The past six months have taught me so much about being a Director of Rugby and how difficult it can be to get things right. Throughout my playing career I have had a number of different experiences and it always surprises me at how little or how slowly ideas and best practices filter down the game. It also surprises me at how lacking the game is in originality, but to be fair that probably comes from the RFU’s rigidity in how things must be coached, which I feel stifles the game more than it improves it, but this angle is for an article another day.
Back to my topic. During my five years at Richmond, 2 as a player and 3 as a coach, I worked under three different Directors of Rugby and each had a very different vision of how they wanted the game played. The main difference was that when I worked as a coach for Steve Hill, the vision took a step up. Prior to Steve the club worked under the principle that every team in the club had the same calls for the same moves and there were some governing calls about where the ball was going to be moved to, so that the forwards knew where to head for.
Under Steve, I learnt that you can take the game down to a different level, backs can still have their moves for first phase options and forwards can still have theirs. Breaking the game down, the team, under Steve’s instruction, developed a structured pattern that occurred on every phase of play. Now this might sound very rigid and certainly it is my experience that it takes players time to understand just how simple it is and how much freedom it gives them to actually make decisions. It sounds complicated but it really isn’t but I can’t go to much further without actually giving away the game plan.
Now just to ensure that I am not accused of hypocrisy, when I said rugby lacks originality, on becoming a Director of Rugby, I have implemented exactly that same game plan that I learned at Richmond. So to a larger extent nothing that I am doing is original or unique to me, I just wonder how many coaches are delivering the same at the level that my 15s club play at.
Pre Season planning is a critical function for any coach worth their salt, and at this stage I am not even beginning to consider playing personnel. For me it comes down to really refining the style of rugby you want to play and how you are going to go about executing that. I spent quite a large amount of time in the off season planning the first month of training, deciding at what stage we were going to introduce the next part of what we now call the structure.
Our focus in the first month was working on the core skills of the players, and no player was exempt from one skill because of their position. As a basic standard we set out to ensure that every player could execute a 10 yard pass, sounds simple enough, but the reality is that most clubs don’t care if their props can pass or not, but due to the nature of our plan we needed them to be able to do that.
The second part of our plan was getting every player to be comfortable in possession and then in kind comfortable making a decision in space or under pressure. This might sound easy enough to do but not every player in rugby is born equal and some have to work harder at this than others, and again this is actually quite a big ask of the forwards especially at lower levels.
The third and final part of the plan was to get the players fit enough to play the game, and I cannot stress enough how different game plans have a very different physical impact on the type of fitness a player needs and this does come in very different guises.
In reviewing my great vision and how our pre season went and i can honestly say that the learning I have taken away from that experience will stand me in very good stead for the rest of my career….
The first thing I learnt was that now matter how much I planned and how much I trained, absolutely nothing is better than actual match practice and I need to remember to bring that element into my next pre season. Whilst I thought during our pre season games, for which we weren’t really under any great pressure, they weren’t the right matches and whilst we looked very good in the games, we were playing without the concern or thought about the actual end result, which obviously changes the minute you enter a league or cup campaign where results matter.
The game plan wasn’t as natural as I had hoped it would be at that stage but to be fair the players stuck at it. And we just weren’t as fit as I thought we were and it has definitely made me review how and what fitness I will be including in pre season.
The second and probably more important thing I learnt from the experience is that actually, arriving at a new club with new ideas (for that club) of how the game should be played is good and ambitious but I need to be far more aware of the fact that it may just take longer than I hoped for the boys to get to where you can see the success on the pitch.
I have learnt to have courage with what I am trying to do, adaptable to be able to make the tweaks in training that are needed and have more belief in the fact that actually having a plan and knowing how to get from A to Z is a great start, so long as we stick with it and realise it is never going to be as perfect as we had hoped.
But more than anything else I need to be able to plan better, and part of that planning process is to have a better understanding of the players I am working with, what their individual and collective strengths and weaknesses are and what we need to do to be able to get everybody to the level we need them to be at.
For those that may have started following my team, it took us five months to get to the point I had hoped to get to by the start of the season, the boys have worked very hard to get there and in the last 3 weeks we have looked like a very different side. You can follow the rest of my team’s season at the teams site here
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Main Photo Credit: Rob Jefferies via Zimbio
