The time out from professional rugby has worked for me; it has given me time to think. One of the first things I decided to do during my self-imposed leave was write to 25 guys around the world with whom I had interacted, both positively and negatively. I was interested in their feedback – where did they think I had gone wrong, and what could I change? Some, such as David Pocock, responded positively and gave me good pointers; others didn’t reply at all and probably still have issues with me. That is their choice and I respect it.
Just because you have clashed with someone doesn’t mean you hate them. It just means that you may see things differently, or may have done at a particular time. There are many aspects of rugby coaching at the top level where there are no rights or wrongs – it just comes down to different opinions. Take the example of Steve Diamond. He wanted me to get involved at Sale at the end of my time with the Lions. But it was also Diamond, all those years ago when I was a player/coach at Sale, who wanted me out of there.
When I look back, perhaps the biggest mistake I have made during my coaching career is that I have always tried to be more than just a coach. I have tried to take on other people’s problems. I tend to roll up my sleeves and get involved in those areas of the rugby business that I feel are not right and try to fix them. I had to do that at the Western Force and the Lions. I can’t help it – I am an achiever and I like assuming responsibility. But it was my choice to work with those teams and unions, so I can’t blame anyone else for the fact that it went wrong.
The same goes for the coaching staff of the teams with whom I have worked. I firmly believe that a coach should take on an experienced middle-management if he can, but there have been times I have chosen to develop less experienced coaches. The most experienced coach who worked with me was Robbie Deans at the All Blacks. Even Clive Woodward wasn’t experienced when I worked with him; he was new to coaching at the time. But Brian Ashton and Phil Larder, who were part of Woodward’s management team, were experienced coaches.
When you work with an inexperienced middle-management, you end up being man alone. The players are below you, the officials above you and your own support staff need mentoring. That is why I have described the pressures I faced at the Western Force and the Lions. It was if I was being pulled downwards, upwards and across simultaneously. I ended up having to be a mentor to everyone.
Duane Monkley was still a ‘baby coach’ when we worked together at Waikato, and so were the Western Force guys. In South Africa, Johan Ackermann and Carlos Spencer developed into outstanding assistant coaches, and Wayne Taylor was top drawer as the strength-and-conditioning coach.
And the players? The Lions players needed to grow up, I felt, and learn what it meant to be professional sportsmen. We were dealing with a player group with a very low foundation and training load, and no experience of a winning culture. Although we would eventually have eased up on the training, at the point I left the union the players still needed additional training and it wasn’t yet time to let up. You can’t play a certain type of rugby if you don’t have the right level of fitness, and, as I’ve said, the Lions players could easily have been mistaken for doughnuts when I arrived.
In Johannesburg, like in any other major global city spread out over a huge area, it is difficult to instil the right sort of team culture in the players. In my early days with the Lions, our schedule was intensive, but we had to finish the day early to allow people time to get home. So we had to condense the hard work into less time. In places like Durban, Port Elizabeth or Bloemfontein, you can usually get from home to the training venue in a matter of minutes, but in a large metropolis like Johannesburg, you can’t expect the guys to attend training twice a day. That is why teams in big cities find it harder to foster a team culture, and it is one of the secrets behind the success of a Super Rugby franchise like the Christchurch-based Crusaders.
At the Lions the resources, in terms of the facilities we had, were atrocious. The gyms were not properly equipped for players trying to attain elite performance levels. The weights were inadequate. We ended up using the gym at the King Edward VII School. So Wayne Taylor had to make do with the resources he had, and given the type of football I wanted the team to play, I told him I needed a strong running base. I wanted the players to run for longer.
I am the first to admit that I have made mistakes along the way, but I have no regrets about or self-doubt over what I tried to do. I wanted players to be accountable for their physical condition as well as their rugby. I wanted to improve their self-awareness, and for them to understand that, as professional players, they were not permitted fluctuating windows of responsibility: they needed to know that they were always accountable for their physical conditioning and couldn’t just let themselves go over weekends or holidays.
Do I have regrets? Well, I wish that I had known earlier in my career what I know now. Although I’ve never had a problem with selection, and that was always an aspect on which I spent time, sometimes you just have to make do with what is available.
The strength-and-conditioning approach I followed is based on the style of football I wanted the teams to play. In retrospect, I think there were times when I made the players spend too much time on the field during training. But I think all coaches have probably been guilty of that, as it is only relatively recently that the conditioning penny has dropped and we’ve realised that less is actually more.
When it comes to playing structures, maybe I overemphasised attacking play – something I was accused of after my stint at the All Blacks – and I admit that I have been more ambitious and creative than conservative in my approach.
Perhaps the biggest change, though, is that I now understand the psychological aspect of coaching better than I ever did. By now, it should be clear to readers that I believe that many of the controversies that have blown up around me have been the result of deceit on the part of people with whom I have worked, and that I have been misunderstood. But I have to concede that people’s perception of me as a disciplinarian has been the result of me not understanding the individual concerned. In the area of communication, every player receives and processes messages differently; it is never the same for all. There were many times when my feedback would have been more effective had I had a better idea of how a particular player was wired. Often the message I conveyed was too straight to the point for a player who was only really interested in whether he was going to be selected or not.
I love the game and I love developing players. That is why I have had this lifelong love affair with rugby and coaching. But, too often, my message was not received by the individual, or it was received in a way it wasn’t intended. The hurt I may have consequently caused individual players was never intentional.
At the All Blacks, I concentrated on performance, but at the Western Force and the Lions, I was trying to build a team. The move to the Western Force came very soon after my All Black experience, and that may explain why I felt I needed to prove myself there. I was building a new franchise, but I also wanted us to win. As I explained earlier, I was too impatient for success.
By the time I came to the Lions, I was prepared to be more patient while developing the franchise, but it quickly became clear that there were factors at play that far outweighed what I was trying to achieve there. Matters that had been voted on at executive-committee level in the organisation conflicted with my endeavours as coach to create a high-performance environment. Much of what goes wrong in the game in South Africa is down to the administrators, who don’t understand what high performance is or what it requires. They are voted into their positions when they are not necessarily qualified for the job and are unwilling to accept accountability.
In the first part of my sabbatical from top-level coaching, I helped out at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It was an amateur/semi-professional environment, but there was a guy there, Mark Schultz, who would be a breath of fresh air if he worked in a professional environment. He is like a dog with a bone – he sticks at things, fights for what he believes in and what is good for the club, and doesn’t back down. When I first came across him, I thought that it’s unfortunate that there aren’t more people like Schultz in the administration of the professional game.
As I am often fond of saying, context gives meaning to content, but this is something I learnt later in my career, when I realised that understanding psychology was crucial to my improvement as a coach. Achieving success in professional rugby is not just about tackles and carries – although that has to be your staple, the bare basic requirement. It is also about how you make people feel. You might have the best game plan in the world, but it won’t work if the players aren’t feeling right. The problem at the Lions was that the people upstairs were never supportive or in synch with what we were trying to achieve as a team.
The bottom line is that after having left the All Blacks, I got into bed with two organisations that weren’t at the top of their game. I was able to take them to a certain point, but the overall structure and the politics of those organisations wouldn’t allow any further progress or any kind of sustainable success.
On reflection, I probably got involved with the All Blacks at the wrong time. I came in just two years before the World Cup, so that programme had to be fast-tracked. There was no time to build systems: it was a question of top performance from day one. My All Black experience might have been a lot more positive had I had the chance to work with them over a four-year cycle, which would have enabled me to build up a solid structure. Nevertheless, my win ratio of 86 per cent with the All Blacks wasn’t bad for a coach who effectively ended up getting sacked!
I am not desperate to win a World Cup. I wouldn’t say there is unfinished business for me. I am quite disinterested in that respect. But I do have total confidence in my ability to coach Test rugby again.
However, my leadership approach would be more thoughtful than it was when I was 37. New Zealand coach Graham Henry was 65 when he won the World Cup. I have just turned 50 at the time of writing.
I would love to coach international rugby again, but I won’t choose to coach Tonga or another minor rugby nation. I turned down an offer from Scotland in 2013. It would have required a long-term plan, it was a big project and I didn’t want to go down that road again. When I left the All Blacks, I should have waited at that point for a big job, something at a proper high-performance organisation, instead of going straight to Western Force. Having said that, though, coaching there equipped me with a particular skill set, so in some respects it was beneficial.
While I acknowledge that I have made the wrong turn in my career path here and there, that doesn’t mean I have regrets, because the ride has been a hell of a lot of fun. I have met people and travelled to places I would never otherwise have seen had it not been for the opportunities afforded by rugby. But it does explain why I need to be particularly selective about my future involvement with coaching at the top level.
I am not sure when, or even if, I will be coaching at the highest level again, much as I would love to if the environment were right. I have just started working as CEO of Egli, a manufacturing machine-packaging company in Pietermaritzburg, and I love the new challenge. I want to maintain my links with rugby, and the company is happy for me to do that, but it is time for me to look after my family and my future, and there is always much uncertainty in rugby coaching.
After 20 years of coaching, I no longer have the motivation to coach a side that is coming from a weak starting point, which is what I have done for long periods of my career. I am reluctant to work for voted-in administrators who do not have a high-performance mentality, and who have a narrow focus and lack unity under pressure. In many of these toxic rugby environments, people and processes do not meet the plan, and outcomes happen by accident. Eventually, poor outcome becomes inevitable, as success is not sustainable.
My preference would be to work for a businessman, board and/or franchise owner who can buy the players they want, and pay whatever he thinks they are worth. I am not prepared to lower my standards again.
I continue to work in the world of rugby in my capacity as an analyst for SuperSport, the top South African television sports channel. This allows me to engage with the game without being inhibited. It is a challenge, though, as you have to process and verbalise your thoughts very quickly, unlike how I imagine it is for cricket commentators.
When analysing the game on TV, if you are critical about something, you still need to be considerate of the people at the receiving end of the criticism. You need to be tactful. You want your audience to think that they would enjoy having you in their own home talking about rugby. If it’s a shit game, you try to inject some humour into the analysis, as you know the people watching also think it is shit.
Being an analyst keeps me closely connected with the sport and I love fielding the questions, such as why the top three teams on the log are where they are, what the difference is between their cultures and philosophies, and what makes them superior to the rest. Results are the product of people and processes, so I like informing the viewer on those kinds of issues. It’s odd now to think back to how I used to be so disliked by the media in New Zealand, and yet the media have now become such a big part of my life.
I am also active in social-media forums (you can follow me on Twitter @mfactorcoaching). I don’t think kids have a clue about when I played, and as time goes on they will become even less aware of it, but what I do now does help to educate kids, and I like to think I can make a big contribution that way.
I have also devoted some of my time during my sabbatical to coaching the coaches. I spoke earlier about having the courage to try something new, and it dawned on me that I have a bank of knowledge and experience to pass on. So why keep it to myself? I live in a country that has the best rugby talent in the world but, until recently, SARU showed no interest in developing coaches. That has been the basis of my venture into coaching the coaches.
There is only one of me, so I can’t devote too much time to it, as I can’t physically get around everywhere, and my new involvement in business will restrict my freedom to a certain extent.
Everywhere I go in South Africa I have noticed that people are taken by surprise when they discover I am different from what they had expected. They may have read about the controversies in the press, and yet they can’t reconcile me with the person that they’ve read about.
This is because the media creates a perception. What is presented as a controversy is often just a case of two people with different strengths and outlooks – and there is often nothing more sinister to it than that. I often see organisations make what I feel are the wrong decisions because they speak to the influencers, people whose emotions are up and down, and who rely too much on their feelings. It is all just perception, and perception is fluid – it changes constantly.
I have no regrets about being strong-minded. I was given the responsibility in my positions as head coach to get the best out of the individual and to challenge that individual to become part of a successful team. You can’t achieve that by being soft on everyone the whole time. That just doesn’t work in a results-driven business.
But perhaps I have been a bit too tough, and maybe I am too dedicated to selfishly pursuing performance outcomes. But then, I often ask myself the question, would soccer managers like Alex Ferguson, José Mourinho and Louis van Gaal survive in rugby? My guess is that they wouldn’t. They are all difficult people in their own way, but they get results. They don’t mind stepping on toes, and in the sensitive rugby environment, that would piss people off very quickly.
We’ve all heard the stories about how Ferguson used to fight with his players and how he would treat them at times. I am not sure that such behaviour would be tolerated in a rugby environment – and yet it can’t be denied that Ferguson got results in soccer. Why shouldn’t it work like that in rugby? What makes rugby players more precious?
So, when I look at some of the British football managers, I wonder whether my style would be more acceptable in that sport than it is in rugby. Quite possibly it would.
I don’t want to be someone else. I am John Mitchell and I have a particular way of coaching. I have won things and I have lost things; I have made good choices and I have made poor choices. But what I can definitely do is try to understand the individual better and, in that sense, if I had my time again, I could probably find better and quicker ways to bring out the best in players.
My next organisation in rugby, if there is to be one, would be an environment where I don’t have to deal with the bullshit that floats around.
I have been approached several times during my sabbatical, among them by the Southern Kings. I think there is potential in the team, but it is just not settled enough. I would not enjoy another Western Force or Lions situation.
In the South African context, the Bulls and the Sharks seem the most stable of the franchises, but I strongly suspect the Sharks are running out of money, which could be problematic for the game in this country.
Development is becoming a critical issue in South Africa. There is a tendency to treat the under-19 level as a conveyor belt instead of allocating resources and the right coaching at that level. Those players are the future Super Rugby players, and the players at that level of the game are becoming younger and younger because of the bruising and arduous nature of that competition. Also, keep in mind that 250 professional players are currently playing outside of South Africa, which draws younger players into competitions they would not normally be selected for at such a young age. This makes greater demands on a younger body, as the player has not had the benefit of a progressive training load, and that leads to a high attrition rate. What they need is a programme that will progressively build their training-load capability year on year. There needs to be a plan in place to ensure that talent is nurtured so that it can progress step by step to the top level.
The feedback I have received from the people I approached, which I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, has been useful. If you are going to rebrand yourself, you should be interested in feedback. It takes courage to ask for that, but I have nothing to lose.
I guess that, in the final analysis, I have to admit that I am not a great politician. The sign of a good political strategist is someone who stays in power, and I haven’t stayed in power. You need to be good at rugby politics to survive as a rugby coach. But at least I can say I have stayed true to my convictions.
I have got better at the politics, but if I take the Western Force example, even if I had been softer on the player group, I would still have been gone. The pillars were crumbling because the people who should have been running the show from upstairs had gone missing. And it was the same with the Lions. Take away all the bullshit and what it boils down to is that the Lions just never had the money to pay me, and someone was fighting for his political survival.