Coaching nous puts warrior spirit in dynasty

CHIEFS COACH Dave Rennie wasn’t up last Sunday morning to watch the live telecast of the Brumbies beating the Bulls.

When he watched the game he wanted to know who had won, because that was the only team he was interested in.

An odd twist in rugby now is that, as players get bigger and stronger, as the physical clashes get more brutal, the tactical planning has become more and more scientific and technical.

And in Rennie and his coaching team the Chiefs have men of international standard, shrewd and imaginative.

Last night they would have wanted, as the Chiefs did in pouring rain in last year’s final against the Sharks, to start like maniacs, keeping the ball in play as much as possible.

The aim? To suck energy early out of the team that had travelled from South Africa.

As a cunning plan it had a lot to recommend it, but like most cunning plans there can often be a counter-plan.

In Jake White the Brumbies had a brilliant thinker in the coaching box too. You might have thought, considering how he coached the most boring World Cup-winning team ever, the 2007 Springboks, the Brumbies would have come to Waikato Stadium planning to kick and chase all night.

They didn’t turn into a Fijian sevens side, but there were definite signs that players like Christian Lealifano, Henry Speight and Clyde Rathbone were not there to just run after footballs booted by first-five Matt Toomua.

And in George Smith, the Brumbies have a man so finely tuned to referees and offside lines he will slow delivery of the ball, even when he doesn’t actually steal it. His capture of Tawera Kerr-Barlow five minutes into the second half, which led to Lealifano’s fourth penalty, was potentially a killer blow.

Luckily for the local fans, there’s no give up in this Chiefs squad. The grit appears in many areas, some of them a little unexpected.

The All Blacks’ selectors have made it brutally clear they think prop Ben Tameifuna is too tubby, yet put the big boy in a big game in a Chiefs jersey and he’s so vigorous and persistent it almost makes a mockery of skin-fold measurements and beep tests.

Tanerau Latimer also struggles to get onto the national scale now, although certainly not on fitness issues. But against high level opponents in Super rugby, he’s a one man world of hurt.

He lives for the chance to fire his body, which appears have been constructed from recycled barbed wire, into the most painful places he can find on a football field.

We also saw probably the best performance of the season from Liam Messam, who abandoned the agile footwork that’s a legacy of his brilliant career in sevens rugby, for brutal, direct drives that sucked up metres, bruised tacklers, and led to his terrific try from No 8, which was as simple and brilliant as a perfectly thrown right cross to the jaw.

They love the Maori warrior motif in the Chiefs, and last night Messam was the living embodiment of the whole idea.

That type of commitment permeates this Chiefs team, and if Aaron Cruden was having a weird night with his boot, it didn’t actually matter in the end.

Because, when the game hit the home straight, it was the Chiefs who had the petrol in the tank, while the Brumbies looked, guess what, like a side that had energy sucked out of them early in the game.

The sellout crowd got a final that deserves to be ranked as one of the greatest since 1996. Last year the Chiefs earned a terrific victory. But this year it feels they’ve started a rugby dynasty.