A HOLL OF A JOURNEY
His years as Munster manager taught Jerry Holland a great deal.
About preparing elite sportspeople for big occasions? Sure? About the psychology of a winning dressing-room? Absolutely.
But there were other lessons in the fine print.
Take the baked beans issue.
“We played Castres in Beziers once and we stayed outside the town in a hotel that was like an old castle,” says Holland.
“Jack Kiely, the bagman, had driven down with various items like baked beans, which were impossible to get in France. The management team was Declan (Kidney), myself and Niall O’Donovan. It was a huge game and we wanted to make sure everything was okay, but the morning of the game there was a major problem.”
Someone had broken into the kitchen and tasted some of the food, said the hotel manager. Before the inquisition began, though, the culprits threw themselves on the mercy of the court and got a suspended sentence. More of that later.
Holland found he couldn’t mind each player 24/7. Once in Toulouse Brian Hickey, Mark Tainton and Ronan O’Gara wanted to go to the stadium for some kicking practice.
“They weren’t sure where it was and they asked an old lady for directions. Across from my house, she said, so they invited her onto the little mini-bus to show them.
“They landed outside the stadium alright, but it was the soccer stadium. At least she got a lift home with her shopping.”
Holland’s big fear as Munster’s manager was that he’d lead the travelling party into a hotel and be met with a blank look by the receptionist.
“It happened once. The hotel thought it was the following week. We got it sorted but some management guys had to bunk down in different places that night.”
For those unfamiliar with the role, Holland describes the manager’s responsiblities.
“From the time you’d meet at the airport to kick-off, if there was a cock-up, then the finger was pointed at you. Not the coach. Not the Branch.You. So if the bus didn’t turn up to meet you at the airport, it was your fault. And that happened.
“Worse, we got a bus driver once in Wales who was supposed to take us to Llanelli, and it seemed he’d never been outside Swansea in his life. You’d assume, in fairness, that a Welsh coach company with a Welsh driver would find a Welsh town, but no. Not a clue.
“And of course the likes of Donncha O’Callaghan, Alan Quinlan, Frankie Sheahan would be roaring ‘shambles, shambles’ on the bus. In fairness unless it was serious it was taken in good humour. Thankfully there were no huge cock-ups.”
That was down to careful preparation. Holland found nothing could be taken for granted: “It can be easy when you’re going to the same hotels, but what if there’s a change in management and you’re unaware of it? You land in and the food’s deteriorated, say?
“You’d have to go and look at the hotel, down to going into the rooms to look at the beds. After all, what suited Peter Stringer wouldn’t suit Paul O’Connell, and the players would be the first to tell you it wasn’t good enough.”
Food was a constant issue — Holland says in all their time nobody warmed to the ultra-rare beef served in France — until they made a friend in Bordeaux.
“The pre-game regime was always specific in terms of nutrition and we couldn’t get what we wanted. It was a big problem.
“In 2000 we played Toulouse in Bordeaux and Vincent, the banqueting manager in our hotel, who was also a chef, seemed to understand what we wanted. Every time Munster have played in France since he’s been there to help.”
Sometimes there was a confrontation rather than a challenge to be faced.
“One time against Castres we went in for the captain’s run and one of the lads thought he saw movement in the commentary box in the stadium. We told Yvan, the ERC liaison man, who went up to investigate. Five minutes later he came down with a Castres management guy by the scruff of the neck. Your man had a video recorder and fair dues to Yvan, he took out the tape and ripped it up before frog-marching your man out of the stadium.
“Something similar happened when we played Stade Francais in the quarter-final when John Connolly was coaching them — we were in the stadium for our walk-through and there were Stade management staff there, and they weren’t disappearing.
“Pat Geraghty (Munster press officer) went over to them. There was a lot of gesticulating and talking and Pat told your man to ring his boss. When the Stade man took out his phone Geraghty flung it up into the stand and there was a set-to like two chickens having a squabble.
“We decided ‘we’re out of here’ and we trooped back onto the bus. Connolly came along and he was raging over what had happened. He knew how we’d see it — as a cause, ‘look we’re not even allowed on the pitch’.
And we did. And beat them.”
Holland oversaw the transition from amateurism to the pro era. He was coach when Munster ended a 17-year inter-provincial famine in 1993, a timely boost just ahead of the game going open two years later.
He can remember the beginning of John Bevan’s brief reign as head coach: a meeting in the old Thomond Park with player after player telling Bevan they had an offer from England and they were heading off.
“Unfortunate, but everyone was trying to find their way and most of them were only away for a year anyway.
“I’d say we might have lost one year or a year and a half at most, and the experience of being away at another club would have stood to them anyway.”
An outside perspective was often needed. The early days of professionalism carried trace elements of the amateur era.
“If you went to France or Italy by scheduled flights you could be waiting a day or two to get back, and our logic was, charter a plane to get back the night of a game to prepare for the following week.
“In reality the reason was if you stay away, you have finely tuned athletes heading out the night of a game for a few drinks, and it’s all over. Chaos. Not that they’d be wrecking hotels but it mightn’t have been far off it.
“We stayed in Italy once and the players were out the night of the game. I got a call from the hotel manager: two of our players had been arrested, according to the police, while the two players thought they were getting a lift back to the hotel.”
They sorted it and moved on, though in those early years another trip to Italy for a week’s training went awry: “We had two games organised for the week, and we’d have scheduled a half-day for shopping for the players. When you see the itineraries they have now, the thought of giving them a half-day to go shopping...
“But in one of the games there was mayhem. The referee sent off two players from each team. We had Heineken Cup the following week but the game was under the radar, so we chatted to him afterwards and he rescinded the sendings-off.
“You were still only making the transition, and you spent time trying to control fellas, to stop them going out. They weren’t on big money and they had come from the amateur era where that was the norm.”
The Cork and Limerick lads coming home from places like Bristol and Harlequins weren’t the only ones bringing a new perspective. Holland describes other outside views as critical.
“You still see it today with the likes of Doug Howlett, but John Langford would have been one of the first guys to come in with that, followed by Jim Williams. They had been involved in a professional set-up for a number of years while we were still learning. Now, fellas gave out about it — they didn’t like hearing ‘the way we had it in the Brumbies was . . . ‘ all the time. Fellas got sick of that, but the points they were making were taken on board.
“That was vital, particularly on how hard players trained here and on their disappointment when they lost. Langford was very important in giving them the confidence they’d be good enough to win.
“Langford was great in that he believed the players’ ability to succeed. On a smaller scale there was his insistence on strength and conditioning coaches, athletics coaches, on proper nutrition — all of that.
“The gym was crucial because fellas realised that the odd session was no good. You had to do it every day. ”
Another Australian helped point them in the right direction: “Jim Williams had played with the Brumbies and I went to see their set-up, and what I noticed was they lived in a community together, almost, and that stressed interaction in the group, creating the identity and hanging around together.
“Jim brought technical ability with him but he got frustrated with the Irish psyche, the ‘will we ever do it?’ compared to the Australian outlook of ‘we’ll be the best’. There had to be a sea change, and that happened after the Wasps game in 2004.”
Though now remembered as one of the great Heineken Cup clashes — one of the great rugby games, full stop — it was a watershed for the losers.
“It ended 37-32 and the big difference was the conditioning of the players. After that there was a big sit down, a big clear-the-air job, and we ended that with the understanding we had to have proper conditioning to compete.
“We brought in someone for strength and someone for conditioning — power-lifting and athletics, basically. We brought in a nutritionist, a defence coach. Supplements came in as we looked to bulk up. We had been at a disadvantage that way.
“Declan would have brought more organisation to the sideline in terms the calmness needed in the heat of battle — to analyse things, to get a message to the players.”
Another little lesson: “At the start of the professional era you were roaring on messages from the sideline, just like a club game, which led to frustration and confusion among the players.
“That changed to ear-pieces, communication systems, the water-carrier bringing the message to key guys. That was another difference.”
As late as 2000 the old approach was still in evidence, though. Holland nods when the famous pre-game meeting before that year’s Heineken Cup final is mentioned.
“There you had old school in terms of that meeting. It was probably the most amazing meeting I was ever at in terms of the passion and emotion that came out for two hours. If we’d played anyone in the world that Friday night at nine o’clock we’d have beaten them, but by three o’clock the following day we were drained.
“We learned from that — that you couldn’t treat a final like another game, you had to understand in the professional era that you could have passion and emotion, but it had to be controlled or it’d take over, and you’d lose the ability to be clinical.
“That was a huge lesson, but it was hard to blame anyone for it because we would always have had a meeting the night before a game. You always did it, and you’d stick to that to avoid variation — but we left it slip away.”
They applied the lessons learned ahead of the next final against Leicester — “which was much better,” says Holland, “and in the third final it was spot-on, and we won. There was no meeting the night before that time; we had the meeting the day of the game.”
When you ask Holland about his dressing-room experiences over the years, he flips that around with another lesson.
“We would always make sure the players had seen the dressing-room, so that nothing would be new — the day before we’d go in and have a look around. If we couldn’t get access beforehand we’d give them photographs of the dressing-room so they’d be familiar with that. The same with the dimensions of the pitch, the dead-ball area.
“Before the Saracens game Declan famously had a little remote-control car speeding around the meeting room. That was just to make sure the players weren’t distracted when Saracens used a similar toy car to bring on the kicking tee. Blaring music, all of that — you recreated as much as you could at training.
“Once they got into the dressing-room it was into their own routine. Fellas would be talking, but though they seemed to be talking to others, it was obvious they were talking to themselves. Most of them were in their own space, in their own routine — but part of that routine might have been seeing the lads walk around talking to other players as well.
“Fellas getting sick? Yeah. There’d be a lot of use of the bathroom facilities. The nervous tension came across in different ways for different players. A Heineken Cup game at 1pm meant players were trying to get chicken and pasta into them at 9am; I don’t know if the brain could manage that at times, and fellas would be so nervous they’d get sick.
“It’s manageable, but you had to balance getting the carbs into them with how the nervous tension manifested itself.”
His memory of the winning dressing-room after that first Heineken Cup isn’t what you might imagine: “It was a huge release, a fantastic occasion, but the more experienced guys were already almost thinking, ‘is this the start of something or the end’? “That was the question — do we kick on from here?
“Guys were nearly asking that question before getting into the celebrations — the sense was you could be the guy who won one Heineken Cup and live off that, fine, but a lot of them immediately thought ‘this is the start of where we want to get to’.
“Their thinking would have been focused on improving things rather than going on the piss for three months.”
Was that the final vindication of the long process of ‘professionalising’ the players? “A good management team will always want to learn, to listen, to take the good bits. If there are 10 issues affecting players — on and off the field — or restricting them, and you tick them off, then the player must say ‘they’ve taken care of those things, and now it’s up to me’.
“There was a sense that their input was critical. But there had to be respect on the other side as well for management that were prepare to listen and take action on issues. That was recognised by players.
“Some of those issues would have been ‘we need charter flights out and back’, and we’d have pointed out that we weren’t Manchester United. There were realities.
“So we might say ‘look, we’ll make sure we have space reserved on the plane for ye, and it won’t be a Roy Keane situation where the officials have the good seats’ and so on. The players got the good seats because they were the athletes trying to prepare.
“Other points would have been, ‘we need to do more to raise the profile of the brand’ or ‘we need some interaction with supporters’ or whatever. Those would have been points raised in 2004, at the meeting I mentioned. Then when we won in 2006 the players drove it on.
“The sense then wasn’t ‘we won, so everything’s great’, it was ‘we won, so how can we drill down deeper’.”
Holland combined his Munster role with his day job in management at EBS, but he wanted to give his son Billy, then emerging from the Academy, some space, and he always felt the job needed a full-timer.
“Declan would have been happy with the time I could give it, and so were the other coaches. It was nearly a case of ‘if you want to go get a replacement’.
“Niallo (Donovan, now manager) is steeped in it. He’s a coach too, and that’s critical. You have to understand the players too — logistics is logistics but you must understand the players and the pressures they’re under while you must also support the management team.”
Steeped in it is right. Take the Beziers Baked Beans incident . . .
“Yeah, before it got too serious that time, myself and Niallo had to put up the hands,” says Holland. “We’d just gone in to have a look. And a bit of a taste.”
