Chelsea hire guru behind All Blacks ‘no d---heads’ policy
Enoka famed for work with all-conquering rugby team Boehly wants to bring best out of expensive signings
Chelsea have hired the mental skills coach behind the All Blacks rugby union team’s “no d---heads” policy to help create the one thing Todd Boehly’s money cannot buy – a winning culture.
Gilbert Enoka, who has been the All Blacks manager for leadership for the past seven years after spending 15 years as the team’s mental skills coach, is due to start what is described as a short-term consultancy role with Chelsea.
Enoka is regarded as a highly significant influence on the All Blacks over more than two decades, particularly as New Zealand’s dominance of Test rugby union reached its peak with back-to-back World Cup victories in 2011 and 2015.
Helping players to deal with suffocating expectation, notably at a home World Cup in 2011, was among his chief responsibilities. New Zealand won that tournament four years after being knocked out by France in the 2007 quarter-final, a game seen to epitomise their tendency to choke under pressure.
Enoka, a former PE teacher, also spent six years as a mental skills coach with the New Zealand cricket team and three years with the country’s netball team. But working with Chelsea will be his first foray into football, with the remit to help the club develop a world-class culture under the Boehly-clearlake Capital ownership.
Boehly and his Clearlake cocontrolling owner, Behdad Eghbali, have spent more than £600million on signings and hired a new recruitment team.
Head coach Graham Potter’s bloated squad is now bursting with different personalities and egos, and there is acknowledgement that Chelsea’s
expensive signings could flop under the weight of expectation without the right culture.
That is the area Enoka has been hired to help with and the 57-yearold will stress the importance of the team over the individual.
Successive managers and head coaches have questioned the mental fortitude of the Chelsea squad since the club last won the Premier League title in 2017.
Enoka developed a culture of each member of the squad taking responsibility for their own actions with the All Blacks and players taking turns in sweeping the changing rooms clean after games. When aberrations occur such as Aaron Cruden’s missed flight, a player is answerable to his team-mates rather than the coaches.
The coach himself can also get pulled up by the players, as outlined by Enoka when describing the definition of d---heads as “people putting themselves ahead of the team, people who think they’re entitled to things or expect the rules to be different for them, people operating deceitfully in the dark, or being unnecessarily loud about their work”.
He added: “Our coach, Steve Hansen, a brilliant man, once came into a team meeting a few minutes late. As he walked in, one of the senior players stood up and said, ‘Coach, you can’t be late. Not again, please’.
“A d---head makes everything about them. Our motto is, if you can’t change the people, change the people.”
Potter made a big call last week when he dropped Pierre-emerick Aubameyang from the Champions League squad and chose Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk and on-loan Joao Felix as the three January signings to add to it – so Benoit Badiashile and Noni Madueke missed out. Reports have claimed MLS club Los Angeles FC are interested in signing Aubameyang immediately.