Hockey guru inspires England’s shot at history

Great Britain coach Danny Kerry is the latest in a long line of radical sporting thinkers to shape Eddie Jones’ work, reports Tom Cary

The thought of Maro Itoje, Dan Cole, Mako Vunipola and the rest of England’s heavy artillery huddled like overgrown schoolboys around a small Subbuteo table at Pennyhill Park is an incongruous one. But do not be surprised if it becomes a reality before next year’s Rugby World Cup in Japan. Eddie Jones was apparently rather taken with the Subbuteo set-up in ‘The Cabin’ at Great Britain Hockey’s training base in Bisham Abbey while on a visit there last summer.

The integrated pitch, which is laid out on the floor and surrounded by tiered seating – from which athletes can descend to move the little figurines about – is one of a number of innovative techniques favoured by Danny Kerry, the coach of the gold medal-winning GB women’s hockey team at Rio 2016.

A former university lecturer in sociology, Kerry appears to have made quite the impression on Jones since being invited to speak at Twickenham in the autumn of 2016, a month or two after his team’s dramatic penalty shoot-out victory over Holland.

“I thought it was going to be just Eddie and Paul [Gustard] and Steve [Borthwick] at that first meeting,” recalls Kerry, sitting in an office at England Hockey’s headquarters at Bisham Abbey. “But it ended up being quite a big group – Rick Shuttleworth, skill acquisition guys, and Frank Dick, the athletics coach. Eddie basically chaired the meeting and asked loads of questions. It felt like I was brought in, plugged in, downloaded and then ‘thanks very much’.”

Whatever Kerry said clearly impressed the Australian because he was plugged back in this time last year, before the Calcutta Cup match, when he was invited down to Pennyhill Park and asked to give feedback on specific drills and sessions. After that meeting, Jones got in touch to ask whether he might come over to Bisham Abbey himself to watch Kerry at work.

Jones (right) is a notorious ‘ideas thief ’ (a term he nicked from Pep Guardiola, incidentally). Guardiola, Antonio Conte and the coaches of England’s football, cricket and hockey teams are just some of the brains the

Australian has picked during his two years at Twickenham.

But it seems Kerry made a particularly big impression. “I think when he came to visit us he had heard and read about the way we prepare our athletes,” Kerry says. “I had a sense he was frustrated about the nature and tradition of coaching in this country. He had a sense that perhaps we were doing it a little differently, particularly decisionmaking under pressure. “After that penalty shoot-out victory in Rio, the girls spoke a lot about ‘Thinking Thursdays’. We like our alliteration here. So we also have Manic Mondays and Tactical Tuesdays. Coaches tend to fixate on the ‘what’ of the tactical and technical, and ignore some of the emotion that gets in the way of good decision-making. So we deliberately try to create quite a highly pressurised environment on Thursdays with our model of pressure being judgment, consequence and expectation. We want to explore the psychologicals. What are you feeling? Why?

“Clive Woodward talked about Dislocation of Expectation, which he nicked from the Royal Marines. We do similar stuff. We design our sessions to throw them off kilter, which creates emotional responses from which they can learn and adapt. Anyway, I believe Eddie will deliberately throw a ‘Mad Minute’ into sessions, which was off the back of coming here.”

It is easy to see what Jones sees in Kerry. A workaholic who almost walked away after a tough postbeijing Olympics review, but who returned and refined his approach, even shrugging off a heart attack last year to remain in post, the two share many qualities. They also both have World Cups to plan for – Jones in Japan next year, Kerry in London this summer.

He can talk, too. The way Kerry discusses his methods, peppering his conversation with terms such as “experiential learning”, “overspeed and underspeed drills”, “distributed leadership models”, “self-limiting through assumptions”, and “contextual chaos”, makes even Sir Dave Brailsford, the master of

management psychobabble, sound like a Neanderthal.

But underpinning his philosophy is a simple tenet. Kerry wants to make his athletes “scholars of the game. It’s the concept of peer-to-peer learning rather than you as the font of all knowledge, a didactic approach.”

It is here that The Cabin comes in. A 10m x 4m shed by the side of a hockey pitch at Bisham Abbey, Kerry is delighted with the impact it has had since undergoing a makeover last year which was overseen by educationist Professor Stephen Heppell. It now features everything from optimised lighting and heating levels to that Subbuteo pitch. It seems Jones was impressed, too. “Five minutes after he left I got an email from his PA asking if we could send over Stephen’s details and the company who built our cabin,” he says.

So there you have it. GB women’s hockey inspiring England Rugby. There is just one problem. Kerry has also been invited up to speak to Scotland during this year’s tournament.