Put the fire back into Edinburgh, Cockers, but try to avoid any nose rubbing
IN the pecking order for the PRO12 title, Edinburgh are in an all too familiar position. They are nowhere – but then it’s been a long time since Scotland’s capital team have been anywhere in the top half of the table.
Since the expansion to 12 clubs with the Italian dimension seven seasons ago, they have finished 8th, 11th, 10th, 8th, 8th, and 9th. They currently lie in a similar position and that long run of unbroken mediocrity is a very good reason why Edinburgh and Richard Cockerill are made for each other.
Who knows, it may yet turn out to be, if not a marriage made in heaven, then an upwardly mobile Anglo-Scottish partnership. The last few months of his reign at Leicester cannot detract from Cockerill’s track record over some 20 years for winning major titles on behalf of England’s most demanding club.
He takes over this summer, driven by a burning sense of grievance at what he perceives as the injustice of his sacking from the Tigers. His first goal will be a top-six finish to qualify for the Champions’ Cup and cut the credibility gap opened by the success of the Warriors.
They, ironically, played their part in Cockerill’s downfall, a thumping 42-13 Champions’ Cup win at Scotstoun sending the Tigers on the slide to their worst European campaign of all. The new head coach will demand to know why Glasgow, a city besotted by Celtic and Rangers, now boasts one of the eight best rugby clubs in Europe while Edinburgh, a rugby city, is still treading water.
Cockerill has a rough idea already of what the salvage operation will take. When his previous club disappeared without trace 38-0 in Limerick before Christmas, he conceded that Munster had been a cut above anything the Tigers had encountered on the domestic circuit.
The PRO12 will be all the better in every respect for his arrival in their midst and if he makes as much of a difference as Stuart Lancaster has at Leinster, Edinburgh will reap similar benefits from doubling the English coaches amongst the Celtic elite.
Cockerill’s relocation coincides with the 20th anniversary of the most animated pre-match performance by any England player of the professional era – his nose-rubbing, eye-balling of Norm Hewitt during the Haka before the Old Trafford Test.
The odds are that Edinburgh’s new head coach will be too immersed in his new job to waste any time recalling the song and dance behind a diplomatic incident that prompted the creation of a no man’s land to eliminate any threat of it all kicking off before kick-off.