Gorden Tallis has lashed out at former coach Wayne Bennett for publicly revealing he offered to take over the reins at the Gold Coast Titans last September.
In an interview with The Courier Mail’s Peter Badel, Bennett revealed he hired a player manager to formally approach the Titans about taking over in 2020.
Bennett, who was sacked by the Broncos last December and immediately hired by South Sydney, said he was ‘genuinely interested’ in coaching Gold Coast but was turned down.
Garth Brennan was sacked by the last-placed Titans this month, with the club set to decide between Justin Holbrook and Kevin Walters as his long-term replacement in the coming days.
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Meanwhile, Bennett’s Bunnies are sitting second on the NRL ladder and are genuine premiershp contenders with six rounds remaining.
But Tallis, a volunteer consultant with the Gold Coast club, called bull*** on his ex-coach in a scathing attack on Sunday.
“I’m just sick and tired of people kicking sand in (the Titans’) face,” Tallis told Triple M.
“Wayne Bennett comes out and says they offered him a job, I should have called BS on that.
“When he said that he’d go work at the Titans, he told Penrith that he’d go work for them as well and he promised Gus (Phil Gould).
“He promised the Dragons that he’d probably go back there and I think he knocked on the Wests Tigers door as well.
“So you can’t take when Wayne comes to a club and says, ‘I’ll come to work for you’ - he uses them all as bargaining tools … and I thought that the article was pretty poor because it didn’t tell the whole truth on what Wayne Bennett does.”
Bennett reportedly reached an agreement with Gould to coach Penrith before the Panthers board opted to sign Ivan Cleary on a five-year deal.
The 69-year-old was then the Wests Tigers’ preferred candidate to replace Cleary but turned down the join-venture club.
Meanwhile, Tallis also took exception to the seven-time premiership-winning coach’s claim that he ‘would have been able to rebuild that club’.
“To be quite honest and everybody says oh, Wayne Bennett should be coaching the Titans, but look what he did at Newcastle.
“Wayne Bennett needs the players, he can’t go and rebuild a club and he knows that he can’t do that.”
