As it turned out, my last provincial game was against Auckland, both my old nemesis and the team that I most enjoyed beating, as it was always an achievement to beat the standard-bearers. The 1994 season was a poor one by the standards we had set ourselves in the previous two years. We lost a lot of experienced players, such as Brent Anderson, Graham Purvis and Richard Loe, and although we had talented replacements, their development was going to take time. We ended up surrendering the Ranfurly Shield, unfortunately defending it only six times.
At the end of my last game, in Hamilton, the guys let me take the conversion. I wasn’t that comfortable taking the kick; in fact, I felt a complete plonker going about it. Of course, I missed, but at least I didn’t cost us the game – we lost 14-37. John Boe was going to be the next Waikato coach and, as I picked up in our meetings before making my decision to retire from New Zealand rugby, I knew he was going to put pressure on me to play better. With the exception of winning the Currie Cup with the Lions later in my career, I’ve always had good intuition about when it is time to move on, and have acted on it. I had no doubt in my mind that it was time for me to go. And it proved the right thing to do, as my exit gave Dion Muir an opportunity to come through. He was a great player for Waikato and the Chiefs.
I had played 134 games for the province and had notched up a lot of mileage in my legs. Looking back, I am pleased I didn’t succumb to any temptation to chase a record. I needed just one more try to become the highest try-scorer in Waikato’s history. I was fortunate, as a substantial percentage of those were pushover tries, which, after a few beers, always somehow manage to become tries that were scored from about 30 metres out.
It was time to leave the playing side of rugby behind, concentrate on my career as a quantity surveyor, pay the mortgage and build a new house. My second-born, a daughter, Ciara, arrived in 1994. I distinctly remember my feeling of anxiousness, as I was scheduled to play Counties in the afternoon and the baby was due in the morning. I ended up playing in the match, with the baby expected any minute, so, understandably, my mind was all over the place in that game. But what a beautiful surprise it was the following morning to see my healthy daughter arrive.
This made me figure that the time had come to devote more time to my family. Ironically, little did I know then that my career in rugby was far from over, and that the travelling and all-consuming nature of the career path that was still to come would effectively be the catalyst that would end my first marriage – though that happened much later.
Talking of family, my retirement did not mean it was the last that New Zealand provincial rugby saw of the Mitchell clan on the playing field. My brother, Paul, was an excellent sportsman. He played golf off a low handicap and scored many sub-union hundreds as a cricketer. He was no good academically and, for him, school was just a place to go and eat his lunch. But, on the rugby field, he excelled. He played first for King Country and then later for the Chiefs in Super 12 before being drafted to Auckland as a back-up for Sean Fitzpatrick, when he was injured.
In 1998, Paul snapped his leg just before the Super Rugby final against the Crusaders. He was younger than me, being a 1967 baby, and in 2001 I coached him at the Chiefs. He is now a stock agent after having started out as a farm hand on Colin Meads’s farm, and he is married to Colin’s daughter, Shelley. King Country is a community about the size of Welkom, in the Free State. In other words, not that big. But Paul has put a lot back into that province.
I played against him a few times, and in one game, when I was playing for Waikato, a scuffle took place between us, and some of those watching told me that Paul had tried to slipper me and he ended up wearing one on the chin from Graham Purvis that made his eyes water. As the game wore on, it was getting really testy, and the referee pulled us together and had harsh words with us. After the ref left the huddle, I adopted my big-brother persona and told Paul in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t toe the line, he would get another one.
While I was off travelling the world, Paul stayed at home and lived around the corner from my mom. He still takes Dad on his fishing trips, but we have grown apart because of my travelling and, sadly, we don’t have a lot in common.
I kept my links with rugby immediately after my retirement by going straight into coaching at club level. A good mate, Les Harrison, a special guy who went from being a one-truck business to a multiple-truck business, loved his rugby and asked me to come back and help him coach Fraser Tech.
Super Rugby had not had any influence on the lower levels of the game at the time, and the club game was still strong in New Zealand, so it was an enjoyable season. We won the Waikato Breweries Shield, which was the major trophy in club rugby at that stage.
In those early days of coaching, the approach was all about outlasting the opposition, and I think we just intimidated other teams in the league with our work ethic. We were definitely fitter than any of the other sides. I never had much to offer technically, but we created an environment and a work ethic that were easily noticeable to any observer. The team was extremely fit and very physical.
Les and I were seen as co-coaches but, in my eyes, he was the head coach and I looked up to him. It was his ship and I supported him as leader. However, when the club handed out the awards at the end of the year, we were presented with them together.
I remember Les in particular for his pet saying to the players in the change room before a game: ‘I hope you’re not pretending.’ I loved that. Interestingly enough, we won our first Waikato Breweries Shield against the team my old friend, Warren Gatland, was coaching, Taupiri.
Early in my club career, I had been seen as a provincial player and not as a Fraser Tech boy, but lots of my mates were guys who played in the Fraser Tech second and third teams, such as Derek Hobbs, Ian Moore, Grant Sirl, Brett Hansen and Chris Favell, who may occasionally have played for the seniors. They were the guys I would have a beer with and the ones I remember most from the club.
Later, when I returned from my coaching stint in England, Les and I coached the provincial B-team to the national championship at that level, and I was the head coach then. Les was a good man.
I didn’t watch much of the 1995 Rugby World Cup hosted by South Africa, as I had wanted to be part of that All Black team and had instead made the decision to move on. I didn’t want to feel left behind in New Zealand, regretting the route I had taken.
But that was also the time the World Rugby Corporation was campaigning in the background signing up top players to a breakaway competition that would be run along the lines of the rebel series with which Kerry Packer had revolutionised cricket. I spoke to former All Black selector and assistant coach Peter Thorburn, whom I had met through my travels, about coaching in New Zealand, and asked him how I should go about educating and developing myself to be a coach. At the same time, I got a random call from someone I didn’t know who asked if I wanted to be involved with the World Rugby Corporation as the coach of an American franchise.
I was interested but, in the end, Sean Fitzpatrick was offered an excellent contract to stay at the Blues and with the All Blacks, and it was the same with François Pienaar in South Africa, and the whole World Rugby Corporation concept was scuppered.
In those days, Andy Haden used to run the New Zealand Classics team, and he asked me if I wanted to go to Bermuda for the annual Classics tournament. I think I got in because of my haircut, as I was young for Classics, but I went along. I ended up getting a stud through the mouth playing against England.
It was at the Classics that the door to my rugby career in England was opened. Paul Turner, who had played flyhalf for Wales in 1989, asked me if I would consider finishing off my career playing in England. I told him that I had already retired, to which he responded by asking me if I would come and be player–coach with him at Sale.
That offer grew more legs when I was given leave of absence by my quantity-surveying company, RDT, and my boss there, Gordon Hassett, so I could act as technical advisor to the Irish national team for 20 weeks. The arrangement was organised by Murray Kidd and Pat Wheelan, whom I had worked for when playing club rugby for Garryowen in 1991. Pat was the chairman of the Ireland Rugby Union committee and he obviously rated my rugby brain from my time at Garryowen. It might have helped that I worked for him as a quantity surveyor as well!
After the Bermuda tournament, I met up with the Ireland squad in Atlanta, where they were having a training camp before going on to play against the US. I then went back to Ireland with them and effectively became their forward coach for the 1996 Five Nations.
While there, I had the opportunity to go and look at the set-up in Sale, and it didn’t take me long to conclude that I should sign my first professional contract with the club. My fee was £60 000 a year, which was peanuts, really, but I ended up moving there in June 1996. By departing midway through the year, I was able to help Les Harrison get the club into their 1996 season, and after I had left they went on to win another Waikato Championship.
But nothing in rugby is plain sailing – particularly not back then, when rugby was new to professionalism. Just two weeks before I left for Sale, Paul Turner had a dispute with the club management and left. Brian Wilkinson, the CEO of Sale, called me and told me he would like me to take over the whole shooting box.
It was a daunting prospect from the outset. Only four or five of us at Sale were full-time professionals. At that time, there wasn’t the science behind the training that there is today and it hadn’t dawned on anyone that it might be beneficial to work less and recover more. To our minds, if there was any extra time, it meant we had to spend that time training. We would then have to wait for field training, which started at 5 p.m. to accommodate the workers.
I took the family over to the UK lock, stock and two smoking barrels. Two little Kiwi kids turning up in the north of England with bare feet caused heads to turn. People thought I couldn’t afford shoes for my children. The move entailed a big adjustment for my kids, and for Kay and me. Our first house didn’t even have any grass outside. My goodness, you should have seen the looks on the kids’ faces when they saw that.
It was a great social environment at Sale, though, and much like my brother, Paul, and I had been able to do all those years ago as children, when my parents used to attend our basketball competitions in New Zealand, the kids could go out and play on the field. The main stand at Sale was more like a shed and about a third of the size of what you would find at the big clubs like Gloucester; it could only accommodate about 3 000 people.
Sale was an amateur club that had to be transformed into a professional one. The University of KwaZulu-Natal, where I have been helping out during my current sabbatical from rugby, reminds me a lot of how Sale was back in 1996. The beer culture of the amateur era was still lingering in professional rugby back then, and the chief executive of the club was renowned for liking his pint of Stella. Players would negotiate contracts with him over a few beers at Little B, the local pub. The chief was also known for falling asleep at Rugby Football Union meetings when he was there on club business, which did not go down well with the other clubs.
In my first year at Sale, the 1996 season, the club enjoyed some success, but, to be fair, that was purely by accident. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was trying my best, but the acquisition of players was fairly hit-or-miss. There was not a lot of knowledge of the science of contracting or, for that matter, much awareness of budgets. We didn’t know what we know now. We managed to appoint New Zealanders Shane Howarth and Simon Mannix as our foreign players – but I am not sure we thought too much about whether we could afford them, or for how long.
The members paid the players’ wages in the first season, but not without difficulty. A consortium had bought the player group, but we, as the coaches, were not allowed to meet with its members. However, it was with their aid that we built a new grandstand in 1997, though it ended up on land owned by the Little B pub.
So, it was not a good start by the new owners, who owned the player list and a new grandstand, but on someone else’s land. It was an unusual business deal, to say the least – real Coronation Street stuff.
Nevertheless, we had a successful year. We finished fifth in the English Premier League and beat Harlequins in the semi-final, and then went on to the English club final, the Pilkington Cup, where we lost to Leicester. That was the first time the club had made it to Twickenham. We only just lost out on qualifying for Europe, which we would have managed had we finished in the top four, by the narrowest of margins. We conceded a penalty try, a dubious decision by referee Ed Morrison, also against Leicester, which enabled them to escape with a 20-all draw from a game we should have won.
After that game, we sat in the change room reflecting, and that is when the reality of the professional era dawned on me. One of the players said that his bonus had gone down the gurgler because of that refereeing decision. ‘Well, there goes the wife’s new kitchen,’ he lamented. I had never thought about it that way before.
I waited after the game to be interviewed by Sky Sports. I was on after Leicester coach Bob Dwyer, who, while being interviewed, was pushed by a Sale fan who accused his team of cheating in extra time. Dwyer shoved the spectator away and told him to ‘fuck off, mate’ – not once or twice, but three times! The Sky reporter hastily returned to David Bobin in the studio, whose conclusion to the piece was ‘rather good adjectives used by Bob Dwyer there …’
Sale was one of the few clubs in England not prepared to give away its assets to an owner. We were effectively paid by the members, and that is why, today, Sale is so well equipped in terms of facilities. The club is based in Carrington now, on a prime piece of real estate in a good area.
The success of that first year attracted between 3 000 and 5 000 spectators to our games. Those were massive crowds for the facilities the club had then. Sale was buzzing.
I was new to coaching at the time and I had a lot of doubts. I knew I wasn’t qualified to do the job, as I hadn’t yet done any of the coaching courses that I later completed. I always do the coaching courses on offer in the country where I work out of respect for where I am at the time. Back then, though, I just had to get on with it and was very much self-taught. I learnt a lot from experience.
An example that illustrates this is an incident that became well known in English club-rugby circles. We had lost to Bristol after being ahead with just 10 minutes to go. I was highly pissed off. We were due to play Harlequins in the cup semi-final. They had some star players, such as Frenchman Laurent Cabannes and Ireland’s Keith Wood, and I felt our guys needed a spark-up.
So I called the players in for what I called a recovery; in effect, a team-building exercise. I got the forwards and backs out on the field, placed cones to demarcate where they should run and sent them on their way. Afterwards, I called them back into the club, where I had a 55-litre keg of beer waiting for them. I told them that no one was leaving until we had finished the keg, and if anyone needed to go to the toilet, he would have to nail his pint first.
If we hadn’t beaten Harlequins the following week, I probably would have been hauled in front of the club’s board of directors. The beer-keg day is still folklore at the club. Those were still very much amateur days, even though rugby had officially turned professional.
Many think I come from a New Zealand rugby blueprint, but I believe I bring an English viewpoint. After all, my formative years as a coach were spent in England, and that has influenced my rugby philosophy. I spent five years in England and coached 50 games a year at the start of my career, so I learnt a huge amount during that period.
We didn’t have the flashy analysis mechanisms available in the mid-to late-1990s that coaches use today. There was video technology, but you didn’t use it in the way that modern coaching groups draw on the playback features. My quantity-surveying background did give me a statistical and account-balancing type of approach to coaching, and there were a lot of things I would go over before the Monday practice, but it was still nothing like today.
That probably helped me, though, because it meant I had to gain knowledge of the technical side of the game and get on and try things rather than rely on statistical feedback. In those days, coaching meant that you just had to get on and do it, and assess whether something worked or not by trying it and seeing it put into practice. Qualitative feedback of patterns or trends, which is a big element of today’s coaching methodology, was non-existent.
My early philosophy was mainly based on lasting longer than the opposition. I focused on physical conditioning, so that the players would always be stronger and fitter than their opponents. The idea behind the philosophy was that a strong mind comes from having a well-prepared body. It was all about putting players into anaerobic thresholds (intervals), more so without the ball in those days, and becoming efficient at set pieces, outlasting the opposition and absorbing pressure.
Now that I understand the game in its entirety, and feel comfortable coaching and teaching it, my aim is to inspire and lead young men to become winners, and to optimise the individual through mental conditioning and an all-round holistic approach that recognises how rugby and life run parallel to one another. In those early days I focused too much on content and not enough on the fundamental context. The reality is that the context gives meaning to the content, and I realise that now.
I had to teach myself. Sports psychology is an area that has always intrigued me, but I never really knew how to make it work in the team environment. I realised that I can teach a guy to run a line and be effective in the tackle, but if I am not coming from the right context and failing to optimise the individual’s strength, then I am never going to get my message across. In other words, no matter how good you are at relaying something, it is meaningless if you don’t understand how that person feels and what else is making him tick. I learnt this relatively late in my coaching career.
There has been a perception that I have been too strong on content, on getting the basics of the game across, on coaching the skills, but not strong enough on taking the feelings of the player into account. I take that criticism on the chin. As coaches, we don’t always get it right and it is a lifelong learning process.
When it comes to attacking play, my philosophy is that you have to prepare a team that can play to all areas of space. You have to develop an attacking framework and work on the methods and skills that are required to get into those spaces. I may give individual players licence to pop up anywhere, but I am generally big on teamwork. Structure gives freedom, and not the other way around.
Ultimately, I want everyone to have the ability to express their skills and to execute generic fundamental behaviours in order for the system to work. Therefore, team selection is important. You can’t focus too much on selecting individuals, but should rather try to create the right team mix. That is something the media and public often don’t understand – they simply see a player who they think is talented and they wonder why he has been left out.
If you get the selection mix right, the team has more chance of becoming congruent quicker because of continuity in team members and play. I like all my players to realise that they are just ordinary men, but with certain strengths. Once we accept this, the trick is for everyone to work together. Only then are we capable of becoming extraordinary as a group.
Another thing I believe in is that you only need to prove yourself to the playing group, and to no one else. A player is accountable only to the players around him, and not to the outside world. Too often I see teams that think they have to prove themselves to outside influences. No, the focus should be on what is happening within the group and what you are trying to achieve in the group.
Coaching tends to become too overly complex in the modern game. There are so many different contests within the game: attacks are flatter, defences are superior to what they used to be, so you have to teach the team to win the arm-wrestle and not get frustrated. The first team that gets frustrated is the one that is generally punished.
I’ve realised now that we have to find a way to spend more time working on the minds of the players. We are always striving for the right execution, but we must never forget that we can also win in other ways. Psychology is coming into coaching more and more. We’re focusing on people’s strengths and on optimising not only their own individual performance, but the team’s performance via the individual. But because we live in a professional world where outcomes are so critical, we are probably not really getting to know individuals and understanding them properly.
Imagine if the players got to know the coaches better and sooner rather than later, and vice versa. Nowadays I focus a lot more on the mind because, over the past five years, I have got to understand how it works much better than I used to. I have a far greater understanding of psychology now than during my days as a coach.
What I know now is that in order to motivate a player, he needs three things: first, autonomy, meaning independence, accountability and responsibility; second, mastery, meaning the opportunity to grow and improve; and, third, belonging, meaning the opportunity to contribute something bigger than himself.
If a coach can supply those three building blocks, they will form an engagement with the players, without which consistent performance just isn’t possible. When you understand what people value as their strengths, you can then individualise what this means for each person, and you can therefore create the optimal environment, both for the individual and the team, which informs you when to allow freedom and when to dish out tough love.
But, back in 1996, when I was just starting out at Sale, I had no concept whatsoever of any of this. I was a player–coach and just applying the knowledge I had accumulated during my playing career. I was learning all the time, and I loved the experience.
How often in the rugby world do you come across special players such as Dewi Morris? He was such an awesome guy and a really good player. We were over the moon to have him with us at Sale and he helped us transform the club. We were known as the softies of northern England when I arrived, but we managed to turn an average group of players into a solid, tough unit.
Dewi had come from another northern club, Orrell, our arch-rivals. Playing with him was an amazing experience. He read the game very well. Orrell had dominated northern English rugby for a long time, but we displaced them. John Devereux was there as well, and Adrian Hadley, who played on the wing for Wales.
At the end of that 1996 season, which was to prove my very last as a player, I was named as the English Barbarians captain for the tour of Italy. I think I was the most unsuccessful Barbarians captain ever: we lost every game. When we played the Zebras in Rome, I knocked a guy around and plunged my shoulder into him in frustration at some refereeing calls. He was all bandaged up at the post-match function and everyone was looking at me as if I was a really bad boy. In fact, as I entered the reception in Rome, an Italian official told me in broken English that I was ‘a very bad boy’! I hadn’t played to the spirit of the Barbarians’ ethos.
Then, in the next game, the Italian captain took me out. I copped it big time. It was my payback. After the game, Barbarians president Micky Steele-Bodger confronted me. He said I would never play for the Barbarians again and that I was ‘absolutely filthy’. This was after Micky had enjoyed a well-deserved gin.
But I did get to play against Newport, and getting the jersey and the tie and the ‘mileage cheque to go back up the M1 motorway to London’ was all part of the experience, as were the old guys walking around the change room afterwards with their walking sticks. I enjoyed being part of it.
It was after that experience that Don Rutherford, the long-serving technical director at the Rugby Football Union (RFU), approached me. He asked if I would be interested in being part of the England coaching team. I was not completely taken by surprise, because Fran Cotton, a member of Sale, had already briefly spoken to me about it. The initial idea had been that I would coach England A, but being appointed England’s assistant coach, which was what Rutherford was suggesting, was an even bigger step.
The goalposts had been moved, and this was before Clive Woodward had even been appointed as England head coach.