Carrying the load: Brad Arthur went to hell and back trying to hold the Parramatta Eels together in 2016. Credit:Getty Images According to his players, if it wasn't for Arthur, the club would have crumbled last year. They'd lost their points, their skipper, their chief executive, their board, their football manager. The joint was a basket case. "This place would have fallen apart without Brad," Corey Norman said. "I believe that, 100 per cent ... 100 per cent. He was doing stuff a coach should never even be thinking about. He had so much on his plate and the way he held himself in front of us and the fans was unbelievable."

Demanding respect: Brad Arthur instructs his team. Credit:Getty Images On the day the NRL handed down its punishment to the Eels last year, Todd Greenberg fronted the old board to break the news. He was asked by the majority of the club's hierachy, some of whom were trying to undermine the coach, to stay away from training. But Arthur had already organised for the chief executive to front the players. He wanted them to hear it from the top. He wanted his players to know why their season was being ripped apart. He allowed them the chance to process the magnitude of what was occurring, then he never allowed it to be a topic of discussion again. Arthur was one of Craig Bellamy's offsiders at the Storm when Melbourne went through their salary cap saga in 2010. He saw first hand just how hard it was for a team to maintain its standards when they had their reason to fight stripped away.

And while semi-final football was almost impossible, he never stopped treating them like a semi-final team. As a reward for not folding and winning enough games that would have seen them finish eighth, the coach extended their off-season break, treating them like semi-finalists. Reasonable as he might seem, Arthur is a control freak. Most NRL coaches are. So at times the hardest part wasn't actually dealing with everything that was being thrown at him, rather delegating to people around him to ease the burden. "Brad protected all the players from that," Mannah said. "He shouldered a lot of the burden and carried all the weight on himself so we could focus on footy. He didn't give away how much he was carrying, but it was pretty obvious how much he was going through. What he did last year, it didn't surprise us, but it definitely impressed everyone here.

"I guess you don't know how someone is going to handle it until it gets thrown at you. The way he handled everything that got thrown at him made us all look at him with a lot of admiration and respected him a lot more." His trust takes time to earn, especially when you consider how scarred he was from the never-ending in-fighting and deception. "He was a bit wary of me when I came in," Eels chairman Max Donnelly said. "He'd been to hell and back. Early on he was saying, 'are you going to come into the dressing rooms, too?'. But that wasn't my go. He said: 'are you going to tell me who to pick at halfback?'. I said to him, 'only if you ask me'." That trust, once earned, gets you in for life.

Which is why the Foran saga tore him apart. Arthur stood by the besieged playmaker, but when his trust was taken advantage of, he couldn't play favourites any more. He came down on Foran as he would any other player, but it only divided the once inseparable duo even further. You could write a book and still not have enough words to describe the nightmare that was Parramatta's 2016 campaign. It began when Anthony Watmough was forced into retirement two years into a lucrative four-year deal, coinciding with the mental disintegration of Foran to the point his exit was welcomed within. Nathan Peats was forced out, Jarryd Hayne didn't want to come back in.

Will Hopoate continued his legal action against the club, while Junior Paulo decided to play third grade park rugby. Semi Radradra left and came back before finally deciding to say au revoir – not before being charged with domestic violence. Norman was busted for drug possession on a night that he was later warned by police for consorting with criminals – not to mention the controversy that followed the leaking of a sex tape that involved the Eels No.6. Oh yeah, and that other thing about the salary cap and almost anyone who held a position of power at the club having their contracts terminated for the indiscretions that led to 12 points being stripped. Yet Arthur was the one thing the players could rely on through it all.

Loading "One of the first things I did was extend his contract. He was already contracted for 2017, but I added '18 and '19 as well," Donnelly said. "Three years is a long time in the rugby league world. But he was the key to it all. It didn't take long after re-signing him then, bingo, Corey Norman is signed. These guys want to play for him. They'll do anything for him. It only took me a week to figure that out."