‘You can only win if you’re good enough to win’
Nearly 20 years ago, a little-known New Zealander came to Wales to assist rugby coaching legend Graham Henry but ended up with the top job thanks to a crisis during that year’s Six Nations. Since then, Sir Steve Hansen has gone on to win two World Cups with the All Blacks and make his mark on the game. Rugby correspondent Simon Thomas talks to the coach about his time with Wales and the legacy he left behind here
FIRST things first, I ask, should I call you Sir Steve?
“No, just call me Steve,” comes the reply, in that familiar drawl.
And with that, we are up and running on an hour-long conversation about the life and times of Steve Hansen, rugby’s newest knight.
It’s close on 20 years now since I first encountered the man from Mosgiel, a man who was to have such a significant impact on Welsh rugby and win two World Cups with his native New Zealand.
When he was unveiled to the media as Graham Henry’s new assistant coach on that late autumn afternoon in Cardiff back in 2001, none of us could have imagined what lay ahead – least of all the man himself.
“I went there to be the assistant to a guy who is a very, very good coach, but unfortunately that didn’t happen,” he recalls. “He left and I was cast into a role which, if I was honest with myself, I probably wasn’t ready for.
“But when you are given it in a crisis, you’ve got to step up, don’t you?”
So it was that Hansen took up the helm with Wales in the wake of Henry standing down after the opening game of the 2002 Six Nations.
What followed over the next two years was a rollercoaster ride which took in a lengthy losing run, a seismic shift to regional rugby, a remarkable World Cup campaign and the sowing of seeds for future success.
It also saw him come within one game of getting the sack, more of which later.
When I speak to Hansen down the line from his home in Christchurch, what becomes clear is he looks back on his time here with a mixture of fondness and frustration.
“My primary job when I took over Wales, and the All Blacks for that matter, was to make them a better team,” he says.
“In the Welsh situation, we were coming from a fairly ordinary starting point. They’d had a great run and then they dipped for whatever reasons.
“We needed to get the culture throughout Welsh rugby better and we needed to get fitter and more skilled to play the game we wanted to play. There were a lot of inhibiting factors preventing that from happening. Some of it was tribalism, some of it was self-interest.”
Much is often made about the similarities between Wales and New Zealand culturally, with rugby playing such an important role in both countries, so I wonder whether Hansen felt that himself at the time, having moved from his job with Canterbury?
“I don’t think any culture is the same,” he replies. “Like in New Zealand, you can have a conversation with someone and you can say what you think and then that’s it. I found in Wales, you had the same conversation and people would sulk. They would take it personally.
“Regardless of what they had said to me, I never took it personal. There’s no point sulking about it. It’s a case of, ‘OK, that’s how you feel, what are we going to do about it?’
“But the biggest handicap Wales had at the time was the tribalism. That was a barrier that had to be broken down, not so much with the players, but the people who run the clubs and supported the clubs.
“Once we got a couple of things sorted out early, the players were brilliant. You couldn’t have asked for more. They tried their butts off, they worked their butts off, to the point where the year after we left they won the Six Nations.
“The thing I enjoyed most of all was that the team was tight. Most of the people who caused us pain were the people on the outside. For whatever reason, they didn’t want us to be successful or they wanted the success to come quicker. They certainly didn’t understand what we were trying to do, be it media or ex-players.
“Maybe when I look back at my time there with the media, I probably didn’t explain what we were trying to do well enough for them to get it.”
He added: “I was in a frustrated state for a long time in Wales and I think that showed at times, particularly in dealing with the media.
“As a young coach, having come from an environment where I hadn’t had to face too much frustration, I didn’t have the experience to deal with it the right way.
“Internally, it was easy, because you just kept driving the standards you wanted and the expectations. But externally it was a lot harder to deal with the frustration.
“I remember I kept getting asked the same question, ‘When are we going to win? When are we going to win?’
“I wanted to win more than any of them. I can’t stand losing. But, as I said at the time, you can only win if you are good enough to win.
“If you are not good enough to win, how are you going to fix it? You are going to go back to the training field and work harder on the things you need to be a successful rugby team.
“Those four things are skill level, fitness level, game knowledge and confidence.
“Unfortunatly, when you are not winning you are pinching confidence, you are taking it away, you’ve got to keep adding it somehow and it’s a very difficult thing to do.”
It’s fair to say Hansen adopted a pretty authoritarian approach when he took charge of the Welsh team in terms of what he expected from players.
“I like to think I empower athletes, but it’s like your children, they’ve got to be ready to be empowered,” he said.
“If they are not ready to be empowered, then you have to be a little bit more authoritarian. We didn’t have a culture or discipline that supported that empowerment. First and foremost, we had to get those things.
“I was probably less flexible in my thinking back then. But we were in a situation where so many things needed to change. We needed to get fitter and we needed to have a better attitude towards team first, as opposed to individuals first, team second.
“Change takes time, particularly if you are starting from a low base. We realised we were going to have to bunker down and push things through because we didn’t have a lot of people who wanted to come with us early on.
“I think some of the players who had been superstars and were closer to retirement than reaching the pinnacle of their careers struggled with it because they had been given so much
rope to do whatever they wanted to do. It had become more about what they wanted than what the team needed.
“It’s been interesting talking to some of the guys in recent years. They now understand what it was we were trying to do, but at the time they struggled with it.
“As a coach, you’ve got to look after your players and sometimes that means making decisions they don’t agree with.”
In addition to the challenges he faced in making changes on the playing front, Hansen also found himself at the centre of a political storm, amid the switch to regional rugby. He recognised from the outset that the number of professional teams simply had to be reduced from the existing nine clubs.
“It had to happen,” he said. “Wales had way more professional rugby players than New Zealand did. Now, does that sound right?
“When you look at it from an honest viewpoint, you would say there were more players in New Zealand that were good enough to be professional than there were in Wales at that time.
“And yet you had five franchises in New Zealand and nine clubs in Wales, with something like twice as many professional players.
“Welsh rugby at that time had a massive amount of debt, as did all the clubs, to be frank.
“You were paying a lot of people a lot of money to take the mick, money that could have been spent somewhere else to benefit the game and develop young players coming through.
“I thought there was really only enough money, enough quality athletes and enough quality coaches for three sides in Wales.
“But I understood why we needed to end up with five politically.
“We had to have five to be able to get it passed because of people wanting an individual thing rather than what was collectively right for the nation.
“The big difference between New Zealand rugby and Welsh rugby is everybody in New Zealand rugby works to make New Zealand rugby better.
“One of the five Welsh regions went broke within a year and that didn’t reflect well. There was a lot of pain and wasted energy and time and money. If we could have avoided that, that would have been great.”
He continued: “Look, clubs would have been the best way to go. But if you had gone the club way, it wouldn’t have happened. You would have still been where you were.
“None of the clubs would have been prepared to stand down and say these are the four best clubs. Back to the tribalism again.
“So you had to give them another avenue or another option and that option was regional.
“If you hadn’t given them another option, the tribalism would have prevented the reduction from happening and it had to happen.”
The move to regional rugby in the summer of 2003 coincided with Hansen’s most precarious period in the job, with Wales having gone on a 10-game losing streak, including a 43-9 defeat at home to an English second string in August.
When it came to the final World Cup warm-up match against Scotland, the heat was really on and one wonders just how close he came to being shown the door.
“Oh, I know how close I came,” he reveals. “David Moffett had come to see me and told me if we didn’t beat Scotland I was going home.
“I didn’t tell anybody because I didn’t see the point putting them under pressure.
“But I also told him I wouldn’t be changing the plan. I had asked for the warm-up matches to be friendlies because we needed to do a series of different things.
“I wanted the players to train hard. We needed the fitness levels, we didn’t need the games.
“But the Union didn’t want to buy into that, they wanted them to be true internationals.
“Then we got smoked by England’s B team, basically. We’d had a training week you wouldn’t normally have if you were playing a Test at the end of it and it meant we had a tired team that went on the park.
“We went through a bit of pain in the media and from the supporters over that defeat because it was England.
“Then we got the visit from Dave. He couldn’t say it himself. I had to say it for him.
“I said, ‘OK that’s fine, but what you’ve got to do is work out who you are going to replace me with.’
“I’m going to stay here and work on how I can get this team to be the team we need it to be.”
Despite his job being on the line, Hansen stuck to his plan to field a mix-and-match side for the meeting with the Scots at the Millennium Stadium, resting a number of front-liners. Was he not tempted at all to call up the cavalry, with so much at stake personally?
“No, because that wasn’t going to help the team in the long run,” he said. “I only wanted to play the top blokes once or one and a half times.
“When you talk about the cavalry, a lot of the cavalry wanted to play because they hadn’t played well against England.
“But they didn’t play that well because we didn’t give them the preparation to do so. Physically, they were knackered.
“But every day was so important from the physical fitness point of view if we were going to be competitive in the World Cup.
“We had to have a plan to get there and that meant I was under a bit of pressure, but that’s OK, that’s what you are there for as a coach.”
In the end, Wales beat Scotland 23-9, through a Michael Owen try and the boot of Iestyn Harris.
So Hansen kept his job and was able to take the team to Australia for the World Cup. It was to prove a memorable campaign as they gave both New Zealand and eventual winners England major scares, playing a thrilling brand of rugby.
“By the time we got to the World Cup, we were starting to get the skill level higher, the fitness higher, the game understanding higher,” he said.
“But we didn’t have the belief.
“In the New Zealand game, we were in front, 37-31, with 15 minutes to go.
“Then they got a try down the short-side from a forward pass and we capitulated a little bit mentally because we are not meant to be in this situation.
“It wasn’t that we weren’t mentally tough, it was just we didn’t have the confidence to say we are good enough to win this – let’s just go and do it. That’s understandable from where we had come from.
“The same against England in the quarter-final where we were leading at half-time.
“I think if we had been 12 months further down the road and in the same situation, we would have beaten them. We froze a little bit because it was, ‘S***, this isn’t meant to be happening.’
“But those two games were powerful in setting that team’s future.
“They were great for the group and, out of that World Cup, we got some belief.”
I point out to him that, 17 years on, a Kiwi who has won two World Cups with New Zealand is still referring to Wales as “we” in the context of a game against the All Blacks. “Well it was ‘we,’” he replies.
“We were all in it together. A lot of people may not have thought that. Here’s this foreigner, he doesn’t care about Welsh rugby. Well, I cared about it.
“At that stage, I didn’t have any future in New Zealand rugby.
“I’m obviously a New Zealander and a proud New Zealander and I’ve loved every minute of my time with the All Blacks and I’m proud of what we achieved there.
“But I’m also proud of what we achieved under really different circumstances in Wales.
“And, to be fair, some of what we did there made it possible to do what I did with the All Blacks.”
What he did with the All Blacks was win two World Cups, first as Henry’s assistant in 2011 and then as head coach in 2015.
Now 60 and recently knighted, he’s moved on to the role of director of rugby with Toyota Verblitz in Japan, having stepped down from the New Zealand job in November.
Two decades on, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since his time in Wales, but it’s clear just how much it still means to him.
“It was a wonderful experience,” he said.
““I look back on it with really fond memories. I loved every minute of it because it was a hell of a challenge.
“I met some wonderful people and got to coach some wonderful athletes who I couldn’t have asked anything more from than what they gave us.
“I have friendships there that will last my lifetime. I saw people develop, I saw myself develop and I took tools away with me that I would use for the rest of my life.
“Did I get it right, everything I did back then? No, I certainly did not. But we tried to do the best with what we had and we did it for the right reasons.
“We were trying to make Welsh rugby and the national team better.
“It took a lot of hard work from everybody, but, eventually, we got where we needed to get to and I think we put a lot of things in place that have been beneficial to Welsh rugby.”
■ ‘My time with the All Blacks’: Monday’s sport pullout