V's opening two rounds.

Where the Dragons are going wrong is in their support play around ball-carriers.

Scenes like this are far too common when the Dragons are trying to work through the centre-third. 

Players are sent out on their own to be ambushed by the defence. No Dragons player is close to Blake Lawrie here; none even motion to move up with him. As a result, Tohu Harris was able to get out in front of the line with Jamayne Taunoa-Brown there to finish Lawrie off for minimal gain.

While it might be a good thing for every player on the team to be organised and on the same page, it's of no use if the opposing defence is reading the same book.

The Warriors, to the surprise of many, offered plenty of examples of how having the support player simply trail the ball carrier can add a few extra metres and a quick play-the-ball to a run.

As Adam Blair takes possession, Taunoa-Brown - while a little bit further behind than Stephen Kearney would like - is enough of a presence for Tyson Frizell to sit back. Blair finds his front and works through the two-man tackle to earn a quick play-the-ball. 

On the occasions that the Dragons did work together in pairs, of which James Graham and Lawrie were often heavily involved, they did get downhill. Their best sets of the game started with tough carries and worked into two or three tackles with players running off each other. Corey Norman and Ben Hunt recorded the Dragons' only line breaks on the back of two of them.

But, when the Dragons do finally get into good ball areas, they offer next to nothing. They were caught with the ball on the 5th tackle five times on Saturday afternoon. Five!

Obsessed with getting to areas before making any sort of move, the Dragons give up opportunities to score.

Here, the Dragons have the Warriors scrambling. A shift through the hands and they more than likely cross the line. But no, Dufty hands it off to...Paul Vaughan.

"Structure" is another word that has become dirty as people look to fix a game that isn't broken. All teams play with it, but some more than others. St George-Illawarra is one of those teams that is playing within it too much at the moment.

Is getting to areas of the field before making a move so ingrained in how the Dragons play that Dufty didn't make the high-percentage play here to simply draw and pass to the outside? Surely, if Dufty wasn't so focused on where he was on the field, he'd use his speed to get across the defence and hit Blake Green's inside shoulder before shifting the ball along.

Instead, the Dragons finally went left on the next tackle for Frizell to be caught in possession on the last yet again.

Perhaps it was just one poor possession, but it all looked a little too familiar nonetheless.

The Dragons are a mess. Without at least providing the threat of a tip-on in hard sets while continuing to play out predictable movements in their good ball sets, they'll remain as one of the worst attacking teams in the NRL - currently averaging 14 points per game.

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How do they fix it?

Well, moving Hunt to hooker and unseating Cameron McInnes - the club's best player at the moment - from his prefered position isn't the answer. McInnes is the heart and soul of the Dragons right now and is playing some of the best football of his career. Don't be tempted, Mary. Leave him alone.

In fact, leave most of them where they are already.

The talent is there.

This is a team that has two 2019 State of Origin reps in the halves and three more in the forward pack. Graham can still do a job, Lawrie is an excellent young workhorse in the middle and Tyrell Fuimaono has impressed in his first three games for the club. While there are holes in the squad, we shouldn't be talking about them as genuine wooden spoon contenders so early in the season.

A couple of adjustments can help.

Start with kick returns.

Dufty is all pace and agility, but he needs to be supporting a dominant forward pack to be effective. At the moment, he's offering nothing from the back for the Dragons. Their sets are starting with Dufty being dominated in the tackle and rarely recovering.

Zac Lomax trained at fullback all summer - put him back there. And for more than one game this time.

Update: Norman has been named at fullback with Adam Clune to start at halfback. An improvement.

From there, have the pack mirror the off-ball work rate of Graham and Lawrie. While Graham doesn't produce the same counting stats as he once did, the 407-game veteran across the NRL and Super League knows where to be and when. He adds more to the team than the numbers suggest. Force the defence into making decisions and be open to moving the ball further than one from the ruck throughout the first four tackles of a set.

At risk of getting a bit too "let the boys play" when it comes to how the team attacks, have Hunt get to positions on the field he's comfortable. Allow him to use his crafty running game and ball-playing at the line. Play the short side if the opportunity is there rather than playing out the premeditated dump-off in the middle to get back into shape.

The game has developed beyond the overuse of block plays. The introduction of the six-again appears to have advanced that development further and McGregor hasn't been able to keep up.

Coaches are always the first to go when things get hairy at a football club. They're often the scapegoat - too often. However, McGregor has the tools in his belt to rebuild his coaching career.

Construction needs to be completed in a fortnight.

Only two wins will do.

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