A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
Innovative, cultured and occasionally spiky, Gregor Townsend is that rarest of things: a Scotland rugby coach with a winning record. Alex Massie looks at a man with a hinterland, who sees the game in poetry not prose
Profiling proud Borderer, national sporting hero and Scotland rugby coach Gregor Townsend
The 21st century has not been kind to Scottish rugby. Each year hope springs anew as the Six Nations hoves into view; each year supporters dare to dream and to ask if this might, at long last, be the year when a return to glory becomes something plausible, not just the stuff of fevered dreams. February and March have been months of hope, not expectation.
The record is dispiriting. Since Scotland won the final edition of the old Five Nations in 1999, the national team has never finished better than third in the expanded Six Nations and even that modest achievement has only been secured on four occasions. Apart from winning in Rome, Scotland have won just two away games in the Six Nations era. Those supporters who came of rugby age in the 1980s and early 1990s had no way of knowing they were living through a golden age for Scottish rugby. Grand Slams in 1984 and 1990 – as well as a shared title in 1986 – were years of unusual fat that have since been followed by a prolonged period of thin pickings.
Reflecting on this in his autobiography, Gregor Townsend allowed that: ‘Having spent my youth watching Scotland win two grand slams in the space of six years, it is something of a disappointment to have been a member of the Scotland team for eleven years and not to add to this total.’
Now spirits are rising again and this is, at least in part, because of Townsend himself. The Scotland coach helms a squad who, on their day, are capable of giving every other team in world rugby a more than decent run for their money. Optimism is tempered by the miseries of past disappointments but, for once, rests on something more than wishful thinking.
Since succeeding Vern Cotter as coach in the summer of 2017, Townsend has presided over ten victories and just six defeats. That may not be a record to make the All Blacks tremble, but it remains the best winning percentage of any Scotland coach since Bill Dickinson became the first man to be formally appointed to the role in 1971. Only Ian McGeechan’s five-year tenure from 1988-1993, during which the Scots won 58% of their fixtures, rivals Townsend’s start.
If Scotland are improving, recent away defeats against Fiji and the United States suggest that there are few easy games in international rugby. Those setbacks, however, must be balanced against home and away victories over Australia and Argentina, plus, most memorably, home triumphs against France and England last season.
Those victories were not flukes or rearguard actions in which heroic defence in bad weather kept the opposition at bay to scrape a just-aboutmerited victory. Scotland prevailed in each of these matches by playing the better rugby; they were games won by Scotland rather more than they were fixtures lost by the opposition. This distinction may be narrow but it is also significant.
Throughout a playing career distinguished by its sense of adventure and including eight clubs, 82 Scotland caps and two memorable Test appearances for the Lions, Townsend was an inveterate innovator and experimenter who was fond of arguing ‘If you’ve never made a mistake, you’ve never made a decision’.
Failure is a catalyst for analysis and reinvention; nothing ventured, little gained. ‘In life, as in rugby, you mustn’t be paralysed by a fear of making mistakes,’ he said. ‘You’ve just got to accept that sometimes the only way to get better is to mess up and learn from it.’
A similar spirit has informed his coaching career. He knows that victories require Scotland to play closer to the limit of their abilities than the opposition; only rarely can Scotland, a country with fewer rugby resources than virtually every other top-tier nation, expect to play poorly and grind out a victory.
So this season, and with the World Cup in Japan to look forward to this autumn, there are legitimate reasons for optimism. Townsend wants to forge a team in his own image: cerebral but adventurous. At their best, his sides have always embraced adventure; the key is balancing that with a measure of control. Townsend stresses tempo, a consequence, in part, of a coaching education that has been marked by his willingness to turn to other sports for inspiration.
In addition to the physical struggle, rugby is a matter of controlling time and space so Townsend has studied Pep Guardiola’s teams at Barcelona and Manchester City to glean insights that can be transferred from football to the oval ball game. Townsend’s approach is also informed by his encyclopaedic reading on the philosophy of coaching, with pride of place in his burgeoning library going to Dean Smith’s The Carolina Way, in which the Tar Heels’ basketball guru shows how he achieved unsurpassed success for 40 years at the University of North Carolina by empowering players; by treating people with dignity, respect and consistency; by always being prepared and executing the plan. Townsend is something of a sports nerd, and loves American sport, having spent time with the New York Jets NFL franchise studying their coaching structure and culture.
“His mantra is: in life, as in rugby, you mustn’t be paralysed by fear of making mistakes
Townsend takes a holistic approach to improvement, particularly his own improvement. His reading tastes are eclectic but challenging (his favourite novel is Canadian author Douglas Copeland’s acclaimed Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture), and unusually he chose to write his own autobiography, Talk of the Toony. As you might expect from an Edinburgh University law and politics graduate, it is well-written, insightful and occasionally spiky.
Although a proud family man who still lives in the Borders with his wife and two boys, his vision is wider than your typical pail merk. He loves taking himself off to the far north – Uig at the northern tip of Skye, Achiltibuie and the Summer Isles are all favourite places to recharge the batteries – but also has a cultural perspective that eschews the insularity of which Borderers are sometimes accused. ‘Being a Borderer is as much a state of mind as a matter of geography,’ he says. ‘We Borderers are proud to be Borderers, proud of their town, aware of what’s happening in their own community. We’re down to earth, love our rugby, and never get too far ahead of ourselves.
‘That said, I’m always striving to get better and I see life as one long learning experience. My first experience of playing in Australia in 1993 as a 20-year-old accelerated my learning so much that after that I was always looking for new challenges. That’s why I played in so many countries. I loved every second of my time in the south of France, and revelled in the opportunity to immerse myself in the language and the culture.
‘Even now I love the cinema. My biggest treat is going to the cinema with my wife because we rarely have time to. I don’t like big blockbusters and prefer films that require a bit of thought. I love French films. They help me keep up the language, although there’s still a shortage of French arthouse cinema in Galashiels.’
Townsend is big on personal responsibility, so it is an article of faith for him that the best teams are player-led. The philosophy he developed as a player with clubs in Scotland, England, Australia, South Africa and France – not to mention with Scotland, the Barbarians and British Lions – is that his job is to give the players what they need to succeed, but that they must impose their own standards if the team is to succeed.
Another part of the Townsend credo is a determination to play the game at a tempo and with an ambition which other sides may struggle to match. This, like so much of Townsend’s career, is a high-risk, high-reward approach; playing fast risks sacrificing the accuracy required to make the most of the opportunities his team creates even as it inevitably increases
the rewards likely to be gained from those opportunities.
This has always been the Townsend way, ever since he made his senior rugby debut while still a pupil at Galashiels Academy. At the age of 19 he was already a Scotland internationalist, coming off the bench to win his first cap against England at Twickenham in 1993. Blessed with electrifying acceleration and a keen eye for a gap, Townsend was burdened in his early years by comparisons with Barrie John, the peerless Welsh fly-half. If that placed an undue weight of expectation on the youngster, an even greater problem often seemed to be whether he could find himself on the same page as less imaginative team-mates. He could lurch from ecstasy to agony in seconds, and if he chafed against being described as ‘mercurial’ it remained a more accurate term than perhaps he liked.
That in turn spawned a debate over whether Scotland should pick Townsend at his preferred fly-half position or instead stick with the more workmanlike, predictable talents of his great rival, Melrose’s Craig Chalmers. Sometimes that meant shoehorning Townsend into the side at his less favoured position of centre as Scotland tried to enjoy the best of both worlds, with Chalmers’ control and Townsend’s flair.
There were times when this worked to spectacular effect, most notably in 1995 against France when the Scots prevailed in Paris for the first time since 1969 – indeed, for the only time at the old Parc des Princes. That 23-21 victory was settled by Townsend’s creativity, the so-called ‘Toonie Flip’ out the back of his hand sending Gavin Hastings clear to canter in under the posts for the match-settling score with seconds remaining.
Nevertheless, Townsend was always better suited to running the show in the number 10 jersey than being an auxiliary conductor wearing number 12 or 13. As he matured, his early impetuosity was tempered by the confidence of experience. Never was this more surely demonstrated than on the 1997 Lions tour to South Africa.
‘The more I look back on that tour,’ Townsend once said, ‘the more it grows in my mind as the most special thing to have happened in my rugby career. It was special at the time - it is the ultimate honour for a British or Irish rugby player, and I made friends for life. But I think I assumed there would be more of this to come, but I didn’t make the 2001 tour.’
In 1997, Townsend relished the opportunity to play alongside a more talented group of team-mates. That Lions tour saw him execute a game-plan that was more about control and pressure than daring moments of individual brilliance; it showed that he could be the complete fly-half.
Two years later, Townsend’s Scotland career reached its zenith on a gorgeous spring afternoon in Paris when they produced 40 minutes of champagne rugby that touched heights rarely reached by Scotland sides. Five tries in the first-half took Scotland to a 36-22 victory that, coupled with Wales’ victory over England the following day, handed Scotland the championship. ‘You hear individual sportsmen talk about being “in the zone”,’ Townsend reflected, ‘but that was the only time where I felt in the zone with a team.’ The narrow defeat at Twickenham, in a game in which Scotland were the better side, cost Scotland a grand slam; a failure that has only become more piquant with the passing of time.
From that point on, there would still be great moments for Townsend but his best days as a player were largely in the past. An 18-year playing career that started with his hometown club of Gala and ended up back at the club’s Netherdale ground with the Border Reivers, but in between took in Warringah of Sydney, Northampton, Brive, Castres, Montpellier and the Sharks of Natal, drew to a close. Injuries took their toll but so too did unsympathetic coaching. Matt Williams, whose reign as Scotland coach could fairly be described as disastrous, made Townsend a scapegoat for his own shortcomings. Most cruelly, as his waning powers coincided with a Scotland team horribly short of talented backs, some simpleton Scotland supporters with short memories derided him as ‘Clownsend’. And so a career of rare brilliance rather petered out.
Townsend had been born into rugby and there was no doubt that the end of his playing career was never likely to mark the end of his involvement with the game. His father and grandfather had both played the game and, growing up in Galashiels, his Borderer’s obsession with the oval ball soon prevailed over his youthful enthusiasm for association football. His father, a print worker, and mother, a library assistant, instilled in Townsend ‘the importance of being humble, modest, and never taking things for granted’. That is an archetypally
“There is steel glinting beneath the bonhomie, and there has been ruthlessness too
Borders approach that he has maintained throughout his coaching career too.
Townsend’s intelligence always made a move into coaching seem probable. But, unsurprisingly for those who have seen the steel glinting beneath the bonhomie, there has been ruthlessness too. Vern Cotter, the New Zealander whose spell as national coach helped restore some much-needed selfrespect, had been keen to continue in post. However, after five years with Glasgow Warriors which included winning the Pro12 competition for the first time, Townsend made it plain to the Scottish Rugby Union that he had ambitions for the national coaching job himself. In essence, he gave the SRU an ultimatum: give me control now, or risk Scottish rugby losing me to a coaching job elsewhere.
Townsend appreciated that this generation of Scottish rugby players would be reaching their peak at this Autumn’s World Cup. In Stuart Hogg and Finn Russell, Scotland have a brace of world class talents capable of unpicking any defence. Unlike some of his coaching predecessors, Townsend has the players to play the game the way he wants it played.
Watching Scotland is never a comfortable experience. Failure has historically proved more likely than success and even periods of glory have been fleeting. The pressure of international rugby is intense; so much so that outsiders can only really guess at it. Townsend has said that the moments before an international carry ‘a sense of adrenaline and anticipation that is the equivalent of arriving at church on your wedding day; the moments before you turn over an exam paper; and attending a job interview – all rolled into one’.
But despite the sometimes crushing weight of expectation, this Scotland side plays in its coach’s image. On their day they play with a joyous freedom, a jazz symphony in which planned and improvised movements work hand-inhand and to stunning effect. Yet the Six Nations is a vicious environment in which there is no hiding place. Scotland will only be clear favourites against Italy this year and trips to London and Paris have rarely ended happily. No win at Twickenham since 1983, none in Paris since Townsend’s annus mirabilis in 1999 when he became just the fifth man to score a try in every Five Nations Championship fixture.
This side will not fail for a want of preparation or ambition though. Scottish supporters have remained stoic for the past twenty years; they are entitled to believe better times lie ahead. At the very least, Townsend is creating a team that plays in a manner to make the supporters proud. If they go down, they will do so with all guns blazing. It is a high-wire act entirely fitting for a coach whose own career was played in poetry, not prose.