Eddie’s little helpers will need to be strong men
IT is said that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and it explains why a Springbok scrum coach is at the top of Eddie Jones’ shopping list with the 2020 Six Nations imminent. Not far behind is the necessity for an attack coach to fill the sizeable boots of Scott Wisemantel, who has returned to Australia to help out the Wallabies.
One of the mantras that international coaches ignore at their peril is that the best way to proceed in terms of international selection is to build from the front to the back – as in getting your forward platform right first, starting with the front row – rather than from back to front.
The latter method usually involves selecting exciting backs who are starved of good ball because the lightweight, mobile pack in front of them are smashed to bits.
South Africa certainly use the front to back method, so it is easy to see why the scrum coach said to be in England’s sights is the Springboks’ 2019 World Cup winner, Matt Proudfoot.
Proudfoot presided over the mangling of the England scrum that gave South Africa the momentum for their emphatic 20-point World Cup final victory last month.
Proudfoot, who was born and raised in South Africa, and won four caps for Scotland (1998-2003) through the granddad formula, has become hot property after the wrecking job on Jones’ scrum. This includes the accolade of having nurtured chief protagonists like Springbok tight-heads Frans Malherbe and Vincent Koch, loosehead Steven Kitshoff, and hooker Mbongi Mbanambi when he was forwards coach at the Stormers under Rassie Erasmus.
However, Proudfoot is not the only Springbok scrum coach who is recently out of contract. The other notable name is Pieter de Villiers, the South African-born tight-head who won 69 caps for France from 1999-2007, and then went on to coach the South African pack from 2012 to the 2015 World Cup.
De Villiers was reappointed by Erasmus when he became South Africa coach, but left to return to French club rugby as Stade Francais forwards coach alongside former Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer in 2018 – before that came to an end last month when they lost their jobs at the Parisian outfit.
Both Proudfoot and De Villiers are 47, and are seasoned scrum coaches with proven track-records.
In Proudfoot’s case there is little doubt that he was assisted in dismantling the England scrum through the Trojan horse influence of having two Saracens front row forwards, veteran hooker Schalk Brits and Koch, embedded in the 2019 Springbok World Cup squad.
Crucially, Brits and Koch had the inside track on the scrummaging strengths and soft spots of not only team-mates like Mako Vunipola and Jamie George, but also English front row forwards they played against regularly, like Kyle Sinckler and Dan Cole.
Brits is a smart operator, and the way South Africa went after the England scrum in the final was the logical Dan Cole, took over the anchor role.
However, while Cole was only accustomed to coming off the bench with 20 to 30 minutes to go, it is a near certainty that Sinckler would have been targeted by the Springboks in exactly the same way that Vunipola,
George and Cole were – and the outcome would not have been much different.
The flip-side of this English genuflection to South African scrum know-how is that players like Brits and Koch made big gains as scrummagers during their time at Saracens.
Over the club’s highly successful last five years the main forward coaching influences have been English, in the shape of Alex Sanderson and scrum coach Ian Peel.
Saracens have had the best scrum in English club rugby, and one of the most effective in Europe, while also providing many of the key tight forwards for Jones. This makes the idea of South Africa knowing how to unsettle them all the more plausible – although my hunch is that Sanderson or Peel would have been much better primed to repel the Springboks than Jones, or his scrum coach, Neal Hatley, were.
Sanderson has developed into a very impressive forwards all-rounder, with an expertise which covers the set-piece as well as the breakdown, and he and Peel have plenty of experience now at elite level.
The impediments to Jones raiding the Saracens coaching dug-out again, is that John Mitchell, who is contracted to England until 2021, covers the same bases as Sanderson as a forwards/ defence expert.
It is also unlikely that Sanderson or Peel would be prepared to leave Saracens in the lurch during a season in which they are in a fight for Premiership survival following their 35-point salary cap penalty.
Of the other English candidates for scrum/forwards coach the most intriguing is Richard Cockerill. Jones was a regular visitor to see ‘Cockers’ when he was at Leicester in the early part of the Aussie’s Red Rose tenure, because there is a friendship between them stretching back to Jones’ brief sojourn at Welford Road as a player.
Fast Eddie could rely on Cockerill to do a good job as a scrum coach given the amount of time he spent at the coalface as part of the Tigers ‘ABC club’, and the former England hooker has the upbeat personality to be an energiser within the camp.
Cockerill is also capable of shouldering some of the ‘media pressure’ that Jones frequently mentions, even though, so far, there have been few signs of the England head coach wanting to duck out of the limelight.
Cockerill’s contract extension with Edinburgh, which is due to end in April 2021 might preclude an RFU approach, as might the Midlander’s desire to be an assistant coach at international level, rather than run his own show in Scotland.
However, if Cockerill’s ambitions are to become a head coach in the Test arena it would be the next logical step to take. Not only that, but he will be in elite company alongside Mitchell, who was New Zealand head coach for three years from 2000-2003.
Another candidate is Rob Hunter, whose track record as Exeter forwards coach – and previously as England U20 and Northampton Academy coach – speaks volumes for his effectiveness.
Graham Rowntree, the former England forwards/scrum coach under Stuart Lancaster, will be on the outer rim of the RFU’s radar, because, having left Harlequins, he has just joined Munster after working for Georgia during the World Cup.
The attack coach list drawn up by Jones should start with Ali Hepher, the former Northampton fly-half, who has been responsible for broadening Exeter’s attacking horizons since he joined them in 2009.
Hepher was promoted to head coach at Sandy Park three years ago, and he also has credit in the bank as head coach of the Saxons side that won a two-match series against South Africa ‘A’ in the summer of 2016.
When Hepher was at the forefront of the Chiefs landmark Premiership winning-campaign in 2017 his stock rose, a c T r
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