Leicester sacked me and I’d never finished outside the top four
Now Cockerill aims to turn Edinburgh into winners
WHEN Leicester sacked Richard Cockerill in early January, he said he was still the right man for the job — a conviction since reinforced by events in the East Midlands and south of France.
As he prepares for the start of the Pro14 season with Edinburgh, his third club in a year of personal peaks and troughs, the ex-England hooker is still bemused by his exit from the Tigers after eight years in charge.
Losing his job knocked his selfbelief but he regained it sufficiently in a short spell at Toulon to suggest now that his former bosses at Welford Road made a mistake.
‘Leicester wanted to change the way they play and all they’ve done is find out that they probably didn’t want to change the way they play,’ said Cockerill — after Kiwi coach Aaron Mauger followed him out of the club.
The Tigers went on to re-hire Matt O’Connor and Cockerill added: ‘They’ve gone back to what they used to do and what they’ve always done because they don’t really want that (new playing style) — the people who employed me just thought they wanted that.
‘What I should have done is just say, “This is how we play, this is what I believe in, I know it works” — and been stronger in my conviction. I got sacked and I’d never finished outside the top four. There are guys who’ve never finished in the top four and they’re still doing their jobs.’
This is trademark Cockerill defiance. Leaving Leicester has not mellowed his combative character. He found at Toulon that he could thrive away from the place where he was such a long-standing stalwart and fell just short of a stunning title-winning coup.
‘When you get sacked, it’s pretty s***,’ he said. ‘You get dented. When I took over as head coach at Toulon they had six games to the final. We won those six games, which has to help your confidence as a coach — knowing that what you are doing is actually right.
‘They sacked Mike Ford on the Monday and nobody trained. There’s me, Marc Dal Maso and Matt Giteau — who’s never coached — and we have to beat Toulouse at Marseille in front of 65,000 people.
‘ You have four days to get prepped with a coach who’s never coached and a scrum coach (Dal Maso) who’s got Parkinson’s disease and has his own issues. You need to be a strong personality because everyone’s saying, “You need to win”. So you say, “No problem, I’m used to winning”. The stadium is awesome and you have Toulon and Toulouse queuing up. That’s the biggest club arena in world rugby — but I was more than capable of taking that team by the scruff of the neck and getting them to a point where they won six on the trot.
‘Your reputation could take double dents in the space of six months so I needed to get it right, which I did.’
Cockerill’s spell at Toulon ended on a Sunday in June and he arrived in Edinburgh two days later. His task is to deliver success at a club where that is an alien concept. Many coaching regimes have tried and failed. Now an Englishman is looking for identity, hard graft and character.
‘The club has been around for 140- odd years but no one can really tell me what the culture is,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lovely castle but there haven’t been any battles there! From 1872 until now, there is a load of history and it is missing somewhere, in a cupboard. We’ve got to find it.
‘I feel too many guys at Edinburgh, historically, have used it as a place to play a few games, to get themselves fit for Test matches. Scotland don’t want that and I won’t tolerate that. I’ve no interest in the national team. These guys have to do it for Edinburgh first. The sooner they realise that, the better for everybody.’
Edinburgh’s players have been warned. They are not going to have a comfortable existence, but it could be a highly rewarding one — in time.
Cockerill rattles cages and he makes teams win. He did it for years in England, he did at once in France and eventually, perhaps before this year of upheaval is over, he will do it in Scotland.