by David Kenny
The media circus rolled on. On Monday, Philip Browne, a highly paid chief executive, was wheeled out on RTÉ News to tell the nation that the IRFU were going to stick with O’Sullivan. Just like the press conference announcing the coach’s four-year extension before the World Cup, Browne spoke little sense and appeared to entirely misjudge the mood of rugby supporters out there. He spoke of how ‘three bad matches’ – we make it eight in a row now – hadn’t changed what O’Sullivan had achieved over the past four to five years and that he didn’t want a situation like in Wales, who were looking for their thirteenth coach in twenty years.
He’s right on that count. Why on earth would the IRFU want to be like the Welsh, an international side whose stylish Grand Slam win in 2005 eclipses anything O’Sullivan has ever done with Ireland? No, he’s right. It’s better to go out of the World Cup with a whimper having scored just eight tries than to go out having played a full part in the game of this World Cup, or possibly any World Cup, having amassed twenty-three tries. No, no, we don’t want to be like Wales.
That kind of talk makes us extremely worried about the upcoming review into Ireland’s World Cup performance. As far as we understand it, and it’s not that straight-forward, it will work a little something like this. All the different people in charge of the many elements of Team Ireland – rugby, medical, logistics, fitness, communications and so – will each write a report on their respective areas of responsibility and those files will be sent to Lansdowne Road for the relevant committees to peruse at their leisure. As we understand it, Eddie O’Sullivan will not have to stand in front of anybody and explain himself. He’ll only have to appear in person and open his mouth if the people reading his particular report, the appointments committee as far as we know, need some more answers. We bet they won’t need them. So to sum up, we’re going to have O’Sullivan justifying himself on paper to three people – Neilly Jackson, Pat Whelan and Noel Murphy – who’ll be willing to accept any kind of waffle to justify their own decision to award him a four-year contract extension. As far as interrogation goes, it won’t exactly be Guantanamo Bay. It’s going to be a complete whitewash.
And after that? Rumours have been going about the place these past few weeks that the rest of the Irish management team were unhappy with the fact that O’Sullivan looked after himself in the contract stakes and left the rest of his colleagues in limbo. Rumours? How could the rest of the management team be anything but unhappy at the contract situation?
It’s funny that O’Sullivan has claimed the consistency of the past few years as his own achievement but the moment things go askew it’s someone else’s fault. For example, after the French game the coach blamed discipline on the pitch (the players’ responsibility) and Ireland’s creaky line-out (Niall O’Donovan’s job) for the defeat.
Surely a strong character like O’Donovan, and others on the coaching staff, must be thinking of walking away from it all now. Not only have they not received any recognition from the union for what this regime is supposed to have achieved over the past few years, they’re constantly dumped upon by their most senior colleague when things go wrong. However, it’s only by thinking about the situation they’re in that you understand why they haven’t rocked the boat. If any of them resigned their posts, they’d be blacklisted by the IRFU and would struggle to get a job in any of the provincial set-ups. The whole system is farcical. It’s like communist China out there.
Piss-off the authorities, the IRFU in this case, and you could be blacklisted and put under house arrest for the rest of your career.
Meanwhile, the big boss gets away scot free. Not once during, or after, this World Cup has O’Sullivan held his hands up and taken responsibility for anything. At Sunday’s post-match press conference, the coach, still a little rattled by the surprise of being asked if he was going to reconsider his position, finally admitted that he felt his players might have been short of rugby going into the tournament.
It was the coach’s eureka moment. Finally, after four weeks of attempting to put his finger on what was going on with his off-colour side, he came up with some sort of explanation, but he still didn’t exactly claim it was his fault. There’s been a stunning lack of accountability from the coach throughout the whole competition and while Brian O’Driscoll did the decent thing on Sunday and claimed that the players were responsible for everything that went wrong, the guy sitting beside him kept his mouth shut and allowed his captain’s words to drift into the air without any company. Yet another example of poor man-management.
So what should be done? If they weren’t so far up their own backsides, the IRFU would now be looking for a new head coach, one with southern hemisphere coaching experience if possible. As we mentioned last week, every team that has performed to any degree so far at this World Cup has employed a coaching team rich in cross-hemisphere coaching experience. It’s only the unions who struggle to see past their own noses, the RFU and IRFU in particular, who believe that they simply have to appoint a native as national coach.
Again, we stress the fact that there’s nothing wrong whatsoever with having an Irish coach of the Irish team but by the same logic, there’s nothing wrong with having a foreign coach of our national side either. It’s about picking the right man for the job and right now it appears as though our mentally weary players could do with the influence of somebody who’s experienced rugby somewhere other than Ireland or Britain.
Instead of considering this kind of option, however, the IRFU seem intent on doing the best ostrich impersonation they can manage, and hope that by the time they spit the last of the sand from their mouths, everything will be okay.
In the meantime, the WRU will be headhunting the best available, or soon to be available, coach in the world to succeed Gareth Jenkins. Warren Gatland’s name has been mentioned and it would appear from his comments this week that the former Irish and Wasps coach is up for the job. Jake White, another technically excellent coach, might also come into contention if he, as predicted, quits the Springboks after the World Cup. Nick Mallett might have been another contender only for the fact that Italy signed him up first.
What will be interesting to observe during the 2008 Six Nations is how the rapid-fire decision-makers out there, Wales and Italy, fare in comparison to Ireland. If O’Sullivan’s side can’t beat both of these sides at Croke Park, serious questions will have to be asked. In truth, if Ireland can’t produce at least four out of five victories next spring, as he has done over the past two Six Nations campaigns, then the logical thing for the IRFU will be to hand him his cards.
Then again, no decision they make ever again can surprise us. Even if O’Sullivan catches nothing, he’ll probably still be retained.
Lost legacy
Clive Woodward’s credibility as a coach is in serious doubt after the Lions’ 38-19 defeat to New Zealand closes a disastrous tour.
10 July 2005
As the series trophy presentation took place in front of the Main Stand at Eden Park yesterday, Clive Woodward strolled around shaking hands with his defeated players. For a lot of them, it was probably for the first time and that’s not an exaggeration. A number of squad members have been commenting in recent days about how little they’ve spoken to the Lions coach over the course of the past six weeks.
With the tour at an end and Woodward’s credibility as a rugby coach in serious doubt, they’re probably thanking their lucky stars that they haven’t had their minds filled with the doublespeak and nonsense that routinely emerges from his mouth. There was yet more of it after the game when Woodward declared that his squad are ‘better people, better players’ at the end of this six-week tour but perhaps the New Zealand inflection of his statement – they pronounce ‘e’ as ‘i’ in this part of the world – gives a more accurate reflection as to what state of mind the Lions travel home in today.
Because no matter how much the squad have enjoyed their stay in the land of the long white cloud, they can’t be happy with the direction the test se
ries has taken and yesterday’s 38-19 defeat in Auckland can only have served to emphasise this point further.
There have been so many glaringly obvious tactical errors from Woodward over the past few weeks, the squad have surely lost whatever faith they ever had in their frontman.
The post-series statistics tell us everything we need to know about the gulf in tactical ambition and class between the two sides and, indeed, the two sets of coaching teams. If the three games are totted up in aggregate fashion, the All Blacks would have won 107-40, a tally that we know could have been a lot more had the heavens not opened up during the first test in Christchurch. It’s a similar story with the try count after the three tests, the All Blacks scoring four times as many tries as their visitors, 12-3 the figure confirmed by the tallymen. ‘I’m not sure what the final try count was in this one; I’ve lost count,’ said Graham Henry as he reminded the assembled media that his much-maligned Lions side of 2001 shared fourteen tries with Australia over the course of the test series.
So the All Blacks collected their Waterford Crystal trophy – the glass, not the horse – although the Lions supporters would have been forgiven for wondering whether the thoroughbreds in the New Zealand line-up had needed their urine looking at in the past few months. Take Tana Umaga for one. The captain has been immense all series, as a battering ram, as a tackler, as an evasive runner, as a leader – as everything you could ever desire from a rugby player.
Yesterday he scored two tries from close range and it was strange that when he spent time in the sin bin early in the game, his side actually appeared to get better, scoring tries through Conrad Smith and Ali Williams to swing the tide. And that was the story of the game really.
Beforehand, there was a lovely balance to the Lions side with five players from each of England, Ireland and Wales in the starting lineup, and the test team truly became the power of four when Gordon Bulloch took to the paddock with one minute of normal time on the clock. But while yesterday’s side never let themselves down as individuals, the team effort was much less than the sum of its parts.
They appeared tired and disjointed as the game wore on but to their immense credit, they never folded to fully allow a youthful All Blacks side, in which debutant out-half Luke McAlister contributed magnificently, to truly run riot.
Before it all, there was an impeccably observed minute’s silence for the victims of the London bombings, an event that has had an undeniable effect on the mood of the masses of Lions supporters in Auckland these past few days. However, they still had enough left to get behind their team with the same ferocity and passion as they have since the tour’s opening game. In all truth, they’ve been the only positive contribution from Britain and Ireland to this test series.
Graham Henry praised the supporters’ efforts after the game and he even managed to fit in a bit of canvassing for the New Zealand bid for the 2011 World Cup. But the last word of a bizarre tour had to go to Woodward, and the head coach proved that he wasn’t all out of crazy just yet. ‘If I was brutally honest I’d bring more players on a tour like this and I’d play more games. When I say more games, I’d try to play on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and I’d try to make the Lions bigger and better.’
And with that the men in the white coats came in to wheel him away. Well, not really but it wouldn’t have looked at all out of place.
Best of luck Southampton FC.
GER SIGGINS
Cricket World Cup murder
The murder of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, strangled in his hotel room, was a shocking end to a glittering life.
25 March 2007
The turbulent city of Kingston is still awash with incredible rumours about the Cricket World Cup murder. The strangling of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer – hours after Ireland had knocked his team out of the competition – has shocked the world and brought the issue of the purity of professional sport into question once more.
On Thursday night, four-and-a-half days after his body was found by a hotel chambermaid, the Jamaican police finally announced that Woolmer had been asphyxiated by manual strangulation.
At a press conference in front of hundreds of reporters, ex-Scotland Yard detective Mark Shields told how a person or persons unknown had gained access to Woolmer’s room on the twelfth floor and killed him with such force that a bone was broken in his neck. Woolmer was a big man, 6 ft 1" and over 18 stone. It wouldn’t have been easy to kill him. The police are following several lines of inquiry but have yet to detain a suspect.
They believe the coach knew his killer and say that ‘those associated with or having access to Mr Woolmer may have vital information that would assist us with our inquiry’.
Kingston has had an unwanted reputation for many years. From the seventeenth-century buccaneers to modern-day Yardie drug gangs, it is a city where violent death is common. One-hundred-and forty people were murdered in January alone, in a city with a population of 660,000.
The Pegasus in New Kingston is a busy international hotel. The flags of the competing nations fly in the lobby, which has been converted to a cricket theme for the fortnight that the city hosts six World Cup matches. But the prosperous and comfortable facade cannot hide the fact that the violence of the city outside has found its way inside the hotel’s doors. Two years ago an American air steward was murdered in his room at the hotel.
After the game last Saturday, Woolmer and his team pulled up in their team bus outside the Pegasus just as a bus taking Irish supporters and media to an out-of-town party drove away. It was 7.30 p.m.
Woolmer went to the bar just off the lobby and had two bottles of the local beer, Red Stripe. At 8.30 p.m. he retired for the evening. It had been a long and stressful day ... the team bus had left for the ground at 7 a.m. that morning for the 9.30 a.m. match against Ireland. It is not known what he did in his room but he logged onto the internet and sent an email to his wife Gill at 3.12 a.m. She said he was fine, albeit upset about the loss to Ireland. The last email he sent was to his ghostwriter Ivo Tennant. It read:
‘We might have to do this from afar. I don’t know what is going to happen next. We will first play our game against Zimbabwe and then fly back to Pakistan. This will give me more time to work on my book on coaching.
The articles will have to be more general from now on.
Thanks Bob
PS: What a miserable day it has been.
Almost as bad as Edgbaston, 1999! [In 1999, South Africa lost the World Cup semi-final to Australia off the last ball of the game.]’
Whatever happened in room 374 over the next few hours is now under intense scrutiny by Jamaican police. What is known is there were no signs of forcible entry and nothing was stolen from the room. Woolmer’s body was discovered by a chambermaid at 10.45 a.m. He was rushed to hospital and declared dead thirty minutes later.
The Pakistan team’s media manager, PJ Mir, told reporters that Woolmer was naked and there was blood, vomit and faeces on his body.
Rooms on the twelfth floor are larger than those in the rest of the hotel and were thus allocated to senior members of each squad and those requiring extra space, such as physiotherapists. Four of the Irish party were billeted there: captain Trent Johnston, coach Adrian Birrell, his assistant Matt Dwyer and physio Iain Knox, although all four were absent that night.
The hotel’s security was lax before the killing. I visited batsman Jeremy Bray in his room the night before the Ireland v Pakistan match and was able to do so without any scrutiny.
Since Woolmer’s death, there have been uniformed guards stationed at each of the three lifts, who travel upwards with guests, who must show a pass key.
It was a shocking end to a glittering life spent travelling the world playing and coaching the game in a way that brought him great respect and affection. Bob Woolmer was a global figure, a man whose innovative techniques brought him to the top jobs at South Africa and Pakistan – he may have been in line to coach England – and who had homes in all three countries.
Two nights before he died, Bob Woolmer was in good spirits. A big, jolly character with one of those odd accents beaten into shape by a career that took him all round the world – he was born in India and educated in England. He was holding court.
The Belisario Suite of the Pegasus Hotel was the venue for a reception hosted by the Pakistan team for the international media.
Woolmer had not been having an easy ride from the Pakistani media and his team was the most controversial in the game. Two star fast bowlers, Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammed Asif, failed drug tests last year and both dropped out of the World Cup squad on the same day, shortly before the competition. Injury was cited as the reason but no one believed that story.
Their captain, Inzamam ul-Haq, was the man who caused a test match to be abandoned in England last summer when he refused to accept an umpire’s ruling that he had cheated by altering the condition of the ball.
When I arrived at the press reception it was winding down but it was still disconcerting to see the room divided into brown and white factions. The Asian pressmen stuck to themselves, lined up along one wall while Woolmer talked to the Irish and UK press at the other.
He sucked on his bottle of beer and was very entertaining in the short time I spoke with him. He gave a passable impression of an Irish accent in imitation of a fellow reporter, so I dared him to do the impression at the post-match conference the following day. He laughed and suggested he might say, ‘I tought tree-tree-tree for tree was a good enough score.’ The following day his team got nowhere near 333, being bowled out by Ireland for 132. I was tempted to throw his joke back at him but thought better of it.
He talked about the book he was working on, and the analysis he had done on the great players of the past. Woolmer’s work with computers revolutionised cricket coaching over the last decade and he talked about this too.