ANALYSIS: How Michael Hooper came back from his break a more adaptable and more effective player

Steve Black was one of the few voices of sanity on the 2001 British and Irish Lions tour of Australia.

Amid all the shifting storms of political intrigue, a hungry, burgeoning press-pack desperately seeking the next big scoop, and coaches and players looking to shut out all the white noise of external pressure, ‘Blackie’ was like a rock.

His official title on tour was Strength and Conditioning Coach but in reality, Mental Skills Coach would have suited him just as well. There was a sizeable overlap in his role for Wales with that of Gilbert Enoka for the All Blacks, and both men had a central part to play under the auspices of teams coached by Sir Graham Henry.

For Black, conditioning was 80 per cent heart and mind, and 20 per cent body. Whatever ‘Ted’ could envision in his planning, Blackie could make it happen on the training field, and translate it into language the players could really understand.

He had high-level EQ, was always positive in outlook and could change the mood of a room just by walking into it.

When Wales played the Southern Hemisphere ‘big three’, he would walk around the changing shed, moving quietly among the keyed-up players, talking in his musical Geordie accent: “They are one of the best teams in the world, probably we wouldn’t beat them more than three times out of ten. But you know what, lads? This could be one of those three games. Go out on that field today and explore it. Go and find out.”

When Blackie was around, the ideal balance between relaxation and focus tended to come along with him. Teams of which he was part never left anything in the locker-room, they left it all out on the field. Blackie had been at various times a power-lifter, a boxer and a bouncer so he knew the dark side of life, he had camped out in the belly of the whale. If Blackie was Ted’s cheerleader-in-chief by day, he could have doubled up equally well as his minder by night.

His skills translated effortlessly to other sports like boxing and soccer, and he became English superstar Jonny Wilkinson’s mentor at Newcastle Falcons, guiding him through a dark tunnel of rugby addiction and out towards the promise of light in life after sport.

I was lucky enough to spend more evenings in the company of Blackie than anyone else on that tour, and I soon began to realise how prescient his observations on the state of the game were. As we passed the umpteenth group of Lions players in Melbourne, or Brisbane or Sydney; sitting at cafes, headphones on and surfing their phones, he would shake his head:

“You look at some of these lads, and they know nothing but rugby. They will come to the end of their careers at the age of 33 or 34 – some earlier than that with injury – and life will suddenly start up again, and they won’t know anything about it. They’ll be starting from scratch, without the skills to cope.

“You see them in the academies now, squeezed out through a narrow tube of physical development in a hot-house environment. Most don’t even get to see the inside of a proper club; to look up at the old, fading black-and-white photos on the wall, to speak with the white-haired old-timer in the corner, to raise a pint to the past.

“There just isn’t that sense of connection anymore.”

His words have proven to be uncomfortably prophetic, and maybe Michael Hooper felt some of the same when he looked up to find himself cast suddenly adrift, in the middle of a featureless sporting ocean before the start of the 2022 Rugby Championship:

“I’ve been playing the game for a long time, had some great changes in my life happen this year and there were a lot of things running through my head showing up [before the first game] in Argentina. Argentina wasn’t the place where I needed to sort these things out,” he told reporters ahead of the Spring Tour.

“I wanted to be around family. I wanted to be in a place where I could put the time in to those things that I needed to…

“I have high expectations of myself and pulling out of [games] is certainly right up there with something I couldn’t see myself doing. Of course, it was hard.

“It came around suddenly. The beautiful thing about rugby, and the hard thing about all sport, is [that] there’s always the next goal so that you can move on and you can move on quick.

“It was probably exacerbated being overseas, away from home; but certainly – where I’m at in my career, you start to look at post-rugby. I’ve got a family now.

‘There are a lot [more] elements now than being a 22-year-old and pretty much being concerned about yourself and I think that played into it.”

The semi-retirement of such a high-profile star, still near the peak of his playing powers, raised more than a stir at the time, shining a much-needed spotlight on the problem of work-life balance in professional sport.

With ‘Hoops’ back before the end-of-year-tour, questions abounded: could Hooper come back at the same level of performance? Could a rest, or a complete break from rugby really be as good as a change? Would the broken internal ‘bone’ heal stronger than before?

The answer arrived in the fourth tour match against World No.1 Ireland, where Hooper found himself in direct opposition to World Player of the Year, Josh van der Flier. Van der Flier had convincingly outplayed New Zealand skipper Sam Cane over the three-match July series, but he got no change out of Hooper:

It was a small but clearcut victory for the New South Welshman on the day. Hooper completed 28 of 29 cleanouts successfully and was emphatically not one of the neck-rollers who hit the highlight reel. He tempered his game to suit a Brumby-filtered outlook, not carrying as much ball as in 2021 but concentrating on breakdown support. On defence, he finished top of the pops against Ireland in both the number of tackles made and successful turnovers in contact.

His outstanding speed, accuracy and decision-making in that area made all the difference in Dublin. In this article after the match against France , I illustrated how he was used to spy on the activities of all-world scrum-half Antoine Dupont in and around the ruck, and harry him to distraction.

Things were not much better for Jamison Gibson-Park at the Aviva stadium:

Hooper has formed a slightly unholy alliance with Nick Frost as the two forwards with probably the highest overall work-rate in the Australian forward pack. They cleaned out 59 rucks between them and pincered on Gibson-Park in obvious kicking situations, with Hooper chasing from the blind-side and Frost looking for the block.

Both box-kicks result in Australian wins, with Mark Nawaqanitawase taking an easy receipt in the first and Caelan Doris penalized for being within the 10-metre orbit of the punt in the second.

Hooper badgered ‘JGP’ mercilessly in maul defence too:

Hooper gets a crucial hand in as Gibson-Park looks to prise the ball free, and that means a broken play for Ireland. Even at the end of the sequence, the defender standing directly opposite the Irish scrum-half at the base of the ruck is the Wallaby No.7.

This is real heavy-duty defence, with Hooper spotting van der Flier (in the red hat) leading the green lineout drive towards the corner flag and smashing him into the ball-carrier Dan Sheehan. JGP put a foot on the side-line in his efforts to clear the ball, and that meant a pain-relieving turnover for Australia just before halftime oranges.

Hooper was as good as ever in lateral coverage, in this instance flushing the Ireland backs all the way across field and making a tackle on blind-side wing Jimmy O’Brien with no green forward anywhere nearby:

At the end of the phase there are five Irish backs consumed by the ruck, and none of their Wallaby counterparts. Advantage Australia.

The Australian open-side also read referee Ben O’Keefe like a book in his post-tackle work. He knew O’Keefe would allow the defender a little more license in his attempts to pilfer the ball and he tiptoed expertly on the limits of legality:

Another official might have pinged Hooper for playing the ball off his feet in the first example, or failing to release from the initial tackle in the second, but Hooper has read O’Keefe right and knows he will play on. It was the sort of fine judgement which would have drawn applause from the great man himself, Sir Richie McCaw.

A third turnover followed in the second period:

Hooper follows Sheehan in from second defender and evades the one-man cleanout to secure another pilfer. The climax of the match featured a classic Hooper double involvement:

Michael Hooper makes the first tackle on van der Flier, then bounces out magically to the next phase – just in time to lead a winning counter-ruck through the middle over the prone Doris.

Summary
Forget all the off-kilter ‘man handled’ and ‘rag dolled’ mythology, Michael Hooper is back, baby! And back with a more humble bang, after his long mental health lay-off for the duration of the 2022 Rugby Championship.

As the man himself put it, “As a younger man, I viewed asking for help as, I guess, a bit of a weakness. You want to feel like you have it all worked out, and I certainly didn’t.”

Hooper may have been suffering from similar symptoms to Jonny Wilkinson, who was worn down to breaking-point by the constant need to find high-intensity peaks of focus and performance from one week to the next, and by the obsessive desire for perfection he developed in response.

One week it may have been ‘hit the corporate box behind the posts’ with a goal-kick; the next it would be ‘hit Granny next to the corporate box’ and the following week, ‘knock the coffee cup out of Granny’s hand’. Nobody can maintain that kind of hyper-vigilance forever.

It was Steve Black who helped Jonny to break the sequence of God-like spotlight views, the mental focus which does not have so many applications in the flow of ordinary life. Like Wilkinson, Hooper may have had to learn to be more simple, generous and earthbound all over again.

Somewhere in rugby’s future, short or long-term mental health rests, or sabbaticals away from the sport may become an essential order of the day. It is becoming important to develop interests outside rugby while you are still playing the game. The refreshers are vital both to the sport’s growth, and that of the individuals within it.

Hooper has visibly benefited from his mid-season R&R period. He has come back more adjustable than before, more able to adapt to new demands. He has a new breadth-of-view: how can I become more effective, both in the tackle and in the on-ball scenarios which follow it? Can I pick my moments to hit the ‘dirtier’, more physical situations hard? Can I clean out as well as I carry? They are all questions he appears to be answering in the affirmative.

The game is going well for Hooper, but maybe life is going even better. Black is sadly no longer with us, but if he is watching from the above, he would be nodding his head in silent approval.