The best coaches need to possess right personality

A player can be bought but rarely, if ever, can a team.

Gerald Davies won 46 caps for Wales, scoring 20 tries, a record that stood for many years. He undoubtably would have added to his 5 Lions caps had he not declined the invitation to tour in 1974 and 1977. Here he argues, in the Sunday Times, that man-management and personality take precedence over knowledge or experience as attributes that the great coaches have.

THE revival of Saracens, who take on Leeds tonight in the Guinness Premiership, has been attributed to the work of Eddie Jones, the former Australia coach, brought in as a consultant when relegation threatened.

Though Jones is due to return to the southern hemisphere at the end of the season, his short tenure at Vicarage Road has thrown the role of the coach into sharp relief. He is either seen as possessing the magical quality of turning dross into gold or else thought to reverse the process. There is little middle ground. The coach is either sorcerer or charlatan.

Wales are in search of a replacement for one who, briefly, seemed to have been blessed with the golden touch and won a grand slam, while England, having enjoyed the presence of a man who delivered a dazzling pearl of a prize in 2003, are debating which path they should choose for their way forward.

Success apparently is the only measure, winning the only option. Coaching is a career balanced constantly on a knife’s edge. A series of misses and close shaves, despite perhaps fine performances in all of them, can mark the end of a coach’s career in the wink of an eye. It is a precarious business.

Tony Grey coached the Wales team who won the triple crown in fine style in 1988 and shared the Five Nations Championship with France. They went to New Zealand and lost two matches against the All Blacks, the world’s dominant team at the time and the holders of the World Cup. Grey lost his job because of the two defeats. He must have felt it the unkindest of cuts.

Conversely there is another way. There is a time to take stock, which England carefully did under duress in 1999. Clive Woodward lost to South Africa in the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Paris. The Springbok victory rested on the highly improbable achievement of five dropped goals by Jannie de Beer. Woodward’s head was called for. Strong and famous men, keeping their cool heads at Twickenham while others were losing theirs elsewhere, came to his defence and rescued him. Woodward is now a knight of the realm.

Coaches are never far away from the headlines. Beyond the captain and the players, this late-arriving breed in rugby has acquired a status that would hardly have been thought of when the nod was given to allow teams to be trained and prepared in the 1960s. At Murrayfield, he was named “adviser to the captain�.

We must be certain what is required nowadays. A coach can coach the team with the help of others. Or he can be defined a head coach who chooses others to carry out specific roles. He might be a manager overseeing others who would have well-defined technical roles.

Carwyn James, in the 1970s, sought to enhance what he defined as “the culture of the coach�. This was perceived then as a man who explained the finer points of the game. It has moved on from then. The system has become so sophisticated that there are now “cultures� in the plural. It is unwise any longer to think in terms of one individual coach who is expected to know all the answers. It is about managing an extremely delicate process; of the balance of technical know-how and of the relationship between personalities, and of experience gained.

The best of their kind are those who can fashion a team, can make an ordinary player good, a good player brilliant. These are coaches who are hard to come by and should be cherished.

A player can be bought but rarely, if ever, can a team. A contract cannot bind players to a spirit, whatever the financial bonuses may be. The well- designed contract can only provide a motivation so far. It is what the player believes within himself and how much he cares about his talent, his jersey and his companions in arms that insists he make the extra mile. Like the best teachers, the coach draws out, rather than shouts for, the right answers. This brings judgment.

Intrinsic motivation is stronger than extrinsic. It is what stiffens the sinews, it is what holds the line. It is what Frank Hadden has managed in Scotland. Perhaps this is also what Jones has instilled at Saracens, a club who hitherto appeared consistently to underachieve despite high-profile coaches, former players in the main.

Technical knowledge is by and large a constant and there are experts to dispense it. Man-management, however, is the elusive key. A manual can provide the key indicators, as business-speak has it. This has to do with personality, but personalities differ and cannot be uniformly defined nor follow a set of rules. There is no prototype, no mould.

When all the talk of coaches is over, knowledge, experience and personality abide and of these three I fancy the greatest is personality. It is what binds the team. Personality can carry the day if one of the other two is lacking. Without this, the other two will falter.