Mike Quirke: Why coaches need to focus on the bigger picture

Coaching was always something that appealed to me. The notion of trying to get everyone on the same page, all striving towards the same goal... sounds lofty doesn’t it?

Then you get hit with the monsoon weather we’ve been dealing with for the past week and you quickly realise that coaching at club level, or any level, is about fire-fighting as much as anything else.

Once you quell a blaze in one place, somebody else comes at you the next day to start another forest fire; they’re going to the States for the summer, or somebody else got a tattoo and can’t play in the next game until it heals properly.