Battling back... Baldwin
THE former Hull City football manager Phil Brown once declared: “Football’s not just physical. It’s menthol, too.”
A handy means of easing a viral infection, then. Or perhaps not. Whatever, rugby is pretty much the same: not just physical, but played in the mind as well.
Not that everyone buys into that line of thinking.
In his autobiography, There and Back Again, Allan Bateman tells how the Welsh players at Richmond RFC in the 1990s used to wind up the club’s sports psychologist.
“When Scott Quinnell joined Richmond, he had to leave his dog behind in Llanelli,” recalls Bateman.
“The other Welsh players would tell the psychologist that Scott was depressed because he was missing his mutt and therapy would follow, with Scott playing along with the wind-up as the academic tried to help him come to terms with his grief.”
Amateurism hadn’t long departed the sport’s top table and there was still a certain scepticism among some about mind doctors getting involved in a macho world of lineouts, scrums, dark arts and all that went with them.
Maybe some still feel that way today. But not Scott Baldwin. Less than two months ago, Wales’s World Cup hooker from 2015 found himself stuck in a downward spiral which seemed to bring fresh woe with every week.
Not only had he lost his Wales place, but at one point, he had looked in danger of slipping back to third-choice No. 2 at the Ospreys.
All that after coming close to losing a hand when he ill-advisedly opted to pet a lion in a cage in South Africa.
Baldwin seemed in freefall, a player who had lost all form and was heading only one way, and it wasn’t upwards.
Yet, lo and behold, the 29-year-old turned up for a round of media interviews at the Ospreys’ press call this week looking anything but defeated.
Over the past month he has been arguably the form hooker in the country, his confidence wondrously restored.
The temptation was to ask for a pint of what he’d been drinking.
His story is one of the most heartening of the Welsh rugby season, how a player simply refused to accept what fate had seemingly planned for him.
How he decided to change the narrative and how improvements followed rapidly.
What has been going on?
A CONVERSATION WITH STEVE TANDY
“I’D become frustrated with the way I’d been playing, so I had a chat with Steve Tandy and he suggested a sports psychologist might help,” says Baldwin.
“I’ve been seeing her for the past six weeks and she’s helped me to declutter everything.
“I focus on myself and my game more now.
“I had the option of using sports psychology with Wales in the past, but I didn’t buy into it.
“But this time I did and it’s been a massive help.”
OLD-SCHOOL VIEWS
BALDWIN is unusual in professional rugby in that he had a career before he committed to the game full-time. He was a carpenter and, in his spare time, an accomplished skate border. Six years ago, he found himself staying in a cramped one-bed flat in Milan after struggling to make an impact at the Ospreys.
In short, he has lived a life beyond rugby and he isn’t afraid to admit he had old-school views over the benefits of sports psychology.
“I doubted I’d get anything out of it,” he says.
“But I had a lot going on last year. There was a new baby in the house, I was coaching at Bridgend RFC and also playing for the Ospreys. Steve and Robin McBryde told me I was doing too much with the coaching as well as the playing, but I was stubborn and didn’t listen. “I’ve sorted things now. “I’ve stopped coaching and recognised that Muckers was right when he said my playing days wouldn’t last for ever and I needed to concentrate on my playing.
“I then had that conversation with Steve and with hindsight maybe the lion bite was a blessing in disguise in that it prompted me to take a look at myself, refocus and think what I wanted to get out of the next five or six years of my career.”
THE MIND DOCTOR
THE help from a sports psychologist was hugely significant.
“Her name is Victoria and she doesn’t pretend to have an encyclopedic knowledge of rugby – that’s not her job – but she’s honest with me about everything and has helped me get my game back on track,” says Baldwin.
BREAKING OF MATCH-DAY RITUALS
THE 34-cap hooker become wedded to match-day routines, fearing that unless he stuck religiously to them his game had set