Management and leadership: How to coach a rugby team

Coaching has changed a lot since the early days of rugby Tests and it’s changing even faster now than ever before.

In the black and white days, a team preparing for a home Test met the coach on Thursday and played on Saturday. Well, almost. For the touring side it was the exact opposite – a coach might have control for four months and 30 or 40 games. But the coach had few specialist assistants. Coaches were appointed for a single tour, or up to two years if they were lucky.

Presently, Test coaches typically get 4-8 years in charge of a Test side. Coaches have a range of specialist assistants and a larger range of duties too, including engaging in publicity and marketing events, dealing with the media and liaising with the clubs or franchises that control their players for the bulk of the rugby season.

It’s clearly far too much for one person.

So what duties should a coach reserve for themselves and what skills might be needed to make a decent coach?

It seems that there are a few large areas that coaches are in control of. These include leading the team of players and crew of assistants to create a pleasant workspace, deciding on the type of rugby to be played and selecting the team that best fits this playing style.

Other tasks include coaching the team in the art of rugby, managing the crew of assistants to support the players’ development and dealing with stakeholders and the media.

Let’s run through each of those tasks to take a deeper look at what a coach’s role includes.

Leading the team and crew
In England it is often called ‘managing’ and coaches of football teams are routinely referred to as ‘managers’. But if you don’t know the difference between ‘managing’ and ‘leading’ then you shouldn’t even be applying for jobs like this.

The All Blacks rightly understand that ‘managing’ is a separate specialist skill and they have a chap to handle that and stay in the background while doing it. His name escapes me as indeed it should.

This is also what God prefers and that’s another reason why he blesses the All Blacks regularly and smites England in every code he can. Managing is about things. Leading is all about people. Players are people – ergo they need leading.

Footballs, boots, hotel rooms, buses, photoshoots and suchlike are things and need to be managed. The confusion implicit in the choice of job titles in English sporting codes is emblematic of their failure.

They literally don’t know what they are supposed to be doing. Only in such an environment could something as daft as the idea of ‘marginal gains’ get traction. People don’t follow bean-counting managers who promise ‘marginal gains’ and ‘incremental improvement’.

They follow leaders who promise death or glory. A degree of colourful character, a la Michael Cheika, is needed in a leader.

The coach, or leader, needs to be a role model and a mentor – especially to younger players. He needs to set the tone by displaying good character himself and by delivering paternal guidance (mentoring) to volatile and not always entirely mature young men.

Give the young men some life-skills guidance while you’ve got them and prepare them for life after Test match rugby. It’s only fair.

He needs to be of visibly good character himself and to set high standards for acceptable behaviour by all the gaggle of team and crew – and he needs to enforce those standards with only minimal compromise. He should err on the side of firmness when in doubt.

He needs to know what virtues he wants in the members of the team and these should be matched to the type of rugby that the team will strive to play. The players do not have to be clones of the coach but should share the fundamental virtues that comprise ‘good character’. It doesn’t have to be complicated. The All Blacks get by with the simple ‘No dickheads’ rule.

They also create a pleasant environment by treating the people within it as family. The All Blacks ‘family’ is careful about who they let join it and they take care of the feelings of all their members – especially when they stop selecting them to play.

They seem to consider all new players to be little brothers – and they insist that older brothers take on responsibility for leading the newbies on and off the field. This reduces the coach’s leadership workload a bit too.

In time, the older brothers tend to ape the behaviour of the coach and captain. By osmosis, they become leaders too. This is how role-modelling works. Older brothers also ensure the virtue of humility is well understood by newbies. Again – not by humbling the newbies with schoolboy pranks and the like – but by humbling themselves and thereby showing the little brothers that this is how it is in the team.

Playing style
Here, the coach has to have an eye for both the possible and the seemingly impossible – the status quo and the future.

If you coached the Springboks right now you might still want to play running rugby – but you’d have to acknowledge that it would take some time to effect a transition using the current players. What is possible next season might be impossible right now – but still worth working towards.

Now that coaches get more than a tour or a couple of seasons, it’s possible to have a grand vision and to be granted the time to achieve it. That was seldom true in the past. Coaching plans in this century can be patient plans now – not hasty and over-reactive to every little puff of headwind.

Some calmness in the face of adversity is needed. It’s interesting that all three of the coaches that have won the Rugby World Cup for New Zealand possessed this quality. Brian Lochore is glacially calm. Steve Hansen is unflappable too.

Graham Henry was more hot headed and admits that he was a bit of a tool until the failed Lions tour taught him to chill out. Now he’s stable like dynamite. There’s still a lurking danger of a blow up – but day-to-day he is fundamentally easy and safe to play with.

The type of rugby also has to be selected with an eye not just to the talent available, but also to the limitations of the game. The rules, the refereeing and the tasks lined up for the team. Coaching a Currie Cup team to win on dry hard grounds with South Africa refs is a bit different to planning to win on four different continents with wild variations in weather and refereeing standards and TMO scrutiny.

As refs get their riding instructions from World Rugby, the coach must also have an eye to what tactics are productive now – but maybe less useful as refereeing policy changes.

Remember the glory days of rucking? Gone now. Short arm penalties? Not seen much recently. Next to go may be the maul. Maybe the breakdown will also change shape soon too. Best plan for the inevitable and the probable.

Failure to appreciate the effects of intense TMO scrutiny was evident in the tactics chosen by some teams at Rugby World Cup 2015.

Some teams have current strengths that don’t suit the future trend for the rules. What use is England’s ponderous pack now that the game can flow so fast around that hunchbacked analogue scrum-cum-relic thanks to passing, catching, offloading, fetching, kick and chase and all the other black arts of digital football?

The All Black game plan has at least four different styles to call on when required. Most teams have only one and sometimes that one style is past its used by date as well. The big hitting style of Samoa isn’t well suited to the TMO environment. The Japanese two-man tackling game of hit-him-low and hit-him-even lower is ideal.

The Wallabies seem to have two types of game at the moment – but one of those games was found to be inadequate in the Rugby World Cup final. So maybe just one at present.

In the case of England, I challenge anyone to state clearly (and to also get from The Roar crowd a general agreement) what England’s grand vision for their chosen type of rugby in 2015 was. It was too clever by half and nowhere near simple enough to stand a chance of working.

That is because Lancaster is a fox, he draws on a wide variety of ideas to implement a gameplan. Good coaches are mostly hedgehogs, they see the game through a single viewpoint.

Hansen is a hedgehog and can explain his grand vision with a hedgehog’s dogged simplicity and he can back it up with a relentless decade long dedication to a single goal, “I want to score tries”.

Note too that the vision has to connect to the rules of rugby. Hansen’s vision isn’t to play running rugby – because that’s what losing teams in the Pacific Islands mostly played in the 2015 Rugby World Cup. It was to score tries.

This is a highly objectively measurable outcome. Whereas ‘running rugby’ isn’t as measurable on the scoreboard anyway. If you asked him why he chose that vision I’m sure he would look at you with pity and then draw a breath and silently remind himself that he shouldn’t mock the afflicted, and then with the faintest smile he’d say “Because they’re worth more than goals.” For Hansen, it’s that simple.

Lancaster had no clearly articulated or discernible vision for his rugby and it showed in his muddled selections, variable tactics and finally in their humiliating early exit. His only clear vision was “That the team be proud to play for England”. That’s a good parallel vision and a critical addition to the culture England was trying to create. He did a lot to achieve it and I think that’s wonderful. But there was no actual rugby vision that could be measured by a scoreboard.
 
Selecting players
Armed with the clear vision of the type of rugby that he wants the team to play, the coach needs to look at what players he has inherited and who he needs to cull or recruit to fill the gaps in his vision.
For this he undoubtedly needs co-selectors who can scout the games at lower levels. He also needs confident selectors who can play Devil’s Advocate against his own choices.

However above all he needs to analyse what he lacks and then to set selectors the task of finding what is needed. This is a bit like deciding that you have a .44 magnum but you lack the bullets for it. It is entirely wrong to ask selectors to just bring him the best players that they find in their travels. They might come back with a fistful of highly impressive .50 calibre bullets. That would be a mistake.

This is a mistake that Stuart Lancaster made repeatedly. He looked for the best talent all the time. He didn’t seem to realise that it was his job to take decent talent and then set about coaching it to become part of a finely tuned team of players who collectively would be greater than the middling talents that formed it.

This is what Eddie Jones did. It is what Daniel Hourcade did. It is what Warren Gatland, Joe Schmidt and Vern Cotter did. All of their teams were better than England because they were actually teams.

This is why I laugh when I see ‘best of the tournament teams’ of players from all nations or clubs selected by people (who ought to know better) in the presumably sincere belief that if such a team ever took the field that they would wipe the floor with the opposition. That is a harmless delusion when expressed by a blogger – but it is a fatal flaw when enacted by a real coach. Lancaster – are you listening?

A team that plays together a lot is a team. A bunch of talented strangers that meet on Thursday to play on Saturday are nothing – nothing at all. Most top club or provincial sides have a Lions scalp or the scalp of a touring Test side on their clubroom walls. This scalp is usually taken at the start of a tour when all the glittering talent that flew in the week before was still getting to know the names of the people playing on their left and right.

The coach must select players to fill a specific gap and if necessary they must coach the ordinary plaster filler they find into a glittering gold dust. This is what was done to Tony Woodcock and Ma’a Nonu. And yes, it took a while.

The shape of the gap has to match the shape of the talent too. Christian Cullen at fullback was a square peg in a square hole. Christian Cullen at centre was a square peg in a deep round hole. When you look at John Hart’s other positional choices in 2003 you have to wonder if he would have made those mistakes if he had a strong selector to stand up to him and say – “Hey shortstuff – let’s not play Cullen at centre, Umaga at wing and Wilson at fullback. Let’s play Cullen at fullback, Wilson at wing and Umaga at centre instead.” Which is what their own clubs decided were their best positions.

Clubs that do not have a profusion of talent to compete for each position are usually pretty adept at finding the best spot for their star player. They have no other choice. Too much choice can confuse mediocre coaches.

Once again, Lancaster’s inability to see in Sam Burgess what Bath and the Rabbitohs both saw in Burgess, i.e. a loose forward, reveals his fundamental problem. He cannot tell a square peg from a round hole and when given multiple options to choose from, he bungled it.

There is a hint of that indecision in Michael Cheika’s selections for various positions too at the moment. Just a hint – and he has time to fix it. The only time Hansen plays someone out of position is because of injury or a card.

Lastly, he has to select a player who can be turned into a captain – unless he is lucky enough to select one already made. If there is no natural leader in the team, the coach must make one in two years. It can be done.

Coaching the team
Once the vision is set out and the team and crew selected, the coach may, if he wants, step aside from a lot of the coaching and maintain a view from the mountain top. Assistants can coach the separate skills and run the opposed training where all the smaller skills are tested at once.

But at some point he has to step in and stop anything that doesn’t fit his vision, and he has to recognise when his skills coaches aren’t achieving his goals.

Stopping the fitness crew from bulking the All Blacks pack up into Michelin men like the England forwards is a responsibility of the coach. Left unsupervised, specialists tend to go nuts in their own field. They need to be reined in occasionally.

Likewise sacking assistants such as Graham Rowntree who couldn’t coach the England scrum to parity with anyone better than Fiji is the kind of sad chore a coach has to perform occasionally.

This is called checking and following up and in a well-run team should take about 10 per cent of his time. In a poorly functioning team – maybe one that is just getting started together it may take 40 per cent of a coach’s time.

Strange as it may seem, actual coaching of his own team doesn’t have to be the biggest part of the coach’s day.

During the campaign season, what he should be doing with a large chunk of his time is constantly reviewing the likely effects of the changing rules, refs and weather, then analysing the opposition strengths and weaknesses and looking at those of his own team. For this a dedicated specialist assistant with the aid of some video and some statistical analysis is helpful. In the military, such a specialist grouping was called ‘The Intelligence Corps’ and they also had to give briefings on likely enemy intentions and tactics. Someone needs to do this for the coach.

From that analysis a draft tactical plan for the next game can be made and communicated to the crew and captain and positional leaders. The draft plan should include the intentions for the chosen reserves.
After a bit of group discussion, some small changes to the plan should be made and then the coach should sit back and wait for game day while the assistants rehearse the skills needed to execute this particular plan.

Meantime the coach looks forward to game day and engages in any trivial mind games he wants to amuse himself with – but the fewer the better in most cases.

On game day, he has two main responsibilities. Committing reserves and amending plans at half time.

Committing reserves is the greatest influence a coach can have on game day. Ideally the moment and the reason for doing so should be thought out when the pre-game analysis is done and should be included in the tactical plan. But that’s only for planned substitutions.

Injuries and red or yellow cards are a different story. For this, teams need to practice substitutions during training. They must be ready for the unexpected. And coaches need to substitute in such a way as to minimise the disruption to the rest of the team.

When the All Blacks needed a wing during the Rugby World Cup and had no backs on the bench, they calmly sent on a loose forward to play on the wing – close to where the waterboy (Nonu) could school him – and left the rest of the backline intact. No problem.

When England needed a wing against Australia they crippled the entire backline by moving nearly everyone, so no-one had a familiar face next to them, and made a complete hash of everyone’s positional play, culminating in Burgess tackling a ball carrier high while Farrell tackled a man without the ball. Stupendous level of confusion there.

So for injuries and cards, practice players at playing another position and try to leave as many positions unchanged as possible when sending on a sub.

I don’t see a pre-game talk as being a great idea. What could a coach say that he shouldn’t have said days before? A few words that can be summed up as “You’re about to go over the top – I’ll see you on the other side”? Leave that stuff to the captain. But in both cases, their mere presence and calm demeanour will do more for the team than any passionate words will do.

During the game, the coach might offer a little advice to the team but a barrage of advice from the sidelines is a very bad idea. Any advice that he has to send down should meet these criteria: important (no trivial advice please), consistent with the pre-game analysis of the team’s own strengths (no use suddenly asking them to play a game that they aren’t capable of), succinct (least said = best understood) and non-negotiable (if you aren’t willing to insist on this direction being followed, then why are you bothering to give it at all?). If it isn’t all of those things then save your breath.

Again, Lancaster broke all of these rules with his astonishing rate, reported to be, of about one message per minute to his team. God only knows what was in them but they clearly didn’t work too well.

At half time though the coach should step in to the dressing room and make a strong positive impact. If things are going well, then step in and say so. Also, say why they are going well. Then pat some heads and leave it to the captain. That’s all positive.

If it’s going badly, then say exactly why it’s going bad and what should be done to minimise the damage or turn the situation around completely. Then quietly kick some arses if needed, publicly pat some heads if possible and leave the rest of it to the captain. That’s positive too.

What is a bad idea is to completely change the plan without warning, to publicly shame players or to show anything even slightly resembling panic or stress. Angry words therefore are not wise. Those are all negatives.

I have a suspicion that highly emotional coaches who display their emotions publicly on camera on the sidelines are also more likely to give advice to their teams badly during the game and at halftime. I could be wrong but I don’t think that a leopard can change his spots on the walk from the stands to the sheds.

I already know that I’d not want to follow a boss who is wound up and obviously under pressure as much as I’d be willing to follow a boss who looks calm and in control. But that’s leadership anyway – not really even coaching.

Managing the crew
Again, selection is the key. Pick grown-ups, get a decent manager, like what’s his name, to handle most of the routine stuff and let them do their job. Lead them the same way you lead the players. Delegate responsibilities to your assistant coaches and give tasks to the rest of the crew.

Dealing with stakeholders
This job can be either very simple or very time consuming. It is important to set boundaries early on around what you will do and won’t do and negotiate with your employer for help doing anything you find difficult.

Make sure your employer knows what you are up to at all times. Nobody likes surprises. When in doubt, smile at the media, listen carefully to franchises and treat them as equals (they aren’t but they won’t like being taken for granted) and tug your forelock politely when dealing with sponsors.

Do not pontificate on anything that isn’t directly connected to your own team. Don’t bag the refs.

And that’s it. Whew – this coaching stuff is easy. Maybe I’ll try it one day.