‘We have been through too many coaches in recent times’
Dan Cole tells Ben Coles he is trying to make sense of the turmoil at Leicester after a traumatic start
Dan Cole was set a quick challenge this week: find the right word to sum up Leicester’s astonishingly un-Leicester-like start to the season. Cole is still just 31 but has seen a few things – this month’s defeat at Wasps was his 200th game – and he is well placed to be able to define a fourmatch period in which Leicester have won only once, sacked their head coach after the first game of the season, a 40-6 defeat at Exeter, and conceded an average of just under 40 points per fixture.
Is this the toughest period he has known at the club, he was asked at their training base? “Probably not, because it is still early in the season and the chance is there to turn it around.”
The darkest? “A couple of years ago, we got hoofed at home to Glasgow and then by Racing away: they are probably darker times.” Fair point. The 43-0 defeat at home to the Warriors was billed by this paper as Leicester’s most humiliating result ever.
How about strangest? “Possibly, with Matt O’Connor going so early. We have to get out of it. It has been worse, but by no means are we brushing off our current predicament by thinking that. Geordie [Murphy] is here and doing a good job behind the scenes, even if the results do not reflect that, which is what you are ultimately judged on. Now we are over the shock of week one, we need to work out a way to settle in and win over the next 10 months of the season.”
While Leicester have to move on quickly, with the latest step in their recovery programme being today’s meeting with Sale Sharks, the sacking of O’Connor is still being processed, if not by those within the club then certainly by everyone on the outside. The mantra for Cole and his Leicester team-mates, instead, has been simple: focus on the next game.
“The board made a choice. It is ultimately that. We had pre-season and after not performing at Exeter, they wanted to make a change,” Cole says.
“As a squad you are a bit shocked at the timing of it. I was. Players met with Peter Tom and Simon Cohen of the board and said, ‘This is not ideal, you have had a whole pre-season and after one game this has happened’. But the board decided a change needed to be made. In some regards they probably wish they made it earlier, but also they did not want to make it too late.
“You accept that, because you can kick your heels and put your bottom lip out, but we are here to play rugby and win games. We have probably been through too many coaches in recent times. But the apocalypse could happen tomorrow, and we would still turn up for training and go out there pushing the scrums and hitting each other around the field. I think that is ingrained within the squad. You go about your business.
“The thing about this sport is that for 40 weeks of the year there is always a next game, and a next game, and if you are not ready you could get a hiding, or get hurt. Modern players are wired for the next job.”
The subsequent promotion of Geordan Murphy to interim head