Warren Gatland has revealed the secrets behind his three Welsh Grand Slams and successful Lions tours of Australia and New Zealand.
The New Zealander has given his thoughts on his coaching style during a fascinating interview with Coach Logic .
Gatland, who steps down as Wales coach following this year’s World Cup in Japan, believes some coaches make a mistake by attempting to overload players with too much information.
He was adamant that clutters their minds and they end up not taking enough in.
Gatland said his role when he reviewed matches was to pinpoint the areas which needed improvement and ask questions of his assistant coaches and his players.
“Can we fix this? Yes. Can we get better at this? Yep. Can we get better at that?” he explained.
“This is good, this is good so let’s concentrate on those things.
“When you go through analytically and you look at a game, you pick out 15, 20 things that you either need to work on or change but you can’t do that.
“What are the two, three or four things as a maximum, the priority things that you have got to work on?”
Gatland stressed: “If you concentrate on those two or three or four things and that becomes your focus for the whole week, that, to me has the most significant impact on performance.
“A lot of coaches make mistakes because they have 20 things they want to fix. You can’t work on 20 things in a week, you can’t get 20 things right.
“I can fix up two or three,” he declared, before adding: “What are the two, three or four things that are most important to work on, to concentrate on, to make us better from last week to improve a performance?
“If you do that and you focus on that, then you tend to get results.”
An example was the work Wales did before beating England in this year's Six Nations to counter the kicking threat of Owen Farrell.
And it paid dividends as Gatland's back-three of George North, Josh Adams and Liam Williams won the aerial battle.
Gatland used acclaimed Wales defence supremo Shaun Edwards as an example of a coach who learned to keep it simple during the pair’s European Cup and English Premiership triumphs with Wasps.
“The great thing about Shaun is that he loves giving out a tips sheet of things to work on,” said Gatland.
“I came in one day and he showed me a tips sheet. There were 12 points on it and I went: ‘Go and reduce that to three or four’,
“He said: ‘Why’s that?’
“I said: ‘I have just read through your 12 points and I can’t remember one of them. But, if you give me three or four, I can remember those’.
“So it’s kind of like saying less is more. It’s one of the mantras that I always had at Wasps
“The message that I give to the coaches all the time is don’t over-coach, don’t give too much information, be specific, concentrate on the things that are important.”
Wales enter the World Cup as Six Nations Grand Slam kings after beating Ireland at the Principality Stadium earlier this year.
