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a really small pool of players,” he says, and then he catches himself. “They, the b ****** s, they… I keep saying ‘we’. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?”
Scotland has grown on him. There are financial constraints at Edinburgh, there is a weirdness to playing home games in a largely deserted national stadium, but he has taken to the country’s rugby players and thinks he is on to something with them. Now that he has made them more English in their outlook.
“Culturally, the Scots are a bit different to the English,” said Cockerill. “I’m an Englishman. I always believe I can win – whether that is realistic or not. The Scottish lads I work with will say, ‘We’re plucky losers. We try hard, we’re a small nation, we’re not meant to win’. We’re slowly changing that. With the amount of players we have in the Scotland squad now, especially around that forward pack, there is a lot to be positive around.
“I’m enjoying coaching these guys. There’s not a lot of flashy stuff around here, they just soak up every bit of information, they’re dead keen to work hard. Towards the end of my experience at Leicester, that wasn’t always the case with some of those Premiership players.
“The really nice thing is that when people talk about Edinburgh now they say that this side looks like the coach – and I take huge pride in that because we are a good side who are hard to beat and people respect us.
“Wherever we go as an Edinburgh team, I’ll be b ****** d if we are going there to think we are going to lose. If we get beaten, we get beaten but we will crawl off the field at the end and the opposition will have had to be good to beat us.”
After an eye-catching demolition of Toulon in round two, the back-to-back fixtures with Richards’ unbeaten Newcastle offer a chance for Edinburgh to serve as unlikely quarter-final eliminators.
Cockers and Deano go back forever. Cockerill recalls one training session at Leicester where he felt his shirt being tugged from behind and swung around to deliver a lesson to the perpetrator. He recalls his feeling of impending doom when he realised the jaw he had connected with belonged to Richards.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is going to hurt’. And it did,” he said. “That Leicester team under Dean at the turn of the THE SCOUT century were back-to-back Heineken Cup winners and league winners four years on the trot. We were pretty unstoppable, and he was a huge part of that.
“He’s a great rugby man. He has never coached a minute in his life but he’s a smart man and he gets good people in around him. And he knows the game really well.
“Who’d have thought he’d be coaching Newcastle and I’d be coaching Edinburgh all these years on?
“I’m sure Newcastle are thinking now they can win this group. Equally, if we could get past them twice, it gives us a fighting chance.”
When all is done, will he meet up with Richards for a drink and a catch-up? A look of horror crosses his face.
“I’d never drink with Dean,” said Cockerill. “His legs are hollow.”