This Lions tour will determine Gatland’s legacy
THERE is the sense of an ending about this Lions tour for Warren Gatland. It is his third campaign with the most famous brand in rugby, after he led the Lions to victory in Australia in 2013 and served as Ian McGeechan’s forwards’ coach in 2009.
He is now almost a decade into his reign as Wales head coach, too, but it looks certain that the next six weeks in his homeland will define his long, impressive career.
Lose and he returns to see out his Wales contract with little hope of ever coaching the All Blacks. Win, though, and a return to the land of his birth becomes a more plausible notion.
Gatland admitted before Christmas that he had spoken to the New Zealand Super Rugby franchise the Chiefs and told them he would be interested after the 2019 World Cup ‘but there’s no way I would leave Wales or the Lions now’.
He was celebrated at the weekend by one newspaper as the best coach in the northern hemisphere in this era. Joe Schmidt’s record at Leinster and Ireland would challenge that, and Gatland’s Test credentials outside of the Six Nations rely on getting Wales to the semi-finals of the 2011 World Cup.
The drama centred on their win against England in the pool stages of the 2015 tournament has obscured their wider failure, losing in the quarter-finals to a desperately ordinary South African team.
The recurring weakness in Gatland’s coaching is the inability to beat southern hemisphere teams. He has never coached Wales to victory away from home against New Zealand, Australia or South Africa, losing in all 15 attempts.
His home record is little better, coaching 35 matches against the trinations countries in Wales, losing 32 of them.
The southern teams, and New Zealand and Australia in particular, have consistently picked apart the Gatland game-plan, and a longstanding criticism is that his tactics are too easily worked out.
The style with which he won a Grand Slam as well as another championship with Wales is derisively termed ‘Warrenball’, and involves big ball-carriers barrelling into the opposing defensive line, with quick recycling off the resultant ruck allowing the team to exploit the space that results from the initial charge.
Wales have won the Six Nations three times since he took over, with the Slam arriving in his first season in charge, 2008, and another in 2012. The third title of his tenure came in 2013 but that season he was not in charge, as he was on sabbatical preparing for that year’s Lions tour and had handed over to Rob Howley.
His record has brought adulation from Welsh fans, but devotion is short-lived amongst that support, and the past 12 months involved an attempted tactical change. The effort was mixed but more importantly, it was again not overseen by Gatland.
He has been on his second sabbatical since last September, with Howley, his Lions attack coach, filling in at Wales. That a tactical switch happened when Gatland was not in charge contributed to rumours that his time with Wales could be coming to an end.
His contract with Wales runs to the conclusion of the next World Cup, by which point he will have coached the team for 11 and a half seasons.
He is a northern hemisphere coach, with his entire career on the sidelines spent between Connacht, Ireland, Wasps and Wales, with the exception of two seasons spent in charge of Waikato in New Zealand’s provincial competition, the tier below Super rugby.
That is one obvious impediment to any ambitions he might entertain of one day coaching the All Blacks.
Another is his fractious relationship with the New Zealand media, which is certain to become a running theme – or sore – over the next seven weeks. Last November the New Zealand Herald mocked up Gatland as a clown in one of its editions, after he had expressed disappointment with the paper doing the same to Australian coach Michael Cheika.
It was embarrassing conduct from a national newspaper but not untypical of the meanspirited partisanship that governs media coverage of the national team in that country.
Journalists flop across the line between reporter and fan, but Gatland should have known that.
However, bumbling into controversy when trying to be clever is another pattern his career has traced. In 2008, he coached against Ireland with Wales for the first time, and his fractious relationship with Eddie O’Sullivan consumed the build-up.
O’Sullivan had been Gatland’s assistant at Ireland, and the latter was never convinced of the loyalty of the former. ‘I suppose what I didn’t have, on reflection, that I have here, was probably that undenying [sic] loyalty you might expect from people within your coaching set-up,’ said Gatland in an interview with the BBC before the match.
Those comments blazed from headlines for days, but after the match, which Wales won, Gatland was childish. ‘That whole issue has been completely over the top and I’m really disappointed with the whole media attitude,’ he said, apparently forgetting he had started the entire controversy with what he said.
A year later, he made a fool of himself in claiming Wales players disliked Ireland more than any other country, and was rude about Declan Kidney before Ireland’s Grand Slam-winning match in Cardiff, suggesting he might follow the approach of the then-Irish chief in behaving cautiously in the media ‘and then you get clichés and nothing’.
In 2011, he questioned the courage of Dylan Hartley and suggested the England hooker was a choker.
In 2014, after a defeat to New Zealand that marked Gatland’s 22nd successive loss to southern hemisphere opposition, he was asked by a BBC reporter if he felt under pressure. ‘And you are putting me under pressure as well, thanks,’ he answered.
The Welsh union subsequently complained to the broadcaster.
In public, he has been a remarkable mix of blunt-speaking Kiwi and put-upon, hyper-sensitive victim. Away from the spotlight, his players speak of the loyalty he commands and the coaching environment he fosters, where the squad leads and set their own standards and he facilitates.
He has less than a week to create those conditions before the Lions’ first big challenge, a match against the brilliant Crusaders next Saturday. That will provide a merciless measure of how the squad has come together – and that is before the first Test a fortnight later.
Defeat looks inevitable. Resilience has distinguished the long career of Warren Gatland. He has never needed it so dearly.