Army

is the ability to see what’s in front of them.’’ He won’t coach them on a whiteboard, he says, because ‘‘once you actually show the boys something, they get it instantly.’’

Likewise, they don’t have an analyst, and neither will Ryan spend hours doing the analysis for them.

He says: ‘‘I just give them my laptop, and tell them, ‘Here’s the game, if you see anything of interest, let me know.’ They’ll all watch it and then come back to me with brilliant insight. They’ve played so many hundreds of thousands of hours, their collective understanding is outstanding.’’

It was when disaster struck that Ryan understood what kind of squad he had developed. The cyclone in February killed 44 people and damaged or destroyed 40,000 homes.

Two of Ryan’s players had their homes obliterated. It struck in the early hours of a Friday.

Their next training camp was the following Tuesday, to prepare for the Las Vegas tournament. In the interim, almost all the players had been living without running water or electricity and it had been baking hot. And as the grid was down, no one could communicate.

On the Tuesday, Ryan waited at training to see who would pitch up, and one by one they trooped in.

‘‘They came in like they’d been at war,’’ he recalls. ‘‘Some had walked eight hours to get on to the road to thumb a lift to training.’’

Only one player, one of those whose house had been destroyed, didn’t make it.

Ryan recalls: ‘‘We tried to train and they had nothing. So I said, ‘Right, you’re going to bed.’’’

At their training base, there is a hotel with a generator, owned by a rugby-mad fan. So the players slept there. Ryan got them food and massages. They did nothing for three days but recover.

‘‘We won Vegas at a canter.’’