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Psychologists have argued for decades about the relative weight of hereditary and environment in the creation of a person’s character and personality.
In the case of Robbie Deans, the discussion is pointless. He is a man and coach made by rugby.
Rugby genius and nous are in his genes. He was brought up in a nation that prides itself on being a ‘rugby country’ and in the back country areas of the Canterbury plains where ‘cranky South Island farmers’ have provided the heart and soul of All Blacks sides since the first Test in 1903.
Robbie Dean’s home club is Ellesmere, a farming district about an hour’s drive out of Christchurch. The club house is large and comfortable, built by the locals. On the board of honour are the names of the All Blacks the club has produced: Alex Wyllie, Bruce and Robbie Deans, Todd Blackadder and Scott Hamilton.
Robbie Deans has played and coached at Ellesmere and sometimes, when he has time, pops down to watch the local side playing at the ground. I went there a couple of years ago to get an insight into the Deans mindset.
An extremely competitive and high standard game was played. And you can see where Deans gets his obsession with creating a team that plays as a team rather than getting stars to lead the team to victory.
You don’t tend to get stars playing in country rugby. The country stars are quickly grabbed by the city schools, clubs and provinces. Those who play in clubs like Ellesmere tend to be tough, hard grafting players who provide the heart and guts to the teams they play for, at the local, provincial and national level.
So it was no surprise to me that Deans concentrated in his first week as the coach of the Wallabies on creating a team environment that reflected his Ellesmere experience.
There is no ‘leadership group.’ Everyone is expected to contribute leadership at the appropriate time, on and off the field.
The Wallabies have been mixed up in the training drills so that players form a new community, the 2008 Wallabies, rather like a country club community where everyone is expected to contribute and where the team is stronger than its component parts.
The Deans family was on the first fleet to Christchurch when the city was founded in 1850. The intention was to create a typical English cathedral city on the plains of Canterbury, so the main river running through the town was called the Avon.
A spacious square was created, with a magnificent cathedral dominating the town environment. A splendid university was built where a young scientist and avid rugby player, Earnest Rutherford, the first scientist to split the atom, learnt his physics. Early on, too, the city fathers established a fine sports ground, Lancaster Park, which was within an easy walking distance from the square.
Work hard and play your games hard could be the motto for Christchurch from its earliest days.
To this could be added an intense local loyalty.
Canterbury supporters are famous (infamous?) in New Zealand for their one-eyed dedication to their team. When the Indian cricketer, the Nawab of Pataudi, lost an eye in an accident, I wrote a piece saying that he had automatically become a Canterbury supporter.
When the Deans family started to put up its pre-fabricated house in the new city of Christchurch in 1850, they found that someone had forgotten to pack any nails. No worries. They made wooden nails and built the house with them. This is a typical example of the New Zealand tendency towards pragmatism.
This pragmatism is a feature of the kiwi culture. It permeates politics (the development of the welfare state) and the way rugby is played there. So when Robbie Deans wandered around the training field at Manly for the first Wallaby practice session and put down some of the cones marking training zones himself, he was following the pragmatic tradition of his ancestors: if something needs to be done, do it yourself.
If you drive around Christchurch’s magnificent Hagley Park, where rugby field after rugby field is passed, you’ll be using the Deans Drive. The naming of the drive is a tribute to the first All Blacks’ Deans, R.G.Deans, a burly, fast center who was a star of the 1905 All Blacks and the scorer of “Deans’ try”, the most famous incident in New Zealand rugby.
The 1905 All Blacks were unbeaten on their historic tour of the UK and France until late in the tour when they played Wales. Wales won. This was the first defeat the All Blacks had suffered.
But the All Blacks always maintained that they’d been robbed of a try scored by Bob Deans.
The cunning Welsh players had pulled Deans back into the field of play before the referee arrived to decide whether a try had been scored. That’s the New Zealand story and it’s been celebrated in one of the best novels with a rugby theme, Lloyd Jones’ The Book of Fame.
Bob Deans, as a man of some means, quietly and without any publicity, gave money to some of the battlers on the team throughout the tour so they could buy additional food, go to shows, and so on with the rest of the team.
There are clues here, in the quiet generosity of Bob Deans, of a similar concern for the welfare of his players that Robbie Deans has shown.
I remember talking with Robbie Deans about the views of Cecilia Lashley, a New Zealand social worker who has written some interesting books on how young men can be aggressive on the field of play and non-violent off it.
Deans has tried to implement her methods with the Crusaders, and will certainly do the same with the Wallabies. In a sense, this interest is a modern take on the Bob Deans mentorship role.
In this way, Robbie Deans has many of the attributes of coaches like Jack Gibson and Wayne Bennett. There is a laconic speech pattern. The words are few but they weigh a lot.
There is the concern about the total player, with improvements on and off the field, being the goal. The improvements are all about the issue of responsibility. Players are expected to be responsible for what they do and are given skills to achieve good outcomes, on and off the field.
Discipline and the desire to constantly improve are internalised. So you won’t get Deans imposing curfews and so on. The players are expected to do the right thing because they want to, not because they are forced to.
There is nothing soft about this approach. Players are treated with respect. They are given the chance to improve. But if they don’t rate, they don’t get selected.
Stephen Brett was dropped from the Crusaders for the finals, even though this cruelled his All Blacks chances in 2008, because he hadn’t delivered at inside centre.
Dan Carter tells the story of being called into Deans’ office as a youngster and asked what his ambitions were with the Crusaders: “To take Merhts’ position,” Carter replied. “Correct answer,” the coach replied.
There are people in Australia who queried the selection of Deans as the Wallaby coach on the grounds that a former All Black wouldn’t have his heart in coaching against New Zealand.
This argument has already been disproved with the way Deans has behaved with the Wallabies so far. It also fails to comprehend Deans’ passion for rugby, and especially for coaching it.
He loves the game. He loves coaching players to play it better than they have in the past. He loves coaching players who grow their game and their characters. This is why he was attracted to Brad Thorn as player and a person.
I got an insight into the Deans passion for coaching rugby at the beginning of the season when the Super 14 coaches and referees were going through a coaching session on the ELVs run by the IRB’s Paddy O’Brien at Coogee Oval.
It was clear from the session that Deans had done more homework on the ELVs and understood them better than all the other coaches and referees, including O’Brien.
From time to time he’d stop a presentation and point out, quietly but assertively, that the explanation was wrong. He’d come back to a point of contention until it was resolved to the satisfaction of everyone. “Are all the coaches agreed?”, he’d ask after some dispute.
After the session I wandered across to him and asked him how his interview had gone for the All Blacks job the day before. He shook his head and murmured that he’d tell me all about it at a later date.
It was clear he wasn’t going to get the job.
This was when I knew that Australian rugby had got the only coach in world rugby who has a chance of taking the Wallabies back to the heights that Rod Macqueen took the side to in the glory days of the late 1980s and early 1990s.