Furst takes England’s minds off final agony to focus on the future
Sports psychologist is a serial winner, creating a culture to inspire players, writes Charlie Morgan
‘Pressure is going to be chasing them up the street.” Eddie Jones relished the lead-up to last October’s World Cup semi-final between England and New Zealand. On the Tuesday before his team’s famous 19-7 win, he unsheathed a few trademark, tone-setting wisecracks.
“The busiest bloke in Tokyo this week will be Gilbert Enoka, their mental skills coach,” the Australian added. “They have to deal with all this pressure of winning the World Cup three times. It is potentially the last game for their greatest coach. They will be thinking about those things.”
Even for Jones, rarely shy of provocative language when attempting to frame a narrative, this was jarring. Enoka is a revered, almost mystical figure.
Credited with curing the All Blacks’ World Cup woes and paving the way for back-to-back triumphs in 2011 and 2015, he has been singled out as the architect and custodian of their team culture – including the often-mocked “no d---heads” policy.
Steve Hansen, the “greatest coach” alluded to by Jones in the quip above, would equate Enoka to the glue holding the All Blacks together.
The irony, of course, is that Jones would have respected Enoka immensely. Even before heading to Japan, he had applied similar adhesive to England. Her name is Dr Andrea Furst, and she led a World Cup post-mortem in Jones’s training camp last week.
“A lot of people think about psychology as an agony-aunt process,” says Rory Burns, the England batsman, who was appointed captain of Surrey County Cricket Club a year after Furst joined their set-up in 2017.
“The perception is that, when things are going wrong, all of a sudden you need mental help. Andrea’s really good at the team dynamic. You worry less about things off the pitch because your habits are ingrained.”
Burns had always been an advocate of psychology, working with Rebecca Symes for most of his career. “Opening the batting can be pretty challenging,” he laughs. “If you nick off three balls into the day, you can be left sitting on your bum drinking coffee.”
When he became captain Burns broadened his thinking, with Furst as a sounding board. “She encouraged me to set out basic attitudes and behaviours that I wanted guys in my squad to exhibit. ‘Culture’ can sound quite vague. You know the All Blacks have their thing, the New England Patriots have their thing.
“You know there are different ways of achieving what is essentially the same thing. But if you say, ‘This is what we want our day-to-day to look like’, you are not going back over things when it hasn’t gone well and saying, ‘Well we didn’t tick that box’. Instead, you tick all your boxes all the time and then worry about playing.”
Surrey promptly landed their first County Championship since 2002.
Success has tended to the follow Australian-born Furst. After stints in athletics, golf, sailing, sprint canoekayak and tennis, she played a significant role in the gold medal won by the Great Britain women’s hockey team in Rio de Janeiro.
The 2016 Games was her fourth Olympic campaign and that know-how showed. Over a total of 12 hours of “workshopping” with coaches and players in 2015, Furst helped the team map out and articulate their identity.
Forward Alex Danson revealed the results to the Mail on Sunday in 2017: “Our vision was: be the difference, create history and inspire the future. Our values were: we are one team, we are winners and be alive.”
Burns affectionately labels Furst as a
“nagger”, stressing her personable nature and tireless capacity to keep in touch with players. As a guest on The Sport Psych Show podcast with Dan Abrahams last May, she described herself as “one of the most patient impatient people”.
Crista Cullen, another of Great Britain’s hockey champions, only rejoined the squad 10 months out from Rio. Vastly experienced and slightly sceptical of sports psychology, she joined a “predetermined” culture and did not require one-on-one support. And yet she still heralds Furst’s impact. “Andrea was a very good facilitator of discussion,” says Cullen.
“She probed in really poignant places to make you have that depth of thought in areas you might not have considered. For example, there would be ‘what ifs’. What if someone goes off piste or is a bit off-colour or not playing well during the Olympics? What if we lose our first game?”
Jones first brought in Furst last summer as a replacement for Corinne Reid, who had been recommended to him by iconic hockey coach Ric Charlesworth. Charlesworth believed his Australia side lost their 2012 Olympic semi-final because players were not alert enough when the ball was dead. He suggested constructive on-field communication could help.
It was interesting to hear Tom Curry speak last week about how Furst’s methods were “conversation based”. In his autobiography, Jones lauds Reid and Furst, both briefed to forge togetherness, as “incredibly impressive and intelligent”.
This Six Nations represents an immediate opportunity for England to move on from their World Cup final defeat by South Africa. Although Jones’s “greatest team the game of rugby has ever seen” reference represents a blatantly intentional change of narrative, he has also admitted the scars will never completely fade.
Still, Furst suggests she is most effective when granted prolonged periods with teams. That, and her reputation for proactivity, mean England will spend far longer looking forward to 2023 rather than wallowing in the past with an agony aunt.