Rugby more grounded than soccer – Flannery
IT’S safe to say that Felix Jones landed on his feet when Rassie Erasmus offered him a gig with the Springboks before last year’s World Cup.
Jones and his former teammate Jerry Flannery had left their posts as assistant coaches on Johann van Graan’s backroom team in May of last year. It was an announcement that sent shockwaves through Irish rugby.
Neither had another gig lined up. New deals were on the table, but both chose to walk away from Munster — an operation in which they had invested so much.
When Swys de Bruin fell ill before the tournament in Japan, Erasmus was one assistant coach short heading towards the World Cup. He decided to give his old pal at Munster a call. Jones was on the podium with a winner’s medal in Tokyo a few months later.
Flannery will be hoping to make a similar impact with Harlequins. After a year out of the game, the former Munster and Ireland hooker is back on the beat with the English Premiership outfit.
Flannery’s main remit will be getting the club’s lineout up to scratch. Yesterday, he faced the media for the first time since he landed the new position.
You feel that he will get on well with Paul Gustard, the club’s head coach, in this new venture.
Gustard was a renowned defence guru with Saracens and Eddie Jones’s England before he was offered the chance to run the show at a top club for the first time when the ambitious Londoners came calling. Energetic, engaging and innovative, Gustard is a big character and he seems to have found a kindred spirit in Flannery.
Several times yesterday, the Quins boss hailed his new assistant’s ‘intensity’ and enthusiasm since he arrived at the Stoop during the summer.
Gustard will be hoping Flannery — a two-time Heineken Cupwinner with Munster — can bring some of that Thomond Park steel to a Harlequins pack which has lacked edge in recent years.
And this is not Flannery’s first time working in London, either. Following his retirement from the game in 2012, after a trophy-laden spell with Munster and 41 Ireland caps to his name, he took up a role with Arsenal’s academy as a strength and conditioning coach.
Going from the teak-tough environment of Munster to the Gunners — a side not renowned for their appetite for battle in recent years — was something of a reality check for Flannery at the time.
Asked what he learned at Arsenal, he delivered a frank reply: ‘Football pays better than rugby!
‘As a result, there are things that come with that. I really enjoyed my time at Arsenal and I feel I learned a lot there. I think it made me realise how much I love rugby.
‘The financial implications of long-term contracts in football mean that you’re not always going to get players as driven and, as a result, you may not get the same level of accountability around performance that you would find in rugby where everyone, the coaches, the players are all on short-term contracts. No one is going to be financially secure from a rugby career.
‘Everyone has got to work afterwards, so everyone is a bit more grounded and, because there’s not as much money in the game, I think when people come through in rugby, when they actually start to earn a few bob, it’s because they’ve earned it.
‘Whereas in football, a lot of players get paid on potential when they’re young and that can be a bit of a poisoned chalice in that the club gets to retain a lot of talent, but if that talent hasn’t been working and suddenly gets rewarded for not working, those players tend not to make it in the end.’
Quins have been the great underachievers of English rugby, but some big Irish personalities have helped the club achieve great things in the past — namely former director of rugby Conor O’Shea, who steered them to their last league title in 2012, and former Ireland hooker Keith Wood, a stalwart of the club in the 1990s and early 2000s.
‘They played Munster in the European Cup and Quins came over and I remember watching the game and seeing all the Munster players trying to get stuck in to him,’ Flannery recalled yesterday.
‘When Woody came back to Munster (in 2000), I was training with the team at the time and it was pretty amazing to see a guy who went to the same school as me playing for the Lions.’
If Flannery can leave a similar imprint on this club as his fellow Munster man, he’ll be doing well.