At the start of 2012, I thought that if we could get the majority of the starting players out onto the field for most of the tournament, we might have a chance of finishing mid-table. But the best-laid plans often go awry, and never more so than in Super Rugby, where the competition is so long and the attrition rate so high.
We lost no fewer than eight members of the Currie Cup–winning team over a period of four weeks. With the Gumede money and all the hype about that partnership dead and gone, we could no longer draw promising recruits.
There were some excellent players, such as Etienne Oosthuizen and Ruan Botha, coming through from the under-20s, but there wasn’t much new talent, and once the injuries set in, we lost experienced guys who might have helped those players make the adjustment to high-level rugby.
The other problem was the uncertainty over our participation in Super Rugby beyond 2012. The theory was that whichever South African team came last in the competition would drop out for the Southern Kings, but rumours were doing the rounds that somehow a way would be found to ensure that we dropped out even if we didn’t finish last. The Lions had endured several tough Super Rugby seasons and had been perennial last-placed finishers among the South African teams for some time.
And when players start to worry about their future, it becomes really difficult to keep them focused. It had been a similar story at the Western Force when the third-party deals fell through. Once a team goes from being in a thriving environment to being in survival mode, it is very hard to get the best out of players who are just thinking of their own futures and not the future of the team.
You could be in a team meeting speaking about defensive lines and you know the guys are sitting there thinking, ‘All I want to do is get out of here. None of this is going to help me as an individual. I just want to be paid and have a place to go next year.’ Quite simply, once a team hits survival mode, it is history.
The Super Rugby season started off positively enough. We beat the Cheetahs 27-25 at home. It was rare for the Lions to start the season off with a win. We then lost narrowly to the Hurricanes (28-30) through a late drop goal. There was no need to panic yet, though, and the issue of relegation at the end of the season wasn’t looming then, as we were playing fairly good rugby. The spirit of the Currie Cup win the previous season was still flickering within the group.
But I was frustrated after that Hurricanes game, as we should have beaten them. We were way too passive in defence, which in the end allowed them to advance into our territory. Yet we had been all over them for most of the game. Then we lost to the Sharks (20-32), and we started to get a bit concerned.
That was followed by a 19-24 home defeat to the Stormers and a 13-23 loss to the Crusaders, after giving them a good contest initially and then going down to their excellent switch play. That game was followed by losses to the Cheetahs and Bulls, but the real low point for me was the flogging we then received from the Brumbies, although the final score of 34-20 might not suggest it was that bad. Michael Hooper played phenomenally for the opposition. We were in trouble from the kick-off. In the modern game, you somehow know it is going to be a long night when the first tackle is missed and the other team swarms all over you. I remember sitting in the coaching box and thinking, ‘Ah well, the tide is coming in.’ I put my file away and just sat and watched. At times like that you start thinking about the questions you will get asked at the post-match press conference and how you will answer them.
My girlfriend, Jules, travelled from Durban to watch the Brumbies game with some friends. It was a fantastic experience for her to attend, as she’d never been to Ellis Park before. The toxic atmosphere in the presidential suite was so noticeable, though, that even she remarked on it. That was before a communication I received from one of the players’ wives telling me that De Klerk had spoken to some of the team members that evening and it seemed as if there was a campaign starting against me. I went to see him at his office immediately afterwards and asked him whether he knew anything about it. He said that he did not, and I said I would leave the matter with him.
Before the Brumbies game, we’d been well beaten in our return match against the Cheetahs. That was when the prospect of the Lions finishing last among the South African teams started to look inevitable. We did have an outside chance for a while, but it was a long shot. We looked like a team that was overthinking and overworking everything and our captain had a decidedly average game; we just didn’t seem congruent at all.
So, from the Brumbies game onwards, which was when our four-week overseas tour started, the questions at the post-match press conferences about our Super Rugby status started to become a regular feature. Up to that point, the media had not questioned me about the future of the Lions, but interest in our possible relegation started to gather momentum once it became obvious that we were going to finish last.
Had we been higher up on the conference log, would the context of the questions have been different? Possibly, but I was not helped by an order from the top that prohibited me from publicly discussing our Super Rugby status. When you are asked the same direct question at every press conference you attend, it is hard to avoid answering it.
De Klerk and I were in communication with each other while I was in Australia, but he told me that we had to be careful how we talked about the tournament. So I said to him, ‘Help me, because I can’t avoid the questions.’ He didn’t give me a feasible way to answer them, but he then sent me an email telling me that I was not allowed to talk about it with the media or the players.
But how the hell was I supposed to not talk about it? I had a group of players who were clueless about their futures and were by now sinking into survival mode. Understandably, De Klerk did not want them to leave the union, which they would have done had they known the truth, but I still felt we needed to be honest with them.
Towards the end of the tour, a journalist in Perth asked me: ‘So, are you never going to let us know why you left the Force?’ It was a standard question, and you have to remember I had resigned midseason. But I felt that the guys there should have been aware of what had gone on behind the scenes that had led to my resignation.
Maybe that question got me into a bad mood because by then I had had enough of being censored by the Lions and SARU – and I said as much. No one was communicating anything. When the Lions later accused me of infringing the code of conduct, claiming that I had attacked SARU, I couldn’t find any evidence in any of the communications that SARU were greatly alarmed.
I was even accused of a racial slur because I had used the word ‘blackmail’. Hello! I know there are sensitivities surrounding race in South Africa, but since when has the word ‘blackmail’ ever had a racial connotation?
I was just speaking on behalf of the players and the staff. What I said was that I couldn’t keep operating ‘in this unknown situation – it almost feels like being blackmailed’.
Players know when an organisation is in trouble and at financial risk. They are not dumb. So, from the start of the tour, I knew I was going to have a battle on my hands maintaining standards, as the players were preoccupied by their uncertain futures. One couldn’t blame Josh Strauss, who had been such a good leader the year before, that he was now only interested in getting signed up by Glasgow as quickly as possible.
I called for changes in the management, but my request was not granted. Mustapha Boomgaard, the manager, just couldn’t understand how poor logistics seriously undermined our objectives, as the team was being compromised.
For instance, when we were on tour we flew from Wellington to Auckland for the game against the Blues. Mustapha expected the players to be satisfied with the lunch served on the plane. At the management meeting afterwards, I asked him how that came about, and he just said he was trying to save the union money. I did not think that was acceptable.
Make no mistake, Mustapha was a really nice guy, but that was the problem. He was too nice. He wasn’t able to enforce discipline, which meant I got dragged into those issues. In a team environment, the manager should be in charge of discipline and the head coach needs to support him. As a coach, you try to have a mentor–player relationship with the team, but circumstances at both the Western Force (towards the end of my tenure) and at the Lions precluded that.
All successful teams generally have a good manager. Robbie Deans suffered likewise because just after he took over as the Australian coach, a very good Wallaby manager got sick and left.
Having a good manager is even more important now that the player groups are so much larger. I was constantly being dragged into bullshit I didn’t want to be involved with. For instance, Mustapha struggled to deal with players constantly turning up late. The players seemed to have no respect for him and, as I have mentioned before, the culture at the Lions was such that players thought being caught in a traffic jam was an excuse for being late.
During the early part of that season it also appeared as if Elton Jantjies, who had been ruled out with an injury sustained during the game against the Crusaders, was getting lazy with his rehabilitation. That is obviously not on, as it means the player comes back to play later than he should. So we had to make him turn up to training an hour earlier than everyone else in order to accelerate his rehabilitation. Elton had a foot injury, while his halfback partner of the year before, Michael Bondesio, was out with a calf injury. So we were without our first-choice No. 9 and No. 10 for most of the season.
Our tour started off against the Chiefs in Pukekohe, near Auckland, and although we lost 21-34, I thought it was a good effort. I was given the okay by the team to go and see my family in Hamilton on the free night the following week. It was a short week because the next match, against the Blues, was a Friday game, but when I got back in time for the captain’s run, Carlos Spencer, who was by then a member of the support staff, informed me that there had been some unprofessional behaviour while I had been away. Some players had stayed up drinking until 2 a.m. and had caused a disturbance, and guests at the hotel had complained about it.
The support staff had dealt with the matter, and they were expecting the senior players to come to me so that we could sort the situation out together. But this didn’t happen. It was so close to the game that I left it, but I saw this as a sign that standards were declining.
As it turned out, the performance against the Blues was rotten, and I told the players as much in the post-match huddle in the change room. I said to the senior players that I wanted to discuss what had happened while I had been away when we got to our next port of call, the Gold Coast. But, when we met in Australia on the Sunday afternoon, the players were all behaving very sheepishly. It became clear to me that I wasn’t getting the entire truth because, in fact, some of the senior players had been involved in the incident.
Why couldn’t they just have been honest about it with me? What had happened wasn’t a huge train smash, but we needed to deal with it. In terms of team protocol, I was entitled to get answers to the questions I was asking, but it was like trying to talk to a brick wall.
When a team goes off the rails, I try to get the players to once again commit to the team values via the team leadership. However, by then there had been so much change in personnel that I had to add people to the leadership group who were still in a development phase.
On that tour, I wanted Franco van der Merwe to assume a leadership role in the player group. It is sometimes important to leave a senior leader in the player group, as the leadership group is the extension of management and connects the two groups. However, if you over-collaborate with the leadership group, you don’t really get the players’ view. And if the leadership group is not right, they tend to start making decisions for themselves rather than for the team. So I will explain to a player, like I did to Franco on that tour, that I want him to be in the player group to assume a mentorship role there and provide me with player feedback.
On the tour, we had flown to Wellington from South Africa because we didn’t want to spend two weeks in Auckland. I had a meeting with the leadership group when we were in Wellington because certain guys had been disciplined for poor timekeeping and were facing non-selection, as it was their third infringement. Tardiness seemed to be a big problem in the Lions culture and it really befuddled me. Yet all I got from the leadership group when I tried to address them on the matter was an egg-and-spoon race – they just weren’t straight with me. That was when I realised the team might well be in trouble.
There are generally four different types of people who make up a team – you have your thinkers; you have the doers; there are the relationship people; and there are the influencers. When there is a poor vibe in a side, the influencers take over and a lot of what they do is driven by emotion. It is all about how they feel at that moment.
By the time we got to the Reds game, the third match of the tour, I realised we needed to start revising our goals. I put the responsibility for this back on the players’ shoulders. I said that the leadership group had to take charge and, if standards fell short, I would hold them responsible.
We did manage to have some fun after the Reds game despite losing 20-34. At the Kontiki the backs concocted a plan to knock out the tight forwards with sleeping pills in their beer. But J.C. van Rensburg is a very clever guy and he knew something was up, particularly after Pat Cilliers had dropped off to sleep while he was sitting there. J.C. held his nerve as he watched the guys go down in a pile, wondering if he was next.
It was probably not the right thing to do, but on tour you do need to have some fun too. I was actually in on the plan, though I didn’t know who had orchestrated it. I was supposed to spike someone’s drink, but I couldn’t because there was something wrong with my target’s beer and he replaced it.
There were drinking issues on that tour. In Perth, Lionel Mapoe had to go and wake up James Kamana, who had overslept. I had to read James the riot act. I told him that, as a foreign player, he had to be a level above in terms of performance and professionalism to justify the expense of bringing him to the country.
When we got home to South Africa after the tour, I asked De Klerk and Allers to address the player group and tell them what was happening regarding the Lions’ future in Super Rugby. They told me: ‘We can only say what we know,’ which I found highly unsatisfactory.
The week after we got home, we quite unexpectedly beat the Sharks. In fact, we didn’t just beat the Sharks, we smashed them 38-28. It was like the Currie Cup final of the year before, and the Sharks looked shell-shocked.
The build-up to that game had been interesting, and not because we were suddenly putting it together on the field. De Klerk had started to pitch at our training sessions, and sat in on our strategy meetings and on the pre-match and captain’s-run speeches. He was observing everything. I wondered whether he was actually there to observe me.
When we beat the Sharks, word was that our performance had had nothing to do with me. Not for the first time in my coaching career I sensed a rumour campaign gathering momentum against me. Soon it was at full throttle.
Super Rugby took a break for the June internationals and I reported back to work on 18 June. I had asked for a meeting with De Klerk at the beginning of the break, but he had cancelled it.
After that first day back at work, I got a late-night phone call from him. He said he needed to speak to me, as I had ‘lost the change room’. He said the players felt that I didn’t care about them. That comment really confused me. I told De Klerk, ‘Mate, I have been fighting for their careers for the past few months.’
I said that I would meet the player group the following morning, drum out the issues and see where we were going wrong. As it turned out, we had a good meeting, but it also seemed orchestrated. The players said they wanted advance warning of what they would be doing in training. Deon van Rensburg and J.C. van Rensburg were designated as the guys to whom I would report; I would inform them about what the players could expect in the next few training sessions.
They also felt Wayne Taylor had too much say, that the schedule was too heavy and that they’d been overtraining. This came after a very tough first session of training the day before. But we had to train hard because the players had just had two and a half weeks off. We needed to rebuild their anaerobic threshold in functional game situations and toughen them up with grappling. Someone in the player group had clearly contacted De Klerk that night and complained about the arduous nature of the training session.
After I met with the player group, I asked them, now that the problems had been identified, could we move on and try rectifying them. Cobus Grobbelaar looked me in the eye. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You have to go!’
So I consulted with my staff on what had been discussed. I was told that the player group had been unhappy with the performance of the physio. Nevertheless, he is still there.
I told De Klerk everything and asked him how we could go forward. He just told me to carry on. But Grobbelaar had given me a vote of no confidence. That wasn’t unexpected: I had made him work, made him play for his position. When I joined, I didn’t treat him as the blue-eyed boy that perhaps some of my predecessors had. I knew I would never be able to rely on his support, as it is natural for a player to react negatively to a coach when he is not given what he wants. I had put Derick Minnie ahead of Grobbelaar in the pecking order and Jaco Kriel was coming through as well.
Then the team doctor informed me that Wikus van Heerden had been to see him and had told him that De Klerk had asked the players to write letters setting out their complaints against me.
So I went to De Klerk and asked him where I stood. Again, I didn’t get an answer.
At the time, South African Breweries (SAB) asked me to attend the Port Elizabeth Test match between the Springboks and England, where I was to look after a group of their clients. I had no other commitments that weekend, as there was no Super Rugby scheduled. Before travelling to the match, on the Wednesday I was in a pub in Sandton with some mates when I received a call from Craig Ray, a journalist with the Times and Sunday Times. He told me that I was ‘gone’. He said he had heard this earlier in the week in Port Elizabeth and asked me what I knew. I told him I could imagine that he was correct, but that I had heard less than he had. I again contacted De Klerk, but he just told me to carry on as normal. Even my agent, John Fordham, got no response to his emails and voicemails.
Then, while I was driving from the airport to Jules’s friend’s place in Port Elizabeth, I got a call. It was De Klerk. He told me my position with the Lions was going to be put on hold pending an investigation. I asked him what I was being investigated for. He said I would receive a letter.
After asking for that letter for five days, I eventually received an email. Over time, the seven allegations laid out against me in that initial email would grow to nearly four times that number.
From the Brumbies game on 27 April onwards to 18 June, the forces had been conspiring against me; it was like the Western Force all over again. The two issues that instigated the whole affair were that Josh Strauss wanted to get out of his contract so he could go to Glasgow and, months before, Altmann Allers implying that they couldn’t afford me. The difference now was that, back then, Allers did not have total power. But he did now, as he’d become an equity partner in addition to being De Klerk’s second in command among the elected officials.
I knew I would have a strong case if I went to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration. But the trust had already been broken, and what was happening now was the culmination of an agenda that had been brewing for a long time.
Since the Brumbies game, my relationship with the players had become strained. Ironically, the same thing had happened at the Western Force – things also went pear-shaped there after a game against the Brumbies. The Lions had become a difficult group to work with, as they weren’t performing. You have your fun by winning on the field, which was what I was trying to get them to do.
On this, I stand by my convictions. I am simply not prepared to drop standards in a quest to be liked. I am not prepared to sit in the position and just take the wages. It is not in my make-up. I strive to win. That is me.
This is why I was perceived to be in conflict with the players and regarded as a disciplinarian. Players felt I was not mentoring them or looking after their needs, which were all about their own survival. I was trying to get them to win – as the team’s coach, I saw that as my primary role.
When you are in that kind of situation, it becomes all about your own survival too. You start to look for the win that might turn things around, and you take your eye off the building and development aspects of the job.
I make no excuses for any of that, even though I am aware that it is my commitment to chasing success that gets me into trouble so often. I have a strong ability and willingness to fight, in the figurative sense, of course, and I pride myself on my resilience. As I said before, I struggle with the concept of being in a coaching job for several years and not winning anything. I just don’t get it.
We were never into building sandcastles at the Lions, and even if you look at the team now, you will note that their strength and conditioning are still good and they play a style of rugby that was designed by the guys on my management team. The current head coach, Johan Ackermann, worked under me as assistant coach.
I am sure many of the off-field processes we introduced still exist too. I used to issue feedback sheets to the players in the early days, in the hope that it would get them to talk. But they found the system onerous. I picked up a feedback sheet one day on which Pat Cilliers had made it clear he was pissed off with the environment. Again, that was during a losing streak. I actually had quite a good relationship with Pat. When I called him in for a one-on-one to ask him what he meant by it, I said, ‘I want to hear your feelings. Forget about what other people think.’
He said he thought we were overtraining and that I was a problem. That was honest of him. I was very straight with Pat. I told him that I didn’t mind him sharing with me what he had written on the paper – that was what it was there for.
‘I am responsible for supporting you to achieve the team goal,’ I said. ‘If I am not doing that, then you must let me know. But if you don’t give me the feedback and you just whinge to others about it, how am I supposed to act on it? How will that help us stay aligned and focused on our goal?’
There are people who love a nice vibe and have to win at everything they do. If they don’t win, then they try to find something or someone else to blame. I don’t get on well with those kinds of people. I get on with the guys who work hard – the thinkers and the strategists, the players who know that to create a winning environment requires sweat and sacrifice. The people who are up and down, the influencing-type of people, are my biggest challenge, because they allow their emotions to take over. They are the hardest individuals to communicate with, which is problematic, as you find many of them in an elite sporting team at any one time.
I get on well with relationship people, but I can send them mixed messages when I challenge them to improve aspects of their game, and I realise that many of them may not get on with me when their work ethic slips. It is understandable if they think that I come on a bit too strong then.
The bottom line for me, though, was that the players had had plenty of opportunity at the end of 2011 to air their grievances – if they had any. No one spoke to me of any grievances – not when they had the chance to do so.
Don’t get me wrong, I know you can always make improvements as a coach. Perhaps I could have got to know some of the players better in order to optimise their strengths. But when the charges against me grew from seven to 28, an increase of 400 per cent, it started to become evident that there was an orchestrated campaign being run against me, no matter what I might try to do, and the catalyst was the uncertainty about our Super Rugby status the following year.
Josh wanted to go to Glasgow; many players wanted out of their contracts. It wasn’t about the Lions any more – it was every man for himself. And, as a consequence, I was marginalised as coach.