Johnson’s haggis, neeps and tatties are just the thing
THAT garrulous Aussie Scott Johnson is still to be found beavering away in Scottish rugby, we can reveal, and — while quietened — he remains convinced that Scotland are on a path to mirroring the last decade’s rise of Wales and Ireland.
Johnson became something of a marmite character with his shoot-from-the-hip comments as a coach with Australia, Wales, the Ospreys and then Scotland.
The former Wallabies Under-21 stand-off suffered for his jests and, when he took over the role of SRU director of performance rugby, there was scepticism that this joker had substance.
When it emerged his salary was reportedly close to the £200,000 mark — only the Scotland coach and SRU chief executive earn more — cue howls of disdain.
Johnson has dealt with tough times in his life, from his father’s premature sudden death to his wife’s passing due to cancer at just 27, so he shrugs it off, but the SRU pulled ‘Johnno’ from the frontline when quiet Kiwi Vern Cotter arrived and forced a media blackout on the opinionated one.
The Mail on Sunday finally broke down the door this week and found the 54-year-old in his Murrayfield office, surrounded by various national coaches, his belly laughter echoing and his confidence still intact.
‘I’m always happy to talk rugby,’ he insisted, ‘and I can tell you I’ve been working my a**e off in here, mate.
‘So what do I do? Pretty simple — it’s all about building success for the national men’s and women’s teams, not just for now but for the next few years and decades. I want Scotland to be great again because we can’t have the same one or two teams winning the World Cup or Six Nations. That’s not good for rugby.
‘We don’t have the number of players or the money the big countries have, but we have proven that we can achieve things when we get our act together. We’ve beaten southern hemisphere teams and England at age-grade levels, won a World Sevens tournament that nobody thought we’d win, won the Guinness Pro12, which are real signs, but we’re not finished yet.’
In the autumn he, Sean Lineen (age-grade chief) and Neil Graham (coach development manager) launched ‘The Scottish Way — Technical Blueprint’.
He saw its importance in a small country before.
New Zealand developed their own game founded on key principles behind the style of rugby they wanted to drive from schools rugby to the All Blacks.
‘There are core ingredients in all the world’s best sporting environments,’ said Johnson.
‘In New Zealand, kids come through knowing how to do contact well and clean out because it’s ingrained from an early age that to be successful you have to play with quick ball, so you have to dominate the contact area.
‘That’s a fundamental principle, but how do they teach that?
‘What we have developed with coaches at all levels is a consensus that is clear on the basics of a Scottish game, what I call the HNTs — haggis, neeps and tatties; what we stand for. We have clarity on what those skills are and how to coach them, and then we build on them to make Scottish rugby competitive at all levels in the modern game.’
Cotter, he clearly states, has been the key influence on Scotland’s improving results; successor Gregor Townsend, Alan Solomons and now Duncan Hodge the main men at the pro teams.
‘Vern has been fantastic for Scottish rugby and I can’t emphasise enough what impact he has had,’ said Johnson. ‘But the fact is we had two of our best coaches coming out of contract at the same time, and we were going to lose one of them.
‘Gregor (Townsend) has done some wonderful things. The timing was difficult but I was pleased with how we did it, in terms of giving people time to get to grips with it, and for Vern to prepare for his next challenge.
‘I look back at what Ireland achieved in the early 2000s, and how that inspired Wales, and I know we can do that here.
‘We’re going up. I want to be able to walk into any club, anywhere in the world, and know that people respect Scotland as a player at every level and, hopefully, we’ll take another step nearer to that in Paris.’