Wednesday, November 23, 2011
LAST Wednesday’s announcement that Martin Johnson had stepped down as England head coach/manager was not surprising and closed a horrible few months for English rugby after the fallout from their World Cup campaign.
His final press conference at Twickenham was sad to watch and England’s only rugby World Cup-winning captain looked a broken man.
Nobody ever managed to achieve that on the field of play.
This was an appointment always likely to end in tears as Johnson was parachuted into the role by committee men in the RFU in a desperate attempt to give the English rugby public a figurehead to hang their hopes on. Johnson had no coaching experience which meant that the RFU was duty-bound to put support systems around him in order for him to grow into the role.
From day one, I felt that Johnson should have addressed this by appointing a management team around him with at least one coach of proven international ability. By way of contrast, Declan Kidney, despite over a decade at coaching at Heineken Cup level, wasted no time in assembling a group that contained three coaches, Gurt Smal, Les Kiss and Alan Gaffney with hands-on experience of international coaching at the highest level with South Africa and Australia.
Loyalty is a trait that Johnson was brought up on in Leicester and he carried that quality, at times blindly, into his international job. While he gave everything to his players, he was ultimately let down by those above him, including England’s Elite Director of Rugby, Rob Andrew, and by the management board of the RFU. He was also let down by a select few of his players whom he ill-advisedly treated as adults.
I am a great admirer of Martin Johnson, enjoy his company and can state from first-hand experience that he is nothing like the ogre he is portrayed as in public. He is intelligent, engaging and has a dry sense of humour that I enjoy. In the week leading up to the Ireland game in Dublin last March, I spent some time with him in the English team headquarters in Pennyhill Park. After three years in the job, he appeared relaxed, in control and had a vision of where his side were heading after introducing a raft of new young talent over the previous 12 months.
England were on the verge of a first Grand Slam since he was captain, and despite that defeat to Ireland, still won the Six Nations championship. In his final year, England won 10 of their 13 tests, including two wins over Australia and won four out of their five games at the World Cup — the same as Ireland.
Yet he was undone in many ways by his failure to control the off-field activities of a few players who let him down badly. Johnson, always the realist, decided to call it a day and left with his dignity intact before a faceless cabal in Twickenham did it for him.
English rugby used him for its own means at a time of desperation and it showed the modesty of the man that he felt if he didn’t take the job when it was offered, he might not get the chance again. It was a poor call on his behalf but one I can empathise with. The irony is he is a far better coach now than when he took the role and the experience of the last three years has given him a better appreciation of the job at hand. He deserved better.
— Donal Lenihan
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