Imagine you are a well-regarded rugby coach, presiding over the league’s bottom team. What would you do if someone with an American accent offered you a fistful of dollars and the biggest job in US rugby? Gary Gold has duly signed up as the next Eagles head coach but the high‑fives are on hold. After five successive Premiership defeats, Worcester are less bothered about American dreams than extracting themselves from an increasingly Grand Canyon-sized hole.
Not that Gold is the type to jump gleefully to safety without a backward glance; he was due to return home at the end of this season anyway, having initially arrived merely as a consultant. It is also only four years since he suffered the cruellest of coaching cuts, ousted from Bath shortly after having relocated his family to Somerset. His return this weekend to the Recreation Ground with Worcester will arouse understandably mixed emotions. “I haven’t been back to Bath since. I’ve no idea how it’s going to be. I’ll be going back with quite a sore heart.”
If anyone is a world-class authority on the rollercoaster existence of modern coaches in both hemispheres it is surely the thoughtful South African, who took his first job in the UK with London Irish at the beginning of the millennium. Coaching “underdog” teams – and helping younger coaches avoid the pitfalls he has encountered – remains his passion, at the expense of a cosier existence back in Cape Town: “I think my children would much rather I was a bank manager, a clerk pushing paper, home for dinner at 5.30pm. This is my 18th year as a professional coach ... if I had my life again I wouldn’t have minded being a lawyer.”
All that top-level coaching experience – he was assistant Springboks coach from 2008 to 2011 and has also enjoyed spells at Newcastle, Western Province and the Sharks – has also taught the 50-year-old another brutal truth: a coach cannot please everyone, particularly impatient wealthy club owners. He is far from alone in being shown the Bath door; more unusually the club were third in the table when Bruce Craig opted to hand over his pet project to Mike Ford, with whom Gold had been working at both Newcastle and Bath. Gold remains distinctly unimpressed. “The Bath time was one of the lowest points in my life because of the nature of how it was done and why it was done,” he says, crisply.
His enduring friendship with Toby Booth and others – “The players are a great bunch and the supporters are absolutely wonderful” – will not dilute his satisfaction should Worcester somehow spring a surprise this weekend.
Either way, he is sure of one thing: all coaches are increasingly affected by the social media vitriol swirling around every track-suited operative: “It’s changed the dynamics of the job completely. It takes a unique individual to crack on and not be affected. There are times when I don’t know if I’m that type of individual; other times my skin becomes a little bit thicker. But it absolutely affects your decision-making, your demeanour and the positivity you want to portray. The tough times are very lonely.”
Working for the Springboks under Peter de Villiers was a particular eye‑opener, even though the Springboks won a Tri Nations title and beat the 2009 British & Irish Lions on Gold’s watch. “It’s the same as football is in this country. You just have to drive home on a Saturday after a game and listen to the call-in shows on the radio. Everyone wants blood if their team has lost. It’s not like 25 years ago when people would read the paper but you wouldn’t know what people were discussing in their households. It is more public now and people are braver behind social media.”
After South Africa lost heavily against New Zealand last month, he knew exactly how the coaches and players felt. “I wasn’t emotional about the loss, I was just very emotional for them. The tirade of abuse and the fallout, is immense. Almost nobody deserves that. You see your players getting abuse and wonder: ‘Is it fair for a 23‑year‑old kid, who’s trying his best, to deal with that?’”
Things are not yet that bad in Worcester but injuries and the uncertainty surrounding the club’s financial stability are not helping. Perversely the US job has made Gold even more determined to leave the Warriors on a high, which he still believes is feasible. “We don’t have a crisis. We’ve got a problem: we’re not playing well enough. But I’ve got a lot of confidence in this club and now, more than ever, I want to leave it as a Premiership club.”
If a suitable replacement can be swiftly recruited, nevertheless, the club says Gold could depart early. With Jemma, his 16-year-old daughter, due to take her end-of-school exams next year and his son Jamie, 13, also needing parental support – “He’s on the autistic spectrum” – he has other priorities away from the Premiership hamster wheel and his imminent American adventure.
Soon enough, though, the pressure will be cranking up again: the Eagles are in England’s pool at the 2019 World Cup and Gold is already wary. “England are an outstandingly good team and they’re going to get even better. I can’t believe anybody will go in as bigger favourites to win in Japan, particularly with Eddie Jones’s knowledge of the country. I just think Eddie is class. It’s unquestionable what a good job he’s done. I’ve crossed paths with him enough to know he will have every minute planned until that World Cup final. We’ve got lots of work to do.”
As have Worcester, with one solitary point gathered so far. “I’m pretty bloody annoyed we haven’t won a game of rugby and so are the boys. Hopefully they don’t feel anybody’s jumping ship and abandoning them. Maybe some of them are ecstatic. I don’t know.”
Gold and his Warriors, regardless, do not intend going down meekly beside the River Avon on Saturday. “There are no panic buttons being hit but you don’t want to start falling too far behind the rest of the pack. Even if you turn the corner it might be too late. I don’t think we should shy away from admitting we need to go down there and be desperate.” Few know more about the art of winning against the odds than America’s next top mentor.
