Making of him
W hen I turned up for my first day as a teacher at Fir Tree Middle School in Leeds in the 1970s, one of my older, wiser colleagues pulled me aside in the common room and gave me some excellent advice that has stayed with me. “Make sure,” he said, “that in 20 years’ time, you’ve got 20 years’ worth of experience. Not one year’s worth of experience which you’ve repeated 20 times.” As a coach, I tried to live by that maxim.
I know how lucky I was to get the breadth of experience I received. I coached schoolboys’ rugby, club rugby and Scotland Under-21s. I was assistant coach to Derrick Grant with Scotland in the mid-80s, while at the same time being head coach of the Scotland B team. Crucially, I was mentored and supported at every stage of my coaching journey, sharing ideas became the norm, and the excitement came from trying to constantly evolve and develop the game we were playing. I was head coach at Scotland and, best of all, of the British and Irish Lions, with an incredible assortment of assistants down the years, from Dick Best to Jim Telfer to Warren Gatland. I was director of rugby at Northampton and London Wasps and Bath.
Sadly, that breadth of experience is denied to many coaches these days. The pressure to win in the modern, professional era, and the specialist nature of every role, means coaches operate in less forgiving environments and there is certainly less opportunity to mix international and club roles. There is less time in general. You only need to look at the high rate of turnover in the Premiership in recent seasons to see a football-esque trend creeping in. Maybe that was the inevitable result of the game going professional.
I was mentored and supported and given opportunities without the same pressure. Besides which, I already had life experience. In fact, it is no surprise to me that so many successful coaches – Telfer, Graham Henry – began life as teachers. It gave you an excellent grounding in terms of how to interact with and coax performances from different personalities. Importantly Henry, following the disappointment of 2007, was given time and another opportunity to take New Zealand to their next level, a standard that has set them apart for the last eight years. Everyone makes mistakes, it is the ability to learn from them and keep moving forward that makes the difference, patience can be a virtue.
I thought of all this when I saw that Richard Cockerill had been appointed as a consultant at Toulon for the rest of the season. There was widespread shock and sympathy for Cockers when he was sacked by Leicester Tigers last week. A Leicester man to the core, who had been with the club for 25 years pretty much non-stop as a player and a coach, he was bitterly disappointed to have been dismissed. But I honestly think it could prove to be a blessing in disguise.
Leicester had not become a bad team in the past two years, not in terms of their finishing positions, anyway. They reached the play-offs in 2014, 2015 and 2016, having won a third Premiership title under Cockerill in 2013. But there are many ways to judge success and, as I wrote last weekend, the club had been static for a while in terms of tactics.
Cockerill has done the right thing in not moping about, but jumping on the new exciting challenge. In moving abroad he will be exposed to a new culture, a new way of working, new players. I know he played at Montferrand for a couple of years towards the end of his playing career, but this will be something else entirely. Toulon are European heavyweights with incredible facilities, resources, playing staff. They are also extremely professionally run, with an excellent work ethic. The players may be galácticos but they are not just there to get their wages.
If I could advise Cockerill of one thing it would be to go there with an open mind; to soak up as much as he can. It should help him that Mike Ford, the head coach, is English. They know each other already and they know the English game. They will not have a language barrier to overcome, although, of course, there will be French coaches and players and staff. Their challenge now is to try to understand French rugby and work out how they can use their shared experiences to make a difference.
As a consultant, it is not Cockers’ head on the chopping block. He just needs to take it all in, absorb the lessons, and immerse himself fully in the experience. There is no substitute for sharing knowledge and swapping ideas. At Wasps, we used to sit down, all the coaches, at the end of the week and throw ideas around over tea and cream cakes; some of them too leftfield to be taken seriously. But from there the seeds of new ideas would emerge. You look around the world, at Wayne Smith, Steve Hansen, Henry, Eddie Jones, Gatland – I don’t think it is any surprise they have all lived and worked abroad, embraced new cultures and playing styles and grown up as coaches.
Maybe this move will be the making of Cockerill, or Ford. Perhaps they will be the next men in after Eddie Jones. although I know Eddie has committed himself to preparing Steve Borthwick and Paul Gustard to be in a position to take England on after 2019, but we have a number of good young coaches in the Premiership who need, in some way, the opportunity to be exposed to the next level. The Rugby Football Union and Premiership Rugby Limited must work harder to find a more constructive way of allowing coaches to develop and gain that international experience. In the past there has always been mistrust. Clubs have worried about sending players off to camps to be poached by rival coaches. I hope that Nigel Melville, the RFU’s new director of professional rugby, and Dean Ryan, the new head of international player development, can knock some heads together and come up with a solution, because young coaches today are missing out on the sorts of opportunities I got when I was coming through.
Good coaching is all about sharing ideas, about broadening horizons, about keeping an open mind.
Perhaps Cockerill, or Ford, will be the next men in after Eddie Jones