TOWNSEND: The making of a rugby mastermind
He’s a free thinker with the world at his feet, a man who chooses to set trends rather than follow them but who will soak up every ounce of knowledge he can from sport’s biggest names. It’s the Gregor Townsend way and it bodes well for a Scotland team primed to deliver in Japan
AS the leading points scorer the history of the World Cup, Jonny Wilkinson and his left peg will always be regarded among the most lethal weapons ever to grace the game of rugby. The same applies to the metronomic right boot of Chris Paterson, who, to this day, stands alone as the top points scorer in the history of the Scottish national team.
In the World Cup of 2011, however, something was amiss. Players who were normally the most ultra-reliable goal-kickers were beginning to fluff their lines.
Wilkinson, in particular, had a shocker at times. In England’s opening pool-stage victory over Argentina, he inexplicably missed five penalties.
The Pumas fared no better. Between them, Felipe Contepomi and Martin Rodriguez missed six kicks at goal in an error-strewn match which England eventually won 13-9.
The roof of the Otago Stadium in Dunedin had been closed. It was effectively indoor conditions — flat-calm, with not a breath of wind. It should have been a kicker’s paradise.
In a tournament which became pockmarked by poor kicking displays, the theory was that the new balls which had been designed for the event in New Zealand were much lighter than anything the players had previously encountered.
Gregor Townsend had his own take on it. Prior to Scotland’s match with Argentina, he was asked why so many players had been so unusually errant with the boot and how they might adjust to the lighter ball.
‘Chris (Paterson) knows you have to kick the ball spot-on,’ said Townsend, who was Scotland’s attack coach at the time, working under head coach Andy Robinson. ‘There’s less margin for error.
‘It’s probably like playing with blades at golf. There’s a smaller sweet spot. That should suit Chris, who is technically outstanding. He says you can’t get away with any bad kicks.’
It was an interesting take from Townsend. The distinction between blades and cavity-backs will be familiar to any golfer and it offered an insight into his thinking as a coach.
A knowledge and understanding of the wider sporting spectrum has informed and shaped much of what he did at Glasgow Warriors and now in his role as head coach of Scotland.
Mike Blair has gone full circle with Townsend. He played with him at the World Cup in 2003, played under him in the 2011 edition, worked with him at Glasgow and is now serving alongside him as an assistant coach.
He knows, perhaps more than anyone else, just what makes Townsend tick. It is this love of other sports, particularly football, which again crops up.
Back in July, prior to Liverpool playing Napoli in a friendly at BT Murrayfield, Blair was asked what value there might be in the Scotland players watching the European champions in action.
Referencing the stunning 4-0 victory over Barcelona at Anfield last season, Blair explained: ‘Learning from other teams is really important, Gregor is really big on that. There was the example in the semi-finals of the Champions League when Liverpool took the quick corner. That kind of stuff is what can translate into what we do.
‘From a defensive point of view, it’s about always being switched on and never turning your back. And, from an attacking point of view, trying to create opportunities against an unstructured defence. Yeah, it was just totally off the cuff.’
A penchant to play off-the-cuff rugby has come to underpin Townsend’s teams, be it Glasgow or Scotland, and is something which perhaps has its roots in the fact that he spent almost half of his professional club career playing in France.
Following his arrival at Scotstoun in 2012, when he took over from Sean Lineen, the Warriors didn’t have the budget to compete with the Leinsters and the Munsters of this world. This applied tenfold in Europe. In that first season in charge, they were swept aside in the Champions Cup, finishing bottom of a group which featured Ulster, Castres and Northampton.
But something was stirring. Without the outright financial muscle of certain other clubs, Townsend was finding a different way.
He had identified Joe Schmidt’s Leinster as the blueprint; the perfect blend of tactical intelligence and attacking flair during a period which yielded successive European Cups for the Irish outfit in 2011 and 2012, as well as the Pro12 title in 2013.
Prior to taking the Glasgow gig, Townsend had spent time in New Zealand with the Chiefs, where he studied the methods of Dave Rennie and Wayne Smith.
It was here where he learned the value of having a collaborative approach with players. Even among two giants of the coaching world like Rennie and Smith, the likes of a young Aaron Cruden and Sonny Bill Williams would be encouraged to engage and speak up. From this point forth, Townsend was never going to be a dictator. Team meetings are often an open floor. If players have an opinion they want to express, be it positive or otherwise, then they are free to do so. Never was this more evident than at Twickenham earlier this year, when Finn Russell voiced his concern at the tactics being deployed during what had been an awful first half against England in the Six Nations. ‘I work closely with Gregor in terms of attack,’ says Russell now. ‘I’ll have my say to him in terms of what I think is happening and he’ll have his. ‘We create a good game plan together. I’ve had him as a coach for roughly seven or eight years now across Glasgow and Scotland. ‘Gregor has had to adapt as a coach because the game is changing every year. He’s always looking at other sports and chatting to other coaches within those sports. ‘Whether that’s in
Learning from other teams is really important, Gregor is really big on that
football or rugby in the southern hemisphere, he’s always chatting to people and trying to learn different things about coaching.
‘He is trying to move with the times as much as we are as players.’
To understand Townsend the coach, it is important to firstly understand Townsend the player. He was always ahead of his time and always seeking to do things slightly differently.
A sense of wanderlust, for instance, saw him forge a career in France with three different clubs — Brive, Castres and Montpellier — before a stint in South Africa with the Sharks.
He was a student of the game, always looking to pick the brains of some of the sharpest operators in the business.
Sir Ian McGeechan, who coached Townsend for Scotland and also on the successful Lions tour of South Africa in 1997, once said of his former pupil: ‘Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had in this game have been with Gregor.’
Townsend has carried that mindset into his own coaching career, with Pep Guardiola and Roberto Martinez among two of the most high-profile football coaches with whom he shares a friendship.
Having spent time watching Guardiola coach his all-conquering Manchester City team, and likewise Martinez with a swashbuckling Belgian national side, it is this desire to immerse himself in the methods of elite coaches which is an inescapable part of the Townsend fabric.
He defies conventions, something which typified his playing career from the moment he threw the infamous ‘Toony flip’ against France in Paris in 1995.
‘He has always had a reputation as a free-thinker and he’s always searching for different ways to do things. That has always been the case with Gregor,’ says John Barclay, who will head to this year’s World Cup in Japan as one of Townsend’s vice-captains.
‘Rugby as a sport is always evolving. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s always been someone who has tried to stay ahead of that curve.
‘He always wants to be at the front of whatever change is happening and be one of the people who are actually influencing that change, rather than reacting to it and following it.
‘He was an assistant coach earlier in my career with Scotland. Even from then, it was obvious just how much he drives the standards of those around him.
‘He’s a perfectionist. His evolvement as a coach is a difficult thing to really pin down and answer, but he has this relentless desire to pursue excellence.
‘We feel that as players. It comes across really strongly and he knows that’s how you push a team forward.’
The excellence which Barclay speaks of can once again be traced back to Townsend’s playing career.
As part of the Scotland team which won the Grand Slam in 1999, Townsend, quite remarkably, scored a try in all four matches.
Yet, for all his desire to play expansive rugby as a player and a coach, Townsend will need nobody to tell him that it is defence which ultimately wins championships.
This is where the narrative around Scotland must change. For too long now, there has been a suspicion that this team has a soft centre which often blights their attacking flair.
It became clear in Townsend’s first tour as Scotland head coach when, in the summer of 2017, they won a thrilling contest against Australia in Sydney, before somehow conspiring to lose to Fiji just a week later.
It is too often boom or bust. When the boom comes, though, it can be deafening, as illustrated later in 2017 when the Scots routed the Wallabies with eight tries in a 53-24 victory in Edinburgh.
That autumn series also saw them go agonisingly close to defeating the All Blacks. But it was in Cardiff the following year when cracks began to appear.
Scotland lost twice in the Welsh capital in 2018; the first a brutal Six Nations battering which almost saw them fail to score a point, the second a weak display which sounded the first alarm bells over Huw Jones.
In the 2018 Six Nations, Scotland won three games — including home victories against France and England — to finish third in the final table.
This year, however, they regressed. They finished second-bottom, their only victory came at home against Italy, with Ireland and Wales both conquering what had previously been fortress Murrayfield.
This was not part of the masterplan. Prior to this point, Townsend’s coaching career had only ever followed a positive trajectory.
In the season prior to his Glasgow team winning the Pro12 title in 2015, they finished runners-up. In the season before that, they had been semi-finalists. This is what Townsend does. He builds teams and he takes players on a path of steady progression and self-improvement.
It is intriguing to look at his first team-sheet from his time as Warriors head coach. It was a game against Ulster at Ravenhill in August of 2012. Tommy Seymour, Peter Horne, Ryan Wilson, Gordon Reid and Barclay all featured in that match — five players who are now heading to the World Cup with Townsend.
Stuart Hogg did not play in that particular game, but he did go on to be named in the Pro12 Team of the Season in 2012-13.
Hogg tells a story of how Townsend used to make the Glasgow players fill out individual goal-sheets about what they wanted to achieve in each match and then be asked to review them afterwards.
Safe to say, it worked a treat for Hogg, who swiftly began to cement his place in the Scotland squad from the moment Townsend took over at Glasgow seven years ago.
Of that debut campaign at Scotstoun, youngsters like Fraser Brown, Jonny Gray, Sean Maitland and Russell also began to break through and played for the first team at various points.
That makes a total of 10 players — almost a third of Scotland’s World Cup squad — who have come all the way from Scotstoun in 2012 on this journey with Townsend.
Together they are the nucleus, the mainstays and the backbone of everything Townsend seeks to achieve over the coming weeks in the Far East.
‘In terms of how we’re playing and the overall style of our rugby, it hasn’t changed much,’ offers Blair Kinghorn, one of the young thrusters in the current camp. ‘It’s probably the same now as when I came into the team (back in the 2018 Six Nations).
‘Gregor will always encourage us to play with quick ball whenever possible. The key difference in our approach is probably in terms of
when we play and when we don’t play.’
It is worth remembering at this point that, of the four home nations, Scotland are the only team to be coached by a native of the country.
Townsend cannot boast the sheer depth of coaching experience the likes of Warren Gatland and Eddie Jones have in their armoury. Nor can he boast the titles and silverware of a Schmidt.
What he can offer, though, is a mind as sharp as any other. He is Scotland’s free-thinker, who now has the world at his feet.