People are like horses. Some need a cuddle, others a kick up the bum
Pressure is mounting on Steve Hansen, the former policeman charged with stopping the resurgent Lions
‘It hurts to lose but policing showed me it’s just a game’ ‘It’d be a travesty if we lost the international game like football. It’s happening before our eyes’ ‘How can we even think of not having Lions tours?’
Steve Hansen’s c.v. makes for curious reading: dairy farmer, frozen meat inspector, police officer.
It is not the typical career path for a World Cup-winning all Blacks coach, but Hansen finds it easy to join the dots back to his days spent helping his father, Des, with the animals in the 1970s.
‘I grew up on a dairy farm and there wasn’t much to do back in those days,’ he recalls.
‘You could watch the rugby, go to the races or work on the farm. they were the three options. You didn’t want to spend your day off working on the farm so you’d go to the rugby and you loved it.’
Hansen would go to matches at Carisbrook, the iconic sports ground in Dunedin, with his three siblings.
He was there, standing on the front row as a 12-year-old, for the first test between the Lions and the all Blacks in 1971, revelling in the verbals.
But his rugby talent was limited so Hansen’s dream was to become a jockey.
‘My dad loved racing and he used to train them, so I had a lot to do with horses,’ he says. now Hansen co- owns a racehorse, Dezzies Dream — named after his father — and looks at his all Blacks squad inn the same way that he looks at a stable filled with h thoroughbred animals.
‘ Horses have got their own n problems, fears and insecurities,s, just like people,’ he explains.
‘some horses you can pushh around and get what you want justt by sheer force, but some horsess won’t like that and react in a bad d way. so how am I going to deal withh that horse?
‘People are the same. somee people need a cuddle, some need a kick up the bum. But they all need d to feel they belong and they needd to feel like they are valued.
‘If you make a horse feel like you care about it, then the horse responds. If you push a horse that doesn’t want to be pushed, it’ll bite you or kick you and that can hurt, so you learn quickly you don’t want to do that.’
Hansen’s innate ability to read horses and humans is part of the secret to his success.
He never reached the pinnacle as a sportsman — making 21 appearances for Canterbury between 1980 and 1987 — but puts his coaching achievements down to the advice from his father.
the Kiwi has won 64 of his 71 tests with the all Blacks.
‘the biggest thing my dad passed on is that you’ve got to know, “Why?”’ says Hansen. ‘I was just learning to play the game and he allowed me to maximise what talent I had, which was not a lot.
‘I could think about the game and see pictures. the easiest way to ex explain it is, well, as a kid you ha have a favourite move because th that’s the one you score the try on on, so you want to do it all the tim time. He’d say, “Why are you do doing that move?” I’d say, “B “Because we scored last week”.
‘ ‘But he’d say, “Why did you sc score? What happened? What di did they do that allowed you to sc score? How did they defend? W What did your team do to ex exploit that?” that’s how he ed educated me around the table. a and my two brothers. and my si sister. and my mother.’
Hansen balanced his early coaching with a job as a police constable in Christchurch.
It was another chapter in the m making of rugby’s greatest coach and helped him to develop a disciplinarian streak — using both the carrot and the cane — and a wider perspective on his sport.
‘I didn’t join the police until I was 30 so I was half grown up by then and I had a lot of experience in different things,’ he says. ‘Policing exposed me to a couple of people who were very influential on me and exposed me to experiences that give you a sense off real-reality that rugby’s just a game.
‘at the end of the day, it’s an important game, but it’s just a game, and don’t lose sight of that because there are some real things happening that are a hell of a lot more important.
‘It hurts to lose a game of footie, but it hurts a lot more to lose someone you love or to deal with people who’ve lost someone they love. It teaches you to keep it all in perspective… don’t get too carried away with yourself.’
that has shaped Hansen’s disillusionment with the current rugby climate.
the Lions are under threat due to rows over money and timings and, having coached Wales between 2002 and 2004, Hansen is concerned that rugby is following the same path as football.
‘there were a lot of games played in Cardiff because Wembley at the time was being rebuilt,’ says Hansen. ‘the rugby model up there is based a lot around the football model, which hasn’t worked.
‘It hasn’t been great at producing great players for england for example, because all these foreigners have got opportunities to play. Yes, it’s a great competition and yes, it’s making lots of money, but the international game has suffered because of it.
‘sir alex Ferguson would say, “He can play and he can play but he
can’t”. Imagine picking an international team like that? eddie Jones couldn’t pick Maro It because his club’s coach said, “no, he’s not part of it this week”.
‘Wouldn’t it be a travesty if the international game was lost, like football. Who wants friendlies? no such thing as friendlies in rugby. that’s all you get in football. england playing Wales in a friendly. Imagine that in rugby? that’s where we could end up if we don’t take some ownership as rugby people. Right before our very eyes it’s happening.
‘Money makes us make funny decisions sometimes. they might be right for the individual, but they’re not right for the game. to even think that we shouldn’t have Lions tours… Owners are not saying it because it’s not right for the game, they’re saying it because it’s not right for their team. Rugby’s bigger than any of us.’