JIM Telfer summed it up well. Almost all coaching careers end in failure – unless you decide to get out at the top.
(Enoch Powell said much the same about political careers.) Clive Woodward piloted England to a World Cup triumph; then was the man in charge of a disastrous Lions tour. Ian McGeechan's second term as Scotland's coach was much less successful than his
first, and he presided over a shambolic World Cup campaign in Australia.
Frank Hadden met with some success, but not enough. His Scotland side was generally hard to beat, but found it even harder to win. Napoleon said the first quality he looked for in a general was "luck", but when Hadden entered the proverbial last chance saloon, luck deserted him. One can only wonder how different this season's Six Nations might have been if he had been able to field his preferred front five of Jacobsen, Ford, Murray, Hines and Hamilton throughout the tournament. As it happened, they didn't play together even once. Andy Robinson, favourite to succeed him, already knows all about bad luck. His tenure as England's coach might have been a success if , like Woodward in the years running up to the World Cup, he had been able to field Jonny Wilkinson at 10. But Wilkinson missed almost all of Robinson's 20-odd games in charge.
Hadden never lost the support of his players, and in the end some of the senior ones will believe that they let him down. Coaches, as Mike Blair and Chris Paterson have said, are not the ones who drop passes or take the wrong option on the field. The players also recognise that it is difficult to win international matches consistently if you are not accustomed to winning the hard games at professional club level. Ireland's success is built on the achievements of Munster and, to a lesser extent, Leinster. Until Edinburgh and Glasgow match these, victories in the Six Nations will remain happy but unusual events. Scotland's 1984 Grand Slam was built on the strength of club rugby, especially in the Borders, and the successes of the South in the old District Championship. There were 11 Borderers in the XV that beat France to clinch the title.
It follows that if Robinson is indeed named as Hadden's successor, the question of his replacement as coach of Edinburgh is every bit as important. It can't be said too often or too loudly: we must strengthen and extend the base of the professional game in Scotland if we are to be successful at international level. In this context, I trust that the men in charge at Murrayfield have taken care to secure contractual agreement that a third Scottish pro team will be accepted into the Magners League when we are in a position to form one. This is particularly important in view of the admission of two Italian clubs in season 2010-11, for that will raise the number of clubs in the league to 12 and there may be some opposition in Wales and Ireland to adding a 13th. So we need a binding commitment.
We must also work to ease the transition from age-group representative rugby to senior level. This means making the academy system better than it seems to be now and improving liaison between Premiership 1 clubs and the professional game – something not easy to achieve since it requires a delicate balancing of interests. At present clubs rarely know till late in a week whether their players who are attached to the National Academy will be available to them or not. Moreover it's still very easy for players to be cut loose once they move out of age-group rugby. I was surprised – even shocked – to learn recently that one such player, after two years' experience in the FIRA junior World Cup, has had no contact with Murrayfield since he last played for Scotland under-20s.
We don't have a director of rugby who might oversee such matters, though it appears that the SRU chief executive Gordon McKie is to some extent filling the role in addition to his other duties. Yet a dozen years ago it was thought essential to have a director of rugby who was not occupied with dealing with the business side of the SRU. How have things changed so that this post is not now considered necessary? We have directors of all sorts of other things at Murrayfield, but no director of rugby, concerned only with the game and the players. Does this make sense?
We probably also need a full-time director of youth rugby, who should be charged also with keeping track of the development of young players once they have moved out of age-group rugby. There was a suggestion on Thursday that Frank Hadden will be offered a new post within the SRU. Given his background, experience, and ability to pay the closest attention to detail, he is an obvious candidate for the post of director of youth rugby. I hope the job is created and offered to him, and that he is not too soured or disillusioned by his treatment at the hands of sections of the media and some of the more vociferous contributors to websites to accept it.
The full article contains 896 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
