2011 big interview with Anthony Foley: ‘My influences are Shannon, Munster and Ireland’
T was supposed to be all over after Toulon. A season, an era. When, for the first time in 13 years, the cavalry in red didn’t ride in to save their own day, it triggered a wave of unflattering post-mortems as forceful as all the gushing eulogies. Munster hadn’t planned for tomorrow, which was why they now had none after Toulon.
Even now, that theory causes the pit of Anthony ‘Axel’ Foley’s stomach to stir. Last Saturday night, he greatly enjoyed his pint in the Clarion Hotel but as dramatic and as sweet as the securing of those bragging rights was, he was painfully aware how fleeting they were, too.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “this weekend they [Leinster] go to Heineken, we go to Amlin.” Munster, for him, are all about Heineken. He’s aware they have the best win-loss record in all of Europe this season, beat Australia and have lost only six games, all away from home — but three of those were in the Heineken.
“People would say, in many ways, we’re having a great season but, rightly or wrongly, our season is measured by how we do in the Heineken. That’s something you have to deal with when you sign up here. Hopefully, next year, the hurt of not getting to the knockout stages will work for us. But what we went through this January wasn’t good.”
It was levelled at the organisation that it wasn’t producing young players near the calibre of Leinster. That rankles with Foley. In many ways, he’s Munster’s past, present and future wrapped in one. He played for the province for more than a decade, like his father. When he retired in 2008, he was absorbed into the backroom team and also assigned to work with the under-20s and the A team, to whom he has been head coach this past two seasons. Almost every day he’s shaping the future and he quite likes what he sees.
“That perception has nearly always been there,” he says, over a ham and salad panini in the Cork IT canteen, minutes after coming off the training ground. “Go through the underage Irish teams I played with and there was always a hell of a lot more Ulster and Leinster players than Munster players.
“We probably don’t do ourselves any favours down here. A lot of our better young players are playing hurling and football coming up, whereas in other provinces they’re playing just rugby. But when players decide what code they want to specialise in, they’re much more skilled for having played other sports. So, it might lead us to being a bit behind the ball in how our underage system is viewed, but what counts is that there’s a steady flow of players to come through at senior level and I feel we have that.”
Foley’s own coaching path underlines how Munster’s forward-planning hasn’t been as haphazard as it is sometimes viewed. With the senior squad, he started off as a technical advisor, taking the A pack to run opposition plays and line-outs. This season, he was assigned by Tony McGahan to oversee the team’s defence, and the result is Munster have conceded the least tries in the Magners League and their Heineken Cup pool.
Three weeks ago, he gained another stripe when he learned he’d be succeeding Laurie Fisher as the team’s forwards coach in the summer.
Foley gave a power-point presentation at his interview, but there was nothing sophisticated about how he advanced his case.
“I talked about myself and what I look for in forwards,” he says in that droll but direct way of his. “Fortunately for me, my influences are Shannon, Munster and Ireland, so you can guess what way I’d like a forward pack to play.”
Foley often describes rugby as “basically a street fight with a ball” and it was from his father Brendan, a son of Limerick, that he learned how vital the confrontational aspect of the game was. Make the other crowd take the first backward step but don’t punch anyone; you’ll only hurt your team, not your opponent, who probably won’t feel it anyway with his adrenaline pumping.
“Hit him hard in the tackle, or in the ruck, son. You can do more damage that way — and it’s legal.”
Keith Wood has regularly hailed Axel as the smartest rugby player he played with or against, and he knows why. He grew up with the Foleys in Killaloe and recalls one of those glorious summer days that only occur in our youth, when he called to the house to find the curtains closed and father and son glued to the TV set.
They loved their westerns. The Magnificent Seven, The Searchers, Rio Bravo. They still do, the father the owner of a John Wayne box set, the son the owner of a Clint Eastwood one and who’ll freely espouse the merits of recent westerns like 3:10 To Yuma, “though,” he says, “they still haven’t done anything to beat Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.
But for every western they slipped into that video cassette player, there were five rugby tapes, with Brendan providing a tutorial on every one. “With this constant repetition,” wrote Wood in the foreword of Foley’s fine autobiography. “Anthony began to understand the game intimately.”
In recent years, Foley’s quest to become a better coach has brought him Down Under, observing the setups at Western Force and the Brumbies, while he spent a week this winter with Toulouse. He’s taken his level two coaching course and regularly chats with Les Kiss. Yet so much of what he preaches today is from the same gospel his father imparted.
“You recognise certain trends,” says Foley, “to the point it’s an instinct to react. You train for it. You see it, you act on it, but you’ve got to have repped it. No matter how talented people think a player is, it comes down to repeating the skill.”
Out on the Cork IT training ground this particular morning, he was constantly there, urging them on.
“That’s it, good shape on our D line.”
“Good recognition.”
“Good communication on either side!”
hen he comes to think of it, no one got bollicked out of it this particular morning. The set-up is legendary for its brutal candour and Foley was central to that culture. When Ronan O’Gara and his international colleagues returned home from the disastrous 2007 World Cup, they were greeted with a text from Foley telling them not to worry: ‘Ye’re not the first Irish team to bring disgrace on the nation and you won’t be the last!’ Nothing is sacred, but as Foley maintains, it’s a form of caring. “Say nothing and an awkwardness can fester. Best get it out in the open.” Yet Foley has always been mindful of the line between good-natured ribbing and in-house bullying and between holding players accountable and crushing them.
When John Kelly missed a tackle in the 2006 Heineken Cup final to allow Biarritz an early try, there were no recriminations. Kelly just put his hand up — his fault, wouldn’t happen again — and they parked it right there.
“It’s the same as having kids grow up,” Foley says. “They do something wrong and you’re like ‘Feck it, he did that on purpose!’, so you’ll come down hard on him. But if he did something accidentally which you know he won’t do again, well, you don’t. When a penalty is conceded, you don’t just jump on a fella. You find out first if it was a penalty; often the officials get it wrong, and in a contact sport, you want fellas to be in competition for the ball.
“We’re looking out for one another here. You’re relying on the man beside you for results and your job, so you make sure everyone can feel comfortable and express themselves.”
He’s now one of the coaches rather than one of the lads but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have the banter. Making that transition hasn’t been that testing. Ask him what’s the biggest challenge now, as a coach, and he answers instantly: “Trying not to let my vision of a forward pack drown out what way the boys want to play.”
He elaborates. “It’s about us working together. I want them to challenge me. I’m open to that the whole time. It was how I wanted it as a player. I was always going to go to a coach and give my point of view. Didn’t matter if I was right or I was wrong, I wanted to at least feel I’d been listened to and I always appreciated it. I’ve come across coaches that pretended they were listening, but would always do it their own way and there’s nothing worse than that. But I think, at the moment, the coaches in Munster are open to suggestions from the players.
“One of the philosophies I live by is one Brian O’Brien instilled here when he was manager — you’re only going to be as successful as the people around you want you to be. If the people around you want you to be successful, you’ll be successful. If there’s one or two that don’t, you won’t. So it’s important to have people around you that want you to be successful. Take Paulie [O’Connell]. When we first won the Heineken he wanted to get better. People ask, ‘At what? He’s already arrived.’ But look at his restarts; he seldom gets caught at restarts now, not even in training. You need to challenge yourself and everyone around you, but encourage them, too.”
They’ve long moved on from the Heineken exit. Foley puts it down to “not taking our opportunities against London Irish, leaving ourselves down against the Ospreys and letting the game run away from us in Toulon; people might say that’s a simplistic view but that’s what happened” — rather than a deeper malaise. They set themselves the goal of winning three of their four games over the course of the Six Nations, which they achieved, giving them the heart to set more.
Last weekend, it was about maintaining their 100% record in Thomond this year; more so, says Foley, than avoiding going a sixth game without beating Leinster. There was no hairdryer unveiled at half-time. “We didn’t think we deserved to be 11 points down. It was just about being a bit more physical, keeping the ball for longer periods and reading good lines.” Three-quarters of an hour later and it was all a bit like when Butch buoyantly declared to Sundance, “Well, we’re back in business, boys and girls, just like the old days.”
Foley’s rising prominence has contributed to the feelgood factor within the camp. One of the last amateurs is now one of the first of the professional generation to coach, and there’s an appreciation that both Munster, and, down the line, Ireland need someone with his values and smarts at the war cabinet.
Foley has long got his head around this Amlin thing and desperately wants to win it, but it’s another cup he really craves, the one he lifted in Cardiff in 2006.
“We need to do it again. It’s like a flippin’ addiction. The journey in itself is fine and good, but actually getting to the destination is something else.” That’s the Munster tradition his generation created, while there’s another from the previous one that he has passed on to the next.
Young Tony, whom he and Olive had six years ago, can already predict every next move on every rugby DVD he’s devoured. Paulie’s hit on Chabal is a particular favourite. “Hit him hard in the tackle, son.”
Already, he knows. Rugby is about being put on the backfoot or putting them on the backfoot. Basically, a street fight with a ball.
