At this time of year everyone is looking for a new spell. Rugby coaches are not magicians but that inconvenient detail tends to be overlooked whenever appointments are made. Rassie Erasmus’s arrival as Munster’s head coach is the latest example; Graham Rowntree’s impending role as forwards coach at Harlequins will shortly be another. Never mind that, in the vast majority of cases a new coach is only as good as the cattle in his sheds.
There are occasional exceptions: England under Eddie Jones have made instant strides with virtually the same group of players. The snag is that world‑class, seasoned operators such as Jones do not come cheap. Nor are there millions of them in Europe. Only one of Ireland’s four provinces is set to be under the command of an Irishman next season. None of the four home unions are coached by someone from the northern hemisphere, let alone their own country. At present Australians are in charge of coaching English cricket, English rugby union and rugby league and British cycling. In the modern sporting world people are increasingly scouring the globe for miracle cures.
So what to do if you wish to turn things around and do not have a billionaire handy? Take Munster and, say, Cardiff Blues: two clubs with rich tradition and, in theory, well-placed to attract decent players. Both are struggling to qualify for the European Champions Cup next season, along with Ospreys. Suddenly their British & Irish Lions candidates for 2017 will be trying to press their cases against clubs from Romania and Russia. As Erasmus is about to discover, the pressure to bounce back will be extreme.
Money, of course, does play some part. If you can afford, as certain French and English clubs can, to hire Dan Carter, Matt Giteau, JP Pietersen and Matt Toomua, it makes life easier in certain respects. But southern hemisphere coaches are not always the instant solution, particularly at provincial level. As Mark Hammett and London Irish’s Tom Coventry can testify, even a top-level Kiwi coaching pedigree does not guarantee success in Europe. Eddie Jones was arguing the other day that British coaches should be less insular and coach abroad more. Not for the first time it would seem he has a point.
Look at the winners of the Premiership over the past decade and a bit: Mark McCall, Richard Cockerill, Jim Mallinder, Conor O’Shea, Sir Ian McGeechan, Pat Howard, Philippe Saint-André, Warren Gatland. All of them, apart from Mallinder, have either coached or lived outside England for an extended period. In addition, if you count McGeechan as Scottish, only two Englishmen have presided over a title-winning team since the play‑off system was introduced. Just one of the eight coaches named has won the Premiership title above the age of 50. Test gurus, by contrast, tend to be slightly older and more worldly-wise, as Jones was intimating.
What else can we infer? That midfield backs, front-row forwards and back-three players, probably in that order, born between around 1965 and 1975 are the shrewdest current recruitment bets for provincial sides in this part of the world? It is a thesis with some foundation. Another old front-row forward Laurent Travers, alongside a former fly-half Laurent Labit, has just guided Racing 92 to the European final.
The globe-trotting Jones used to be a hooker, the consistently smart Ireland coach Joe Schmidt was once a wing. Steve Hansen was a centre, so was the fast-rising Aaron Mauger. The exception proving the rule in recent top-level rugby is Michael Cheika, the Australian head coach who used to be a rumbustuous back-row forward for Randwick. Our thesis may need tweaking slightly: front-rowers, midfield backs, back-three men and anyone from Sydney or, failing that, Canberra.
Either way your chosen saviour will need time. Jones and Schmidt may have won Six Nations grand slams at the first attempt but the gestation period is longer at club level, as Bath are finding. The Premiership’s current top four all have settled leaders: McCall has been at Saracens since 2009, Dai Young at Wasps since 2011, Cockerill first rocked up at Leicester in 1992, and Rob Baxter has a lifelong affinity with Exeter. An innate understanding of the local landscape, not necessarily a fat chequebook, is vital but only Baxter has not coached outside England.
It is not dissimilar in the Pro12. Among the league’s recent coaching winners – Gregor Townsend, Matt O’Connor, Joe Schmidt, Steve Tandy and Tony McGahan – only Tandy has limited experience of other rugby cultures. Erasmus, even so, will study these lists and note the shortage of successful South Africans on British or Irish club honours boards, aside from Brendan Venter’s influential period at the helm of Saracens. The former Springboks back-rower, the possessor of a fine rugby brain, will have to break the mould in more ways than one. All you can do is wish him, and everyone else, well. Rowntree will definitely be on a mission to succeed alongside John Kingston at Quins.
O’Shea, bound for Italy to replace Jacques Brunel, will arrive with a crystal-clear long-term plan. Stuart Lancaster, looking to assume a post‑England role, will surely pop up again somewhere. It is interesting, though, that neither of England’s last two head coaches prior to Jones won a Premiership title; even Jones found coaching Saracens hard work and both McGeechan and Declan Kidney, two of the shrewdest coaches of any era, ultimately encountered problems at Bath and Leinster respectively. The truth of the matter is that some people are better suited to coaching at Test level while others thrive more on a weekly diet of challenges. Rare indeed is the guru who thrives wherever he goes.
Different worlds
Around 220 miles separate Salford from Twickenham but perhaps they belong in parallel universes. How else to explain Salford being docked six points and fined £5,000 for breaching the Super League salary cap in 2014 and 2015 while certain Premiership rugby union clubs seemingly guilty of similar offences were permitted to come to a private commercial settlement which had no impact on the league table? One sporting body has acted with admirable transparency, the other has hidden behind confidentiality agreements and legal obfuscation. There is a moral to this tale of two cities and it does not show the 15-man code in a glorious light.
One to watch
They call it Judgment Day and the double bill of Pro12 rugby at Principality Stadium this Saturday has caught the public imagination. More than 62,000 tickets have been sold so far, 10,000 more than last year’s event, with the lure of a seat for £10 clearly part of the attraction. In a week in which two European Champions Cup semi-finals attracted an aggregate attendance of 38,968 there would seem some merit in the idea of also staging future European semis as double-headers, given the annual problem of selling expensive tickets in a short period in the wake of the Six Nations. Watching rugby should be fun and not merely restricted to diehard fans with decent incomes.
