The trepidation involved with reintegrating World Cup returnees
BIG ENERGY: South Africa’s RG Snyman and Jean Kleyn celebrate. Pic: ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan
Week three of the BKT URC and World Cup stars are beginning to trickle back into team selection, a welcome return for spectators and coaches alike.
Munster have scrum-half Craig Casey returning to their starting line-up for this evening’s URC clash with the Dragons in Cork with fly-half Jack Crowley on the bench and the Ireland duo will be warmly greeted on their return to provincial colours after a four-month tour of duty with the national squad.
With their return to the red jersey comes an expectation of lifting performance levels.
Yet there is also an acknowledgment that whatever about the short-term gains to be had in an early-season campaign from the arrival of Test-quality personnel, there is a myriad of potential pitfalls lying in wait at the other end of the season when the clubs and provinces will need their best players still fit, fresh and firing on all cylinders.
Munster attack coach Mike Prendergast this week revealed plans have long been made to carefully manage the returns to play of the World Cup contingent with greater mileage on the clock from the last two months in France than the relatively lightly-raced Casey and Crowley.
With club captain Peter O’Mahony and pack-mate Tadhg Beirne each having clocked up 300-plus minutes at the tournament alone and South African duo RG Snyman and Jean Kleyn spending two weeks longer in camp as the Springboks retained the Webb Ellis Cup, which they are currently celebrating with their compatriots in a nationwide trophy tour, it is clear that workloads will need to be carefully managed.
“This year is a big year,” Prendergast said. “We’ve spoken about it, it’s really important how you manage your players. We’ll have some players coming back, like the two boys (Kleyn and Snyman) will come back bouncing, obviously, and for the Ireland players, there has been disappointment there and it’s really important how we manage those lads because it’s a long year for them… So it’s very important how we manage the internationals coming back, more so on an individual basis.”
Management is an apt term given CJ Stander’s experience of coming off long tours. The now-retired Munster and Ireland No.8 learned his lesson the hard way following his return from the British & Irish Lions tour to New Zealand in 2017.
“Yeah, I’d say 2017 Lions, my body was giving up,” Stander said this week during a URC round table alongside former Ospreys head coach Sean Holley.
“Both ankles were gone, went to the Lions tour, didn’t feel well at all and just physically-wise I couldn’t perform at the levels I wanted to.
“And then came back and had six weeks off, I think, but only took four weeks and I kept going again and in that 17-18 season I was gone. It’s a difficult thing to explain to someone because your body just goes into something like a shock. It goes, ‘there’s nothing left here, buddy’.
“It took me a while to recover from that but then I learned. It was a hard way of learning but you get told by other people how bad you’re playing, and then it’s too late.
Stander added: “It was difficult as a player to understand the need to rest, especially when I was younger. I wanted to come back.
“I remember at some stage we were doing stats and how many minutes you played and I just wanted to play every minute all the time and train all the sessions. So (former Munster S&C coach) Aled Walters would actually have to talk to my wife… ’Just take this guy to the park or somewhere because he’s pestering me around training and he’s here all the time’.
“It got to the point where I’d say ‘I’ll come in in the morning and do a bit of gym’ and he’d be like, “just go home’.
“So it is a difficult thing to do and when I got older I realised that come April, May, June, then it gets tough, that it was all about the mental battle, whereas if you just rested yourself earlier in the season, then it’s a bit easier.”
Once the penny dropped, Stander said he honed the art of reintegrating into club rugby, and even adding positives from his recent international camp experiences.
“It was a smooth transition but the learnings we got from the other players and the other teams was invaluable and we slowly built that into the squad because we all learned and from that experience with the coaching staff and from the players as well.
“It sounds stupid but it’s quite an easy thing to do.”
Holley admitted to having a somewhat different experience of welcoming back Welsh Test players during his nine years as an Ospreys coach between 2003 and 2012.
“Listening to CJ there, I wish I’d had him in my team because it wasn’t that easy integrating some of my lot back!
“When you think of it, in 2008 we had 13 Ospreys playing in Warren Gatland’s first game that went on to win the Grand Slam and having that amount of players back was very difficult. However, CJ is right, you have to integrate with a bit of patience. They have to get themselves back into it because mentally they might be attuned to going back and being ready and feel like they can but at some point it’s going to hit them mentally.
“So you have to be quite astute as a coaching team to integrate them back when they’re sharp enough and that might be training and not playing for a bit or it might be playing and then taking a break and then coming back again so they get a flavour of being back in, having their break and then bring them back. Because it’s such a convoluted, hard, long season, our season here up north where it ebbs and flows with European competition, Six Nations and so on.
“I think it comes down to the individual as well and CJ makes a really good point. The last thing you want to do is discard all of the learnings that the international players will have had in a campaign, particularly in a successful campaign, and say ‘well, we don’t do it like that, we do it this way’.
“You have to keep evolving. You have to keep learning and empower players like CJ to bring things back to see if you can enhance your own club game. I think that’s probably the trickiest part but it’s not an exact science.”
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