Worcester may be in a position to secure their Premiership status by beating Bath at Sixways next month. If they did so, it would provide extra satisfaction for their director of rugby, Gary Gold, who was recruited at the start of the year on a short-term contract with the target of keeping the wobbling Warriors in the top flight.
At the end of 2013 Gold was fired as Bath’s director of rugby. The club was third in the Premiership when he was given no explanation for the decision which the South African, part of the Springboks’ coaching team against the 2009 Lions and in the World Cup two years later, admits still hurts.
“I have been a professional coach for 16 years and that is the only time it has happened to me,” says Gold. “I am still pretty much in the dark about why it did and I do not want to go down the route of accepting something like that. I get that in sport at the top level there is a huge emphasis on performance and success but, when a decision is not related to the success of the team, you get sad at the route the sport is going down.
“A normal business would not behave in that manner and it does hurt. I have been heavily involved in recent studies in professional sports teams across various codes. The irony is the more teams chop and change, whether coaches or players, and lose the element of continuity, the less successful they are.
“It is fascinating for me to watch the Arsenal situation. If they do get rid of Arsène Wenger after so long and they do not qualify for Europe for the next three years, how happy will the season‑ticket holders be then?
“I understand there is an expectation to win trophies but there have been a few along the way. Arsenal are a well-balanced team and the club is profitable, always in Europe. I do not see that as being a terrible story. I get that demands are high and Wenger is in one sense the master of his own downfall because he created success there. Alex Ferguson once said: ‘I did not keep my job because I was successful; I became successful because I kept my job.’ You are in the era now of owners of clubs compared to the past when it was committees who did not have a hiring and firing mentality. Success comes with continuity.”
Worcester are at Wasps todayon Sunday, a club Gold cites as a model for others. In his last firefighting role in England, back in 2012, he spent the final four months trying to keep Newcastle in the Premiership before joining Bath. They were marooned at the bottom when he arrived but they went to Adams Park on the final weekend of the campaign with a chance of surviving at the expense of Wasps, whose director of rugby then, as now, was Dai Young.
“If they had gone down, they may have gone bankrupt but a number of players who were with them then are still at the club,” says Gold. “Dai has done an amazing job and Wasps deserve a huge amount of credit for sticking by a bloody good coach. Look at his path and compare it to Bath and what happened to Ian McGeechan. Uncertainty at a club is ruinous and that is one of the things we are trying to change at Worcester.”
Worcester looked in a state of collapse before Gold arrived having lost to their relegation rivals Bristol on Boxing Day. They have won two of their four league matches since his arrival, including revenge on Bristol, having recorded two victories in their first 13 games and Gold is in talks with the club about extending his stay beyond the end of the season.
“At this stage my position is short-term,” he says. “We are talking about possibilities and options but my first task is to keep the club in the Premiership and I have not achieved that yet. I am slightly apprehensive about getting ahead of ourselves but conversations have taken place and there is interest. It is a great place to be: part of my remit was to work with the coaches and see if I could add value. It has been fun but we are nowhere near out of the woods and we have to continue to be tough on ourselves for the next five weeks.
“I want us to build on our performance against Bristol. We have had a horrible away record and our next challenge is to replicate our home form on the road. The game at Wasps will give us a sense of how far we have come: they are a star-studded team who are top of the Premiership. We will be up for it and we have been focusing on ourselves. I have placed an emphasis on training with intensity and replicating match situations. It is a process that takes time, but we are on the right path.”
Gold was out of work when Worcester called him, having resigned as the Sharks’ coach because he wanted to spend more time with his family in Cape Town. He left a game in South Africa that was in turmoil after the Springboks endured their least successful year when they even lost to Italy and slumped to seventh in the world rankings.
“I am worried but I think it is fixable,” he says. “There is a way back for them because we have the players and in that sense there is no crisis. Transformation has been used as an excuse, but that is a cop out: our cricket side is still doing well. I think the issue has been poor administration that has affected coaches and players and been a factor in many moving abroad. If we get decent leadership at the top of the game and appreciate we have the talent, there is a way back.
“I was first in England in 2000 with London Irish and can see the improvements that have been made here since, not least at academy level. In South Africa we have the highest number of schoolboy players in the world but no academy system. England have an outstanding pathway for players and coaches and it is no surprise that they are very good at the moment.”
