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St George Illawarra are currently emboriled in the worst losing streak in club history. (Getty Images: Cameron Spencer )
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In the end, there was nothing left for St George Illawarra to do but scorch the earth.
On Monday, the Dragons confirmed what had seemed inevitable for some time now, relieving Shane Flanagan as head coach and Ben Haran as head of football amidst the club's longest losing streak and worst ever start to a season.
Despite those historical lows, this is not foreign country for the Red V. Flanagan was the fourth head coach in a row to be sacked midway through a season and the third of those four to be sent packing within 18 months of signing a contract extension.
Shane Flanagan and the St George Illawarra Dragons part ways after a winless start to 2026 extends an 11-game losing streak dating back to last August.
It's a familiar pattern of failure for a club that's only made the finals three times since their last premiership in 2010 and returned just one playoff win. They have not finished higher than 10th in the last seven years.
Flanagan was supposed to be a different beast to those who came before him — he had a proven track record from his Cronulla days, including the 2016 premiership.
That grand final triumph was Flanagan's true north, proof that he knew what it took to forge a club into a winner. Those Sharks clawed their way up from some very low depths to finally turn out the porch light, but over the past three years the Dragons never quite started the climb.
Flanagan has done a lot of the same things. He's always favoured older players — the 2016 Sharks had the oldest roster ever to win a premiership — so he brought in experienced men such as Damien Cook, Clint Gutherson and Valentine Holmes to teach the young guys a thing or two about a thing or two.
His teams always learned how to fight before they learned how to win. In the Cronulla days, a low-scoring street-fight of a game at Shark Park was something of a speciality. They played like going to hell would be worth it, so long as you went with them.
Flanagan came with a high reputation following his 2016 premiership win with Cronulla. (Getty Images: Mark Kolbe )
They had forward packs mean enough to skin crocodiles as Flanagan got the best out of players as varied in ability as Andrew Fifita, Matt Prior and Wade Graham, all of whom developed into Origin players under his watch, and maximising those talents could take his teams almost anywhere they wanted to go.
The Dragons didn't have the same kind of marquee names — like Paul Gallen or Luke Lewis — in the pack, but between Hamish Stewart, Dylan Egan, Jacob Halangahu and the Couchman brothers they had a strong foundation of boys Flanagan and his old fellas could teach to be men.
But at some point the old ways stopped working. The same steps, followed in a similar order, produced a rebuild that never really got started.
What once made Flanagan teams strong now made them rigid. They got stuck in the quicksand and the harder they fought to get out the deeper they sank.
The Dragons are yet to win a game this season and are last on the NRL ladder. (Getty Images: Mark Metcalfe)
In a world that runs on set restarts, which did not exist in Flanagan's glorious times, speed and athleticism are at a greater premium than ever before and young legs leave the old grasping at air or gasping for it.
Holmes has been a disaster. Gutherson was strong last season, but years of pushing himself to the limit have finally caught up to him. And while Cook still has his moments — he was in beach-sprinting mode against South Sydney on the weekend — he is not what he once was.
At their best, the Flanagan Dragons could find a fight and stick in one, but could never really nail the winning part. Last season they beat three of the top four and played in 12 matches decided by one score or less but lost eight of them.
They never transformed into the red and white roughnecks they were supposed to be and when you add in a serious lack of attacking class it created something unsustainable.
Time finally ran out on Flanagan following the weekend's loss to South Sydney. (Getty Images: Mark Metcalfe )