One of Hansen’s key strengths was getting inside the head of rival coaches.
BEING A HEAD COACH THESE DAYS REQ UIRES A DEGREE IN PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR FARE. IT’ S A JOB FOR BIG PERSONALITIES AND Steve HanSen CAME TO RELISH THE CHANCE TO INDULGE IN MIND GAMES.
The last two weeks of the World Cup drove a level of media interest that was unprecedented.
The four teams that had survived were vastly different in playing style, vision and philosophy.
Yet they were united in that they were all respectively governed by a head coach with a huge presence and a PhD in setting an agenda.
Those last two weeks proved that we are in the era of the ‘Super Coach’. The best teams were governed by men with big personalities. Alpha male types who had been around for an age and knew how to manipulate the media – how to create a storyline that suited whatever angle they were working.
If the World Cup taught us anything, it was surely that coaching now is all about the cult of personality.
A job that was once about organising 15 blokes to run in the same direction has morphed into something entirely different in a professional age of mass media coverage, sponsor influence and free labour markets that have led to the global dissemination of rugby intelligence.
The head coaching role is no longer the domain of the technical and tactical mastermind, operating in the shadows of the training ground, clad in tracksuit and commanding those around him with shrill blasts of the whistle.
What we saw in Japan is that a head coach is now a figurehead, a statesman, a near genius in the art of psychological warfare.
In those last two weeks of the World Cup, the players didn’t make any headlines off the park. It felt like no one was particularly interested in what they had to say.
It was the respective coaches of New Zealand, England, South Africa and Wales that grabbed all the attention. During the week of the semi-final, literally hundreds of journalists crammed into England’s hotel to hear Eddie Jones make any number of priceless one liners and zany observations.
For 20 minutes, Jones was brilliant entertainment, rattling off any number of never to be forgotten one-liners.
“We don’t have any pressure, mate,” he said. “No one thinks we can win. There’s 120 million Japanese people out there whose second team are the All Blacks.
“They [the All Blacks] have got to be thinking, they’re looking for a third straight World Cup, so there will be pressure there. They talk about walking towards the pressure but this week the pressure is going to be chasing them down the street.
“I don’t think they’re vulnerable but the pressure is real. The busiest guy for them will be Gilbert Enoka. They will be talking about it the whole week. It’s potentially the last game for their greatest ever coach [Steve Hansen], and for their greatest ever captain [Kieran Read].
WE’VE BEEN PREPARING FOR THIS GAME FOR TWO-ANDA-HALF YEARS. EVEN BACK THEN WE KNEW THAT WE WOULD PLAY NEW ZEALAND IN THE SEMI-FINALS. WE BELIEVE WE’VE BUILT THE GAME TO TAKE NEW ZEALAND.’ EDDIE JONES
“We’ve been preparing for this game for twoand-a-half years. Even back then we knew that we would play New Zealand in the semi-finals. We believe we’ve built the game to take New Zealand.”
It meant that two days later, there was an even bigger crowd to hear All Blacks coach Steve Hansen respond. The battle between the two was unmissable theatre.
It was the same when Warren Gatland and Rassie Erasmus held court – everyone wanted to hear what they had to say: everyone wanted to know how they were going to respectively wind each other up.
It was a reminder that a head coach these days has to understand the difference between tactics and strategy and be conscious that they are employed to win wars, not battles.
Jones won a battle against the All Blacks while Erasmus lost one, yet it was the latter who won the war. It was Erasmus who ran the best campaign in the end because it was his side that lifted the Webb Ellis Cup.
A head coach has to be an arch manipulator of referees, players and the media and while they don’t need to be academically smart, they have to be street smart; cunning and with a deep insight into the flaws, frailties and limits of the human condition.
It is an exposed and lonely place. The head coach sits on the front-line, providing the biggest clues of all to where his side may be weak, where they might be strong and how they intend to attack the opposition on game night.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that the last four teams standing were coached by men with combative instincts that have been used so well over the years that they have developed bigger profiles than most of the players. Hansen, Jones, Gatland and Erasmus were the big four – the men who have come to see that a press conference is not a chore, but an opportunity to destabilise their opposition and potentially impact their preparation and performance.
They get that coaching is a job only for those with the mental strength to accept that their every decision, selection and utterance will create a narrative of some kind and they have to be ready to bend it in the direction they want.
Call it the ability to control the message, but it is really more than that. It’s the ability to detect weakness in others and strategise a means to exploit it that may often require having to plan three to four moves ahead.
It’s an art form because to be aggressive or provocative – to play what are universally known as mind games with a rival coach - is to invite a response that may prove to be destabilising for the initial aggressor.
The retaliation can potentially be the killer blow and so it takes a deep thinker to determine the potential advantages and disadvantages of verbally antagonising a rival coach.
Look at Jones, his line about pressure chasing the All Blacks down the street will forever be remembered because in the end the All Blacks did indeed play as if the pressure had chased them down the street and caught up with them.
Whether Jones’ words had any impact on the All Blacks we will never know, but Hansen did admit during that week, that the whole business of mind games is not harmless theatre.
“It’s a real thing, but sometimes you are better to not bother going there and sometimes you are,” he said.
Jones had probably been hoping to elicit a response from Hansen, but it never came. And it didn’t come because Hansen’s successful tenure was built on knowing who to attack and why and who to leave alone.
He was happy to verbally spar with Ewen McKenzie because the former Wallabies coach rated himself in that area while Hansen didn’t hold the same view.
McKenzie lacked the mental agility to think on his feet and lasted barely two years in the role. Hansen, with some deadly observations and public put downs having caused much of the damage to his opponent’s confidence and reputation.
His best came when McKenzie surprisingly picked Kurtley Beale at first-five for a Bledisloe Cup test in 2014 and Hansen suggested it was a decision made not by the coach, but the Australian Rugby Union who were paranoid that the soon-tobe off contract utility back was going to flee overseas unless he felt wanted.
McKenzie had no come back to that, which was pretty much the story of his two years in the role. Hansen would verbally thrust and McKenzie couldn’t parry.
He simply didn’t have the stomach for it, or if he did, he didn’t have the smarts and never once managed to land a decent retort.
Michael Cheika was another on the list of obvious targets for Hansen given his certainty to respond to any kind of provocation. It became clear early in Cheika’s tenure that he was emotionally volatile and hence a massively negative impact on his own team when Hansen needled him.
One year Hansen decided to never use Cheika’s name publicly but to only refer to him as the Australian coach. It sent Cheika into endless rants about not being respected.
But among many memorable barbs, the best came earlier this year when Hansen was at a corporate function and was asked, deliberately, by on-stage MC Ian Fraser, who is a former chief executive of TVNZ and close friend, what he thought about former Wallaby great Mark Ella saying that Mickey Mouse could coach the All Blacks.
Hansen said that the Disney character wouldn’t be able to because he was already gainfully employed elsewhere: “They’ve got Mickey Mouse coaching Aussie.”
Of course Hansen knew that despite there being no media at the function that the comment would get back to Cheika and the illusion of it looking like a genuine expose would only make its impact more powerful.
Gatland has not been a target per se, but he was during the Lions tour in 2017 as there was always this sense that under pressure he would look to protect himself rather than the team.
As the tour developed, Gatland made a series of increasingly bizarre decisions, one of which - calling-up six additional players based on their
proximity to New Zealand rather than actually being deserving of selection - Hansen publicly predicted a few days before it was confirmed.
First Gatland had to worry there was a mole in his set-up and then he had bigger problems because the decision to bolster the squad with players who didn’t deserve the jersey saw him incur the wrath of his own team as well as that of the wider
Lions rugby fraternity.
Then, after a heavy first test loss, Gatland made a wild claim that the All Blacks had illegally targeted halfback Conor Murray in the hope they could injure him.
A few days out from the second test Gatland appeared on the verge of imploding – something the New Zealand Herald picked up on and published a cartoon of Gatland dressed as a clown.
“We probably had him where we needed him and then the bloody Herald made a picture of him as a clown, which I didn’t think was right, so I had to back off,” Hansen revealed at the same event where he made the Mickey Mouse quip.
In contrast he shied away from jousting with Erasmus and Jones, no doubt because he deduced there was little to be gained as both are quick-witted, especially the latter, and capable of putting the pressure back on the All Blacks.
He did, however, feel the need to put the record straight before the All Blacks played South Africa in their opening pool game of the World Cup.
In the build-up to that game Erasmus had made a claim that the All Blacks had, as a result of being the world’s number one team, enjoyed favourable refereeing decisions for the last decade.
He said that now they weren’t the number one team, he expected referees to adjust their stance accordingly.
It was a brazen and unsophisticated attempt to influence the match officials and Hansen called him on it.
“It’s pretty obvious what they are trying to do,” Hansen said. “I have a lot of respect for South Africa and particularly Rassie, he’s a great coach, but I don’t agree with them trying to put more pressure on the referees. They’re under enough pressure already.
“They don’t need us coaches doing what he is doing. It doesn’t matter who you are, as a coach or a team, you can always find things after a game and get emotional about the fact that it is against you and not the opposition. We have done it ourselves.
“But at the end of the day they go out there to do the best that they can and, yes, they don’t get it right all the time, we have suffered from that, just like other teams.”
Likewise, Hansen never went after Joe Schmidt, but said before the game with Ireland last year that the winner would be the real world number one.
When Ireland did win, he then
bestowed that status on them and asked whether they would be able to cope with the pressure of being favourites. It was designed to lodge in Ireland’s heads that they were now the hunted and the long game worked.
He thought four moves ahead as sure enough Ireland collapsed when they met the All Blacks in the World Cup quarter-final with captain Rory Best admitting as much.
“Everyone talks about the pressure that’s on the All Blacks before quarter-finals but when you haven’t won one and you feel you have a great coaching set-up and great group of players then maybe you put too much pressure on,” he said.
“Maybe we have been looking at this for too long and been so focused on it that we forgot to win some of the little battles along the way over the last 12 months.”
Hansen hasn’t offered the next All Blacks coach any advice. That’s not his style. But inadvertently at least, he has given the next man in some things to think about.
Not the least of which is whether his successor will attempt to play the same sort of mind games. Hansen didn’t do it for himself.
He did it with the sole intention of helping the team. That was the point he never lost sight of. He always had a strategical objective.
“You have got to have an inner belief about what the purpose is otherwise you will get knocked off the bike pretty quick,” he says.
“There are a lot of things that come at you and you have got to be thick-skinned as there is a lot of pressure and scrutiny that comes with the job. Depending on the team...some have more pressure than others.
“It is like the CEO of business there is not one model fits all so you have got to do it the way that suits your own style and that is one of the first things I asked myself when the
opportunity to be a head coach came up many years ago in other teams: I asked what kind of style did I want?”
And that’s going to be a big question for the next coach to answer – what is their style and will they be able to work the media with the same skill and outcome as Hansen?
Even as he stepped down, Hansen managed to land a blow on Gatland on his way out the door. A Welsh journalist, stated more than asked whether the ferocious competition Hansen had enjoyed with Gatland over the years after the All Blacks had beaten Wales 40-17 in the bronze medal match had made it a great coup for New Zealand to have the latter returning home to coach the Chiefs.
“I think we have played 10 times, and it might be eight wins [to the All Blacks], one loss and one draw. So it has been competitive, yeah,” Hansen said by way of mocking the assertion that Gatland had been a genuine rival.
“Having him back in New Zealand - not sure how that is going to work to be honest. Because he is going to go and do the Lions after that. So there is not going to be a lot of continuity there for the Chiefs and him. But I am sure he will work his way through that.”
Playing mind games worked for Hansen. It clearly rattled the various Australian coaches he encountered and got under Gatland’s skin.
The next coach might not be able to decide for themselves whether they want to go down the road of playing things the same way.
Given the way things are, it may now be part of the job: a non-negotiable that the All Blacks coach be skilled in the verbal combat zones and cognisant of the emotional and psychological war they will have to wage every week.
They may have to develop if they don’t already have the force of personality to impose the All Blacks’ will on whoever needs to have it imposed upon them and the emotional intelligence to read what strategy is required to best do it.