by Peter Burns
THREE
THE ANATOMY OF A COACH
‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.’
Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’
HENLEY RUGBY CLUB’S Dry Leas ground in the world-famous rowing regatta town of Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, is a postcard setting, as quintessentially romantic a home of English sport as can be imagined. On a mild August night in 1990 a gentle breeze shifted through the trees that lined the river a few hundred yards from the ground, carrying all the rich smells of summer across the beautifully manicured pitches towards the old clubhouse. But something unusual was taking place to disturb the usual calm of this rural idyll.
The speakers built into the stand as part of the club’s PA system crackled. A whine of feedback howled through the quiet evening and startled a flock of birds into flight from the riverside foliage. The door to the clubhouse swung open and out trooped every playing member of the club, ready for pre-season training, the studs of their boots clacking on the dry ground as they made their way down to the area of the pitch just in front of the stand and formed themselves into a series of makeshift rows.
A young woman, dressed predominantly in Lycra, followed them out and then took up a position in the space between the rows of players and the stand. She was beaming at their bemused and, in some cases, palpably terrified faces.
‘OK!’ she called out with a clap of her hands. ‘Just follow my lead – this is going to be so much fun! Just try to keep up... and enjoy yourselves!’
She waved an arm to a figure in the clubhouse who turned to a CD player hooked up to the PA system and pressed play.
‘The Power’ by Snap! screeched out of the speakers, filling the evening air, and the Lycra-clad aerobics instructor began her routine – and forty men in a ragbag assortment of different rugby shirts, T-shirts and shorts tried to keep up as best they could.
Leaning against one of the posts watching proceedings, a clipboard in one hand, a whistle draped around his neck, and with a satisfied smile on his face, stood Clive Woodward.
Just six months earlier, Woodward had known little or nothing about Henley RFC, the club just a few miles from his new home in Pinkneys Green. Then, one evening, completely out of the blue, he received a call from an old Loughborough teammate, Mike Poulson, who was a player-coach at the club, which played in South-West Division Two. Poulson had heard about Woodward’s return from Australia and wondered if he would be interested in coming down to the club to give a talk to the players about his time Down Under. At first Woodward was reluctant but he could think of no real reason to decline the request.
He turned up one evening and observed training, gave a small talk to the players about his experiences in Australia and made a few suggestions on how to improve one or two aspects of their training. He enjoyed the interaction and the response he had from the players. After attending a few more training sessions on this casual basis, he started to watch their games on a Saturday and he and his family soon got heavily involved in the social scene at the club. It was a relaxing change of focus from work and the Woodwards enjoyed the welcoming embrace of the club community. As the summer approached, Poulson cornered him at a club barbecue and asked him if he would be interested in taking on the head coach position for the following season. Much to Woodward’s own surprise, he agreed.
While he had been in Australia, the RFU had moved to establish an organised structure to the whole club game in England by setting up a pyramid league system. There is little doubt that the concept of taking part in a competition that would matter week in week out, with relegation and promotion at the end of the season, would have appealed to Woodward’s competitive instincts. There would be a tangible sense of achievement, of driving for a goal, which stimulated a very basic instinct in his psyche – and he was soon completely hooked by coaching. As he had done with his business career, he threw himself into the challenge; he was as focused on making a success of his time at Henley as he was of making a success of Sales Finance and Leasing – and, consequently, there would be no half-measures in his attitude or his dedication.
He approached coaching as Alan Jones had – in a businesslike manner, drawing on all his experience, all his accumulated knowledge and all his resources and folding them into a philosophy inspired by his love of football and the attitudes of Earle Kirton, Jim Greenwood and Chalkie White – and in direct contrast to that of his England playing days. Above all else he wanted his players to enjoy their rugby, to have fun with the ball and to play with smiles on their faces. A tight, forwards-orientated game plan wouldn’t achieve this. An aspiration to play Total Rugby would. It was a lofty ambition to have for a team in such a lowly league as South-West Division Two, but he saw no reason to limit his ambitions for the team just because of the league they were playing in.
Having tried and failed to come in and foster his own way of doing things in the Xerox office in Sydney, he knew that he had to take time to understand the playing culture at Henley and what the players wanted. He would then build that into his plan for developing their game and aiming for promotion from the league. He also realised that the key to success didn’t just lie with the first XV squad. Henley was a club and he needed to involve (or at least make feel involved) every player in every team, all the committee members and volunteers, the supporters, sponsors and the players’ families. They were all part of the club and if they worked together then there would be a solid bedrock from which to build consistent and continued success.
One of his first tasks was to set about analysing the team’s previous tactical structures and the players at his disposal. In so doing he recognised that they had talent but that their basic skills were flawed and they could be forced into making serious errors if pressed by an aggressive defence, if they were tiring towards the end of a game or if play broke down and became disorganised chaos. So from the first pre-season training session he went back to basics, focusing on simple handling drills and getting the fundamental tactical elements of the game right. If the game broke down it wasn’t the time to panic – when the defence is caught wrong-footed, when predictability goes out of the window, it is the perfect opportunity to attack.
He wanted to make sure there was fun in everything that they did. Thus the aerobics instructor. It was additional fitness and co-ordination work for his players, hidden in the guise of fun. It also allowed his players an opportunity to shed inhibitions in front of one another, have a laugh and, as a result, bond as a team. It was his first outside-the-box piece of coaching; it would not be his last.
One of the main objectives, however, for focusing so specifically on developing their handling skills was his ambition to introduce the flat-line back play that he had learnt in Australia. It would be difficult for his players to learn and then implement the style and it was high-risk because if it went wrong they would be horribly exposed in defence. But he also knew that there were high rewards for the team if they got it right – no defence they would come up against would be able to handle it if they executed accurately, and the players would derive so much enjoyment from it.
He knew that it was important not to override the senses with a flood of new ideas, so he gradually introduced things at training over a period of time. This allowed the players to adapt to each new phase of their development and also kept them fresh and interested throughout the entirety of the season.
There is a story that Woodward tells in his autobiography that demonstrates perfectly his efforts to get the players thinking differently – while also forcing them into executing his tactical shift to the flat-line all-out attack.
‘A month or two into the season I banned any form of kicking during play. Without kicking, you have to play the ball in your hands. When the pressure was really on, that was actually the time to keep hold of the ball, not kick it away. But a lot of the players were terrified of playing under pressure... That’s
the time when people with less skill tend to collapse under the pressure of it all. Pressure is wonderfully revealing in that way. When the pressure is on, there is just no place to hide on the pitch. I loved it. The players hated it – at first – but very quickly we became good at playing this way. If we did not become skilled at this very quickly we would be at the bottom of the table, but if we could get it right we’d be at the top. It was compelling.’
An analysis of this story is revealing for it not only gives a fascinating insight into Woodward’s psychology but also the management style that would come to define his coaching career. It shows his inherent belief in what has been termed a ‘growth mindset’, a psychological approach that is often inherently present in the most successful individuals in life, from business to music to education to sport.
Carol Dweck is a professor of psychology at Stanford University who has dedicated much of her career to researching and understanding the growth mindset. Her illuminating book, Mindset, pitches the notion that there are two types of mindset when it comes to an individual’s intelligence, talents and personality – a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.
In a fixed mindset, an individual believes that their basic qualities, such as sporting talent, intelligence or ability to play music, are inherent traits – natural abilities that they are born with. If they believe that they are naturally in possession of these traits, they do not work with the relentless dedication required to achieve consistent levels of excellence in their given field; when they come up against obstacles or experience failure, they blame the limitations of their apparently inherent nature. Those with a growth mindset, however, believe that through sustained and dedicated effort these qualities can be developed; when they come up against obstacles or experience failure, they teach themselves new ways to improve and push themselves onwards to greater success. The growth mindset is perhaps best summarised by Thomas Edison when he said, ‘If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.’
So it was the case with Woodward and his coaching philosophy. By placing an almost complete ban on kicking at Henley he encouraged his charges to find other ways to negotiate their way out of a problem, to think differently – to think positively about the game at all times. They had to find space, they had to identify weaknesses in the opposition, they had to think their way out of trouble and they had to develop their handling and running skills to allow them to execute their escape strategies. Although Carol Dweck spent two decades studying fixed and growth mindsets, she did not publish Mindset until 2006, so Woodward had no knowledge of her studies. It is fascinating to see that he is typical of someone with a growth mindset – a subject that we will return to later.
Henley narrowly missed out on promotion in Woodward’s first full season in charge, but their game dramatically improved and they won the last eight matches of the season, as well as the Oxfordshire Cup. They were still in a transitional phase under his guidance and there were some inevitable teething problems as they adapted to the new style of play he was trying to implement, but they were developing all the time – Edison would have been proud. And the way they were training and playing was attracting a lot of attention in rugby circles; by the end of that first season there was a groundswell of new players eager to join the club.
Turning his focus to his second season at the helm, Woodward continued his player development, knowing that the most successful teams are ones that are led by the players themselves with only guidance from the coach. Player empowerment was crucial for this to happen. He assigned responsibilities to senior players for various key aspects of the game – line-outs, scrums, penalties and defence – and gave them copies of Jim Greenwood’s Total Rugby for encouragement. Thereafter they would make reports at pre-training meetings, analysing their areas with regard to the previous week’s game and offering solutions on how to improve aspects of their play. He was determined to replicate Greenwood’s vision – just as he had experienced it in Australia.
It wasn’t only on the training ground and in matches that he implemented new standards at the club. He insisted that the team wore matching off-field team-wear so that all the players felt as one – and showed a united front and professional appearance to the opposition teams and their own supporters. He also asked that the players try to remain as responsible as possible when it came to drinking after away games. He didn’t want anything to bring embarrassment to the team or to distract from their focus on winning. He aimed for high standards across every facet of their association with the club.
While the Henley players were making great strides towards playing the flat-line attack, the technique was still in need of some refinement. In another show of lateral thinking and of bringing in outside expertise, Woodward recruited two former teammates from Manly, Rob Gallacher and James Perrignon, to join the club for the 1992–93 season. The primary reason was to help continue the development of the flat-line back play, but their quality and experience also helped to significantly raise the standards of those around them in both training and in games. As a reflection of just how good the imports were, both continued to play for Manly’s first team for a number of seasons after their return to Australia and, in a further testament to his quality, Gallacher was eventually selected for the Wallaby squad.
Henley went unbeaten throughout that second season and comfortably won promotion to South-West Division One. This launched a run of unprecedented success as they continued to push on through the leagues year by year, winning the Oxfordshire Cup every season before eventually breaking through to the national leagues in 1994. Their success was turning heads all over the country and Rugby Special showcased a feature on them – with an interview with Woodward at its core. The club’s playing numbers had grown out of all proportion to the base that had been there when Woodward arrived. It was, without doubt, a remarkable success story.
*
After a long and difficult season in 1994–95, London Irish were relegated from England’s First Division. Amid the gloomy pall that hung over the club, their coach, the former New Zealand hooker Hika Reid, quit his position and several top players, including a number of Ireland internationals, began to jump ship to other clubs that were still in the top flight. All of a sudden the club were rudderless and staring into oblivion. With no coach, a sudden vacuum in the senior player department, and a culture of disappointment and defeatism now deeply rooted throughout the club, London Irish were facing the prospect of a drastic and continued downward spiral. For one of the world’s grand old clubs, everything looked to be falling to pieces; they were in a deep crisis.
Ann Heaver, who worked for Woodward at Sales Finance and Leasing – and, in truth, by 1995, was essentially running the whole operation with Jayne Woodward while Clive spent the majority of his time and energy concentrating on rugby – was a passionate London Irish fan. Acutely aware of the club’s plight, she had an epiphany: Woodward should apply for the available head coach role. She contacted Mike Gibson, the Ireland and Lions legend who was in charge of the playing side at the club, spoke glowingly of Woodward as a boss, a man and of his success with Henley, and suggested that Gibson get in touch with him – which he duly did.
When being shown around the club’s impressive stadium at The Avenue in Sunbury-on-Thames, Woodward explained to Gibson that he would be interested in taking on the job, but only if he was allowed to do things his way. He had to have complete control of how the team was organised and run, complete control of selection and even control of player recruitment – including the ability to bring in players who had no connection to Ireland. They were reasonable demands, totally in keeping with anything that any modern coach would expect to be granted. These conditions, and the last in particular, would prove thorny, but the club acquiesced to his demands and he was named head coach in the summer of 1995.
One of his first acts at London Irish was to examine the playing roster and cle
ar out the dead wood, including encouraging the last remaining international on their books to move on – his public indecision about whether to stay or go was proving a huge distraction during pre-season preparations. Woodward had already proved himself an astute team builder in both business and rugby and he readily understood the negative influence that someone who is not 100 per cent dedicated to the cause can create.
He brought music and enjoyment to training and playing, just as he had done at Henley. The team trained to music, ran out on to the pitch before matches to music and music blared when they scored. Not only did it create an alien and intimidating environment for visiting teams, but it raised the spirits of the home players and encouraged a party atmosphere among the large, passionate and vocal support. Home games at London Irish were played in a carnival atmosphere – and the positive feelings that this engendered spread from the vociferous crowd to the players on the pitch.
The first season was almost a carbon copy of his first season at Henley. The team gradually bought into Woodward’s new way of thinking – which again he introduced incrementally – and they consolidated their position. And just as Henley had done, London Irish finished the season strongly, with their tails in the air. Woodward had managed to prevent a spiral into disaster, which can so often happen when a team is relegated and knows nothing but the feeling of defeat and desolation. The following season would be all about focusing on winning the Second Division and returning to the top flight.
