‘The doping ban was hard but it helped my career’
Gloucester head coach Johan Ackermann says ignominy as a player set him on the right path
It has been a rough week for Johan Ackermann. In the early hours of last Sunday morning, the Gloucester head coach was involved in a nightclub altercation that left a man with facial injuries. Although there are wildly contrasting accounts of events on social media, one witness who has seen the CCTV footage says, “Johan operated with a restraint no one I know would have when provoked like that.” The incident is still subject to a police investigation and serves as an unwelcome distraction from Gloucester’s trip to Wasps today.
As a coach with the Lions in Super Rugby and now Gloucester, who are second in the Premiership, Ackermann seems to possess a Midas touch. Yet as he says, “not everything in my life has been smooth sailing”.
The darkest period came at the start of his playing career in 1997 when he was banned for doping. Ackermann had just established himself in the Springboks second row when he tore his knee ligaments. “The return to play date was initially set at three months,” Ackermann said. “At three months I still couldn’t straighten my knee. At six months, I still couldn’t run. Obviously something had gone wrong.”
A combination of desperation and naivety caused Ackermann to accept the advice of a police colleague. He was told the only way to rebuild the muscles around his knee was to take a steroid. He was told it would be out of his system in no time. He was told he would not get caught.
Instead he tested positive for nandrolone and received a two-year ban. He lost everything, including his house and his car. “I had just bought a house and I lost it because, on a police salary, I could not afford it,” Ackermann said. “The saddest thing is the rugby side where I missed a lot of caps, both at provincial and international level.”
Ackermann is not looking for sympathy. He refuses to linger for long on the negative experiences. Instead he focuses on his determination to re-establish his international career and the lessons he can now pass on as a coach.
“Obviously you are saddened and disappointed in yourself for taking the wrong advice but the good thing is that the flame in me didn’t die,” Ackermann said. “After two years I still felt there was unfinished business and desperately wanted to play for the Springboks again. I ended up playing another nine Tests. It was important for me to show that I didn’t cheat to achieve that, it was a mistake, and I could play at the highest level on my own terms.
“Again, in the situation there are a lot of ifs and whys but I believe that experience has helped me. I never knew that I would be part of a coaching set-up where you can go back and share that experience with people.”
It is an experience, one of many, that has shaped him as a character and a coach. As a player he says he was a fly-half trapped in a secondrow’s body and his beliefs were reinforced by working with a number of New Zealand coaches, including John Mitchell, Laurie Mains and Wayne Smith, whom he encountered during a short spell at Northampton. “You take bits and pieces from these people and you mix it in your mind with your own character and way of thinking,” Ackermann said. “Hopefully something comes out that will work.”
The result was a decidedly un-south African philosophy that places an emphasis on playing with flair and freedom. “We gave a basic structure but, within that structure, the player has the freedom to make certain decisions,” Ackermann said. “I just want them to enjoy it and have the freedom to play. There is no right or wrong. Afterwards you can say, ‘Maybe you should have kicked here’. That’s the easy part. I will never fault the player unless there is a lack of effort.”
In the Lions’ previous seven Super Rugby seasons, they had never finished outside the bottom three. When Ackermann came in, they faced a play-off against the Southern Kings for the right to play in Super Rugby. “Life will always go on, the sun will come up in the morning, but it was almost like life or death pressure because I don’t think the Lions could have survived losing,” Ackermann said. “It was almost unbearable.”
The Lions won 44-42 on aggregate. Within two seasons, a franchise composed of other teams’ “cast-offs” was competing in back-to-back Super Rugby finals with a core of homebred Springbok internationals, including hooker Malcolm Marx. In any other country, Ackermann would
have been installed to take over a struggling national team but, in South Africa, logic and reason are rare beasts. And so he accepted Gloucester’s invitation to work under David Humphreys this summer. It is easy to draw parallels between the Lions and Gloucester’s status as perennial underachievers.
The difference is that at the Lions, Ackermann was starting with a blank piece of paper and zero expectations. At Gloucester, “we can’t accept two years of trial and error before we start winning”.
Nor can he simply transpose his winning formula from the Lions to Kingsholm. “We have to create our own culture here,” Ackermann said. “I can’t just copy and paste what I did at the Lions. Some things will be similar. The key values: the culture of respecting the facilities, the people who cut the grass, the people who look after the security, the maintenance people. That culture of caring for each other can be applied to all organisations.”
Ackermann deflects all the praise for Gloucester’s stunning start to the season to the senior player group of Jeremy Thrush, Charlie Sharples, Billy Twelvetrees and Ben Morgan for buying into, and then enacting, his methods. He also points out that nothing has been achieved yet, even if expectations in a success-starved city increases exponentially with each victory. “Success for supporters is in trophies and winning,” Ackermann said. “But if I can create a place where players love to be and come every day with a smile on their face then, to me, that is success.”
‘I played another nine Tests – it was crucial to show I didn’t cheat to achieve that’