Players will love working with super Sinfield

KEVIN SINFIELD phoned me up for some advice before he switched over to rugby union two years ago and I always knew he would be a success. We had three or four conversations and he told me about his opportunity to work with Steve Borthwick at Leicester Tigers. What you work on in rugby league are your individual skills; how to throw a dummy, how to hand off, how to beat someone one on one. In union you have to become familiar with things like the scrum and lineout. Borthwick is an extremely good technical coach and there are few better people to learn the intricacies of the game from than him. I told Kevin it was the perfect opportunity to enter the game and now they have both developed into England coaches. Our rugby league careers never crossed but Kevin was an incredible player with an outstanding record in big games. He was a brilliant all-rounder. He could take the ball up the middle to make the hard yards but he was also a very creative player. He was a great link between the backs and the forwards because he was capable of playing in multiple positions. Very good in attack with the ability to make 30 tackles per match. What set him apart was his leadership. He had great relationships and that’s transferred over into his coaching. No one he has coached has ever had a bad word to say about him. Just look at the incredible fundraising he is doing for his old team-mate, Rob Burrow, who is suffering horribly with motor neurone disease. He deserves a knighthood for that. That’s the definition of leading by example for me. Players will see that, respect that and want to play for him. There are a lot of guys with rugby league backgrounds coaching in union now. Kevin, me, Andy Farrell to name a few. People often ask me why there are so many and it dates back to when the great Australian team came over to Great Britain in 1982. They were so successful and Phil Larder, who was from Oldham, was given the chance to go and spend some time in their camp. He saw how much emphasis they put on their defence and brought that back into our game, becoming a trailblazer alongside men like Clive Griffiths and Dave Ellis. At that time, rugby union training was all about attack. I was captain of the England union schoolboys team and I don’t think we ever worked on defence. People like Phil, Clive and Dave came into union and changed that. Phil ended up working alongside Clive Woodward when England won the World Cup in 2003. Nowadays you watch Test match rugby and a lot of big games are won on defence. I told Kevin that the difference in union is there’s always a contest for the ball. You can lose the ball at any moment. What I picked up in our conversations is the way Kevin thinks about the game. There was a law tweak coming in where if you hold the ball up over the try-line then the defending team are given a drop-out. Leeds Rhinos worked very hard on their goal-line defence and we talked about that. Your instinct as a defence coach is to coach your players to win the collision but this law tweak changed that. Kevin talked about how they got their hands into a certain position to accept the power and take the opposition over the line. All the way up the pitch you’re told to win the collision but all of a sudden, you’re telling someone to lose the collision when it’s red hot. He thinks about things differently and I liked that. I wish him all the best. I’ll be coming to Twickenham with France in a few months’ time and we’re expecting England to be at their absolute best. Winning at Twickenham is a major tick on your resume and that’s what I’ll be telling

my players when we come over — but I certainly don’t expect it to get any easier with Steve and Kevin in charge.