Schmidt faces his first crisis
N his professional career Joe Schmidt has had just two jobs as head-coach. Up until the last few months it’s been a near constant upward spiral of achievement and excellence. Each year seemingly bigger and better than the last.
Usually when we say ‘crisis, what crisis’, we do so somewhat with tongue in cheek, suggesting that a crisis has been averted, but in Schmidt’s case we can use it quite literally... what crisis? Seriously, what crisis? Schmidt, he’s never really had one in his career as a head coach.
The closest we can come to identifying one is his first few months at Leinster. It was a relatively shaky start to his career as head coach – he’d been assistant coach at Clermont and for the Blues in his native New Zealand – and it looked possible that Leinster might not even get out of their group.
George Hook wrote in his Sunday Independent column that he suspected Schmidt had lost the dressing room. The following weekend Leinster welcomed Racing 92 to the RDS, hammered them and went on to win the first of two Heineken Cup titles in succession under Schmidt.
Not really much of a crisis was it? Certainly it was nothing like what he now faces and for all the brilliance of his career it’s the lack of a genuine crisis that would give you pause for concern.
Can he arrest the slide and there has been a slide. With each season up to now he’s been edging ever closer to the perfection he seeks. He won two Six Nations titles before his first Grand Slam. Bit by bit ramping it up, closer and closer. The victory over New Zealand, second place in the world rankings. He brought Ireland to their highest ever peak, now that they’ve fallen from it, now that the cycle of improvement has been so comprehensively broken he repair it? Perhaps even it’s the very things that brought Ireland to their greatest highs that have led to this fall? Schmidt is being criticised by some pundits – Matt Williams for instance – for being too prescriptive and restrictive a coach.
Does Schmidt have it within himself to change, to break the habit of a lifetime, cede a modicum of control and allow his team off the leash a little, allow them to become more expansive and innovative, or does he hold close what’s made him such a brilliant coach? Whether or not Ireland recover their form, whether or not they perform at the World Cup in Japan, how Schmidt approaches those questions promises to be absolutely fascinating.