Why I doubt Tigers can find quick solution to their slide
If you look at the Champions Cup quarter-finalists, the most striking names are those of Munster and Leinster, giants of the game who fell from grace, but then have come again.
Leicester fans can take heart from that. Why clubs suddenly flounder, and how they recover, isn’t easy to explain, but there will be an urgent search for those answers among the Tigers’ coaches, players, and their board.
What Tigers’ chief executive Simon Cohen has said was revealing, giving possible clues to the cause of the current malaise.
Some have said Leicester need a ‘sugar daddy’ to invest in the club but Cohen made the point that the Tigers are well-run and don’t need investment as they’ve spent right up to the salary cap ceiling. He talked repeatedly about “the board”, and mentioned the “playing side sub-committee” which includes such as Ben Kay and Rory Underwood.
He made a staunch defence of the process whereby the board budgets and approves capital projects, and gave the impression Leicester’s foundations are built on solid ground, which they undoubtedly are.
He revealed the board was aware of the tensions between Richard Cockerill and Aaron Mauger some nine months before they finally decided to act, hanging on in the hope that things would finally work out as they’d previously done with Cockerill and Matt O’Connor.
On the appointment of a new DoR, he uttered words that may strike fear into the hearts of supporters, telling them that consultants have been hired to trawl the world for the right candidate.
Having written previously about PRL’s failure to impose standards to ensure clubs reach “break even”, Cohen’s comments, perhaps, shed some light on the problems.
Clubs with owners get more than just cash, they get direction and decisiveness. They may still have boards, but they’re probably not going to be as big as the Tigers’, whose website shows 11 members, some of who work within the club, while other have had illustrious business or rugby careers.
The Tigers board is rammed full of talent, but who knows whether it shows sufficient fleetness of foot. Some board members with successful business careers will be in their element discussing the economics of a new stand or similar but when all is said and done, Tigers are first and foremost about winning rugby matches.
It seems to an outsider that nine months was an awfully long time to allow the tensions between Cockerill and Mauger to reach breaking point. You’d hope someone on the board indulged in some banging together of heads during that time.
Whether they did or didn’t, it wasn’t sorted.
It’s easy to blame one or other of the coaches, but the buck stops with the board. Cohen said: “They (Cockerill and Mauger) started off their time working together a long way apart in their philosophy…” which rather begs the question as to whether that was known when Mauger was appointed? If it wasn’t, why not, and if it was, then did Cohen or the board make it crystal clear which philosophy was the right way forward? It sounds as though the coaches were left to work it out for themselves over a far-too-lengthy period.
If the chemistry wasn’t working, why weren’t the board thinking about replacements – appointing consultants after the event sounds like heel dragging.
Telling fans that the board has spent up to the salary cap limit might be meant to reassure and impress, but I bet it had the opposite effect. If there’s that much money around, and the team can still be humiliated in the Champions Cup pool stages, then surely serious questions need to be asked about how the Tigers’ recruitment policy has worked, and what the playing side sub-committee has been up to? I bet Glasgow Warriors’ playing budget is a lot smaller than Leicester’s!
You have to hope that as an expensive consultant scours the world for a DoR, and Richard Cockerill enjoys the Toulon sun and ponders his next move, the Tigers board are doing their own spot of reflection on whether the club is being run appropriately for today’s rugby world.
The way things currently stand, you wouldn’t bet the house on Tigers quickly turning things round.