Telfer and his pride of Lions
THERE are laddies in Melrose, some of them still teenagers, who know precisely what it is like to be a British and Irish Lion.
They may not have worn the jersey or toured the Southern Hemisphere, but they have experienced a once traditional Lions staple: the Jim Telfer personal tuition.
The robustness of this encounter can be gauged by the extraordinary DVD of the Lions tour to South Africa in 1997 when Telfer came at the forwards with invective and fleck flying. It was the sort of stuff that would send a modern HR manager scuttling for grievance procedures and a tranquilliser.
It worked for Telfer. It worked for the Lions. And it worked for Melrose Wasps. Telfer, who helped coach the Lions to a series victory and Scotland to two Grand Slams, subsequently in supposed retirement gave his expertise to the Melrose Under-18 teams for a decade, only giving up two years ago. He coached these tyro Borderers with the unrelenting focus he directed at such as Martin Johnson, Andy Irvine, Gavin Hastings or any other of the heroes of the past.
‘I wouldn’t treat them any differently, no,’ he says of the young Wasps. ‘I was a chemistry teacher and I expected my pupils to pass exams.
‘Sometimes you wanted them to pass exams more than they did. I would not expect 16-year-olds to do the same things (as a Lion), but I would talk to them man to man. I would eyeball them. I would tell them: “Right, this is what we can do. And this is what we can’t do”.
‘My approach would be very, very, similar to coaching the Lions. At 16 or 18, they are very important years, crucial. It is all about getting the best players into the professional environment as soon as possible. It is about learning.’
Telfer, now 76, is speaking in his home in Galashiels on a wintry day. Immersed in rugby for all of his life, playing and coaching for his nation and Britain and Ireland, he is now a lion at bay. The passion remains, however, and it is complemented by an extraordinary education at the highest level. He now passes on the lessons with a gentle fluency.
He admits the game has changed in that technique and fitness has improved, but he insists the fundamentals remain.
‘It is a game of inches,’ he says. ‘A fingertip in the line-out, a wee nudge at the scrum, the precise placing of a pass. Ian McGeechan said he picked Martin Johnson as Lions captain because he was an inch bigger than his South African counterpart and so would have a psychological advantage at the toss up.’
Telfer smiles at this recollection, but he is a deep, insightful thinker on the game. He has not coached seriously — and there is no other way than seriously for Telfer — for two years, but retains strongly his philosophy that players cannot be in any doubts about gameplans. That could involve confrontation.
‘Would you get away with it now? Yes. I am a teacher first and a coach second,’ he says. ‘The job of the coach and teacher is to make players better. You have to have some idea of where you want the players to go. What the players want is clarity and this is what Eddie Jones has brought to the English game.
‘As a coach, you must make sure the players know exactly how we want to play the game.’
His dramatic, uncompromising speeches to the forwards in the nineties, whether at a Grand Slam-winning Scotland or a series-winning Lions, have become the stuff of legend. He makes no apologies for the approach.
‘I still think there is a place for a hard man, if you like,’ he says. ‘With top players, I could be very, very hard because they know they are top players. So when I said that was useless or whatever, they would accept it because they know what I am saying is the truth. I am not one of those coaches who is mealy mouthed. If it is wrong, it is wrong.’
He adds, almost unnecessarily: ‘I always kept my distance from international players. I never got into cuddling them and all that stuff.’
He stresses: ‘The personality and philosophy of the coach comes through in the way the players play. If the coach has a will to win, then it tends to come through. Sir Alex Ferguson is a good example. His teams were do or die.
‘Eddie Jones has shown with England in the past 18 months that if you take a good group of players — who were perhaps prepared to be second best — and you tell them the truth, then they accept it.’
Telfer is an admirer of Gregor Townsend, who will take up the Scotland job in the summer: ‘Intellectually, he is very bright. Rugby-wise he is a great thinker. He played in a position where he had to think. He was also very skilful and sometimes a bit reckless in decision making, but he will give the players their head, give them confidence.’
Yet he did not believe Townsend, who was one of the 1997 victorious Lions squad, would become a coach.
‘Not because I thought he could not do it, but because I didn’t think he would want to
I still think there is a place for a hard man, if you like
It gets in your craw, but England are getting better under Jones
do it,’ says Telfer. ‘He has a business degree and usually you make a lot more money in business than in coaching.
‘Gregor will do well. He can talk good rugby, he can direct good rugby. He would ask for advice, too. I have spoken to him a few times and I was up in Glasgow a couple of years ago to talk to the team. About the Lions, funnily enough.’
And so the conversation returns to the Lions. In many ways, Telfer, considered and articulate on all subjects, becomes almost taciturn on his greatest triumphs, whether it be the Lions or the two Grand Slam teams he coached.
‘I do not like to look back,’ he says. ‘I always like to look forward in life and in coaching.’
So how about a preview of the Lions tour? He believes they could be fatally compromised by the demands of finishing the club season so near to their first matches in New Zealand.
‘Some of the players will not be half dead, they will be threequarters dead,’ he says. ‘The Lions tour is well down the priorities of the millionaires who own the English and Welsh clubs. The RFU sold its soul to businessmen 20 years ago.’
Of the Scottish contenders for the tour, he says: ‘You can’t think parochially. You have to think where the coaches are coming from geographically and from a rugby point of view. Whatever Scotland do in the Six Nations is important. I have seen Lions players chosen because of their displays in the last game of the season.’
He is persuasive on the theory that Scotland’s backs may have a better chance than its forwards, pointing out the safer, experienced options for Warren Gatland in the heavy brigade.
Telfer muses aloud: ‘(Stuart) Hogg has been, by a distance, the best attacking full-back in the four nations, so he will probably go. Tommy Seymour is more than an opportunist, he is an all-round good player. Finn Russell has been outstanding, but he is against three or four very good stand-offs and the stand off will have to kick goals and Finn misses a few.’
He then praises centres Alex Dunbar, Mark Bennett and Duncan Taylor, adding: ‘We have six or seven players in contention.’
And the destination of the Six Nations championship?
‘It gets in your craw, but England are getting better, though Ireland could cause them trouble in the last match,’ says Telfer.
He adds of Scotland: ‘I think it is more difficult to win internationals now. When I coached Scotland, we had a distinctive way of playing the game, but other teams have improved. We were always very, very fit, but all teams are fit now. Scotland does well to keep its head above water because of our player base.’
His half century of coaching is over irrevocably. He now spends time in his garden or in his holiday home in Portugal, though he wanders down to watch Gala or Melrose regularly and scrutinises matches on television. Does he miss it? ‘Yes. I miss being with young folk. The only thing we had in common was the coaching time. They would come in with iPads and iPhones and I do not have a mobile phone. It kept me young. I miss being young.’
He accompanies me to the door and we look out on a snowy expanse. The handshake is suitably strong. Telfer is now a lion in winter, but still a lion all the same.