Schmidt’s side of the fence now the only place to be
No, Joe Schmidt’s greatest nightmare is a kid called Darren.
The Ireland coach was a headmaster in New Zealand at the time. The story goes that the girls’ schools near his own had been unexpectedly released from their educational bonds for the rest of the day. Their first instinct was to march en masse for the boys’ enclosure down the road and instigate a clamour for a similar release.
The SOS went out to Schmidt’s office.
By the time he arrived on the scene Darren was about to hop the fence. The moment hung in the balance until Schmidt shouted out the kid’s name. For a second, nothing, then Darren retreated. Crisis averted. The girls were on their own but Darren had personified a rare example of how Schmidt almost lost control.
It has rarely, if ever, happened since.
It’s a trait most obvious in his attention to detail on the training paddock and, though the players from Munster and Ulster are now fully-subscribed members of his fan club, it is no secret that they were taken aback by his inspection of the minutiae. Minor errors bring training to a standstill as the kinks are explained and ironed out. Video of sessions and games are devoured almost as soon as the post-match grub is gone.
At some stage tomorrow night Schmidt will sit down to watch the DVD of the England game and anything up to seven hours could pass before he arises again. Nothing is too insignificant. When his players come calling to discuss a particular knock-on, missed tackle or pass their coach will know exactly the incident in question. Control.
Yet Schmidt’s genius has been to know when to hold the reigns and when to pass them over. Darren wasn’t talked down. The sound of his name was all he heard that day. Schmidt left it to his student to come to his own conclusion and he has empowered his players in much the same way.
The popular perception of him has been coloured by his trademark grin and propensity to crack a joke or two for the camera — usually at his own expense — but even the stories about his dark side in video review sessions don’t paint anything like a rounded picture of a man who in his rugby journey through three countries has so far debunked the theory about the two types of coaches: those who have been fired and those who are about to be.
He may be a wet week into his current role but he is almost four years in Ireland by now and it is impossible to think of any manager in any code who has been embraced so tightly by his players as the Kiwi, who seems to enjoy the knack of knowing when to crack the whip and when to give way to the fact that dressing rooms are, essentially, playgrounds for adults.
Read any sporting autobiography and it will reveal as much and Schmidt has been savvy enough to know that players need to let off steam in juvenile ways. One of the rules they brought in at Leinster was that you couldn’t celebrate a try. It started in training and extended to matches. Like most clubs they operated their own kangaroo courts, with one of the regular punishments forcing the offender to turn up at training for the week in a shirt and tie.
Above all, however, the man is a coach.
There are any number of schools of thought as to what makes a good one. Brian Clough wrote in his autobiography that: “Coaching is for kids. If a player can’t trap a ball and pass it by the time he’s in the team, he shouldn’t be there in the first place. I told Roy McFarland to go and get his bloody hair cut — that’s coaching at this level.”
Arthur Ashe was among the first to bemoan what has become known as paralysis by analysis, while the venerable Donald Bradman once remarked that no one had ever told him how to hold a bat, but Schmidt would surely have been of a mind to at least make some observations as to how he was swinging it. Such is his way.
He would surely cringe if he read this — and let’s be wary of crowning anyone two games into their first Six Nations — but it is impossible to escape the notion that the right man is in the right place at the right time. Unlike Clough, he doesn’t seek the limelight. By yesterday his work was almost done for the week. The days before kick-off are spent reinforcing the positives. The final team talk he leaves to the players.
By then there is no one to talk down off the fence.
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie Twitter: @Rackob
