WARREN PEACE
HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH IRISH RUGBY HAS BEEN TESTY AND TEMPESTUOUS FOR TWO DECADES. SO IS GATLAND FINALLY OVER HIS BITTER BREAK-UP?
HIS concession that the form of Johnny Sexton makes leaving him out of the last Lions tour look a mistake, was celebrated in some quarters as another setback for Warren Gatland in his enduring relationship with Irish rugby.
Events of the past 18 months make the exclusion of Sexton seem an error, but it is easy to forget how he struggled, for Leinster and Ireland, against teams with powerful packs in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
But Gatland’s comments still made headlines here, and brought back memories of the absurd reaction in Ireland in 2013 when the Kiwi coach dropped Brian O’Driscoll for the final Lions test against Australia.
It was the correct call, justified by the brilliant team display in that deciding game which saw the Lions win at a canter.
O’Driscoll was in his final months as a player, and his game-changing brilliance was a diminishing factor, especially in the rushed environment
That decision was treated as a national slight
of a Lions tour. Yet a call that was seen as straightforward in England, Wales, and Scotland triggered one of our occasional bouts of breathless over-reaction here, and the decision was treated as a national slight.
It seems certain that the aftermath was influenced, at least in part, by the tangled ties that have linked Gatland to rugby in this country for a quarter of a century.
But if his decision to leave Sexton at home was defensible based on form, and if the O’Driscoll decision was an obviously sound one based on form and validated by what happened in the final Test, some of the wider takes on Gatland’s Ireland experience are unduly sympathetic to the veteran coach.
There is a version of what happened in 2002 that is now taken as gospel, and it goes like this: Gatland, still some months shy of his 40th birthday, helped to transform Ireland from a squad undermined by amateur tactics and preparation, and under the undue influence of amateur committee men, in his three and a half years in the job.
Then, his scheming assistant, in concert with some of those blazers, shafted him and cost him his job.
Thereafter, Gatland thrived, with Wasps, Wales and the Lions, fuelled in part by the anger that the end of his Ireland reign engendered.
It is a version of the past, aspects of which Gatland appears to have pushed over the years.
The build-up to his return to Ireland in 2008 in charge of Wales, with Eddie O’Sullivan opposite him still at the head of Ireland, was dominated by what had happened six years previously.
Wales won a miserable encounter in Croke Park, and O’Sullivan was gone shortly after.
The memory is still vivid of Gatland’s resentful demeanour in the post-match press conference as he claimed his words had been twisted in the build-up. But what he said was clear – and it revealed the real hurt he still felt at how his time here ended.
In particular, an interview he gave to BBC Wales about his Irish experience included an unsubtle dig at O’Sullivan, fresh confirmation of Gatland’s belief that the latter was a cause in his fall.
‘I suppose what I didn’t have on reflection, that I have here, was probably that undenying [sic] loyalty you might expect from people within your coaching setup,’ he said.
The comments caused a sensation here, and it was, at best, remarkable naivety on Gatland’s part if he was surprised at how they were received.
A year later, he let himself down before Ireland’s Grand Slam-winning game in Cardiff, with a cheap jibe at Declan Kidney that suggested his bad feeling towards Irish rugby did not depart with Eddie O’Sullivan.
He had claimed that the Wales players disliked Ireland above all other opponents, words that were again hotly received and widely covered here.
In the pre-match press conference, a sulky Gatland objected to how his comments had been received, and he mused that ‘perhaps in future I should take a leaf out of Declan Kidney’s book, that’s probably the way to go in future.
‘Then you get clichés and nothing’.
It was a remarkably graceless thing to say about a fellow coach, but it also betrayed his ongoing Ireland issues.
Fourteen years on, the presumption is that he has processed some of the ill will.
Maybe he has come to appreciate that the end of his time coaching Ireland was not solely down to the ambitions of O’Sullivan and the bumbling of those running the union at the time. Maybe. But the past two decades has seen a version of those events crystallise in which Gatland was the innocent dupe in a power play that harmed Irish rugby in the long run. This is, at best, a contestable reading of history.
The definitive account of that time remains ‘From There to Here’, Brendan Fanning’s history of the first years of professionalism in Irish rugby.
He details at great length the tensions that marked the partnership between Gatland and O’Sullivan from the time the latter was picked as Gatland’s assistant, in the fall-out from the disastrous defeat to Argentina in Lens in the 1999 World Cup.
However, the team took off with a win against Scotland in the 2000 Six Nations, a campaign elevated to unforgettable by Brian O’Driscoll’s hat-trick in Paris. A year later, ambitions of continuing the improvement were ruined by a foot and mouth outbreak that prevented Gatland building on two wins from their first two games, including a defeat of France in Dublin. By the time the postponed matches were played that autumn, a significant shift in Gatland’s relationship with the union had occurred. He had been public in his concerns about the security of his tenure, with the coach agitating for a contract that took him through to the 2003 World Cup.
Instead, he was to be judged on how Ireland fared in the rearranged Six Nations game and the November Tests in 2001.
That run of games, which started with Irish ambitions of a Grand Slam that were dashed by a heavy defeat in Murrayfield, concluded with them coughing up a handsome lead against New Zealand to lose by 11 points.
The defeat exposed the one enduring weakness in Gatland’s plans, which was Ireland’s defence (and it may not be coincidental that brilliant defence would go on to be such a feature of Gatland’s best sides, thanks primarily to the work of Shaun Edwards).
Keith Wood addressed that loss in ‘From There to Here’: ‘That was my chance to beat New Zealand. I’d never beaten them. We had it not done, but nearly done, and literally it was the harum scarum defensive structure that can work for 60 minutes but can’t work for 80 minutes because it’s inefficient. I was just so sick of it’.
Others were, too, and Gatland was gone by the end of November, with O’Sullivan his replacement. The latter could count on the strong support of Wood, but others, too; there was no rancorous players’ reaction to the news.
Irish rugby was changing, the ambitions of players were starting to be shaped by the professional game, and there was a feeling that a more stable, more thorough coaching structure was required.
Whatever his detractors might feel, it is hard to argue O’Sullivan didn’t provide it; Ireland won three Triple Crowns and climbed to third in the world rankings in his six years.
That won’t deter those who dream of what might have been in a story that compels 20 years on.
The enduring weakness was the defending