Kidney and Boyd show coaches are worth weight in gold in Premiership

When Bristol took on London Irish at Ashton Gate on Sunday, it was the first time the two clubs had met in the Premiership for 10 years. One or other had been in the Championship in that time, mainly the Bears, and the presence of the two most recently promoted clubs in the top half of the Premiership is an indication of how the salary cap is working.

The top four clubs have all had stints in the Championship in the past 12 years while the bottom four have always been in the Premiership: Saracens are bottom because they lost 35 points for breaching the league’s salary cap regulations, but Leicester, Wasps and Bath, former European Cup winners all, have mustered four victories in 15 matches in the tournament this season, although between them they supplied 12 players for England’s World Cup campaign.

Leicester had them all back at Northampton last weekend and it did not seem to make a jot of difference as they suffered a fourth Premiership defeat, none of which yielded a bonus point. The result took the Saints to the top of the table where they stayed after Bristol drew with opponents who played the second half with 14 men.

London Irish and Worcester were expected to contest the drop this season, but after five rounds both are in the top half of the table. The deal with CVC has given clubs whose average attendances are considerably lower than the likes of Leicester the means to spend up to the salary cap and Irish were unrecognisable from their last Premiership campaign two years ago when they lost 14 matches in a row on their way to an immediate return to the second tier.

With the salary cap acting as a counterweight to the financial muscle of some and the weakness of others, coaching helps make a difference. The Exiles have the former Ireland coach Declan Kidney in charge, backed up by Les Kiss, and their experience showed at Bristol where Irish in the first half only played in opposition territory and trusted their defensive line but in the second, with the prop Ollie Hoskins having been sent off, kept the ball in hand to minimise the impact of the missing brick in their wall. Pat Lam has done remarkably well at Bristol, but Kidney came out on top on Sunday with a coaching masterclass.

The World Cup showed the difference high-calibre coaches make. Premier League football is going through one of its more frequently recurring phases where a few matches without a victory means questions are asked about a manager’s future, never mind that the riches enjoyed by that league mean that even the smallest club have the means to assemble a talented, competitive squad.

An unsuccessful streak is seen as evidence that the players at that club are not good enough, but as Carwyn James observed before taking the 1971 Lions to New Zealand, where they were expected to come a distant second to the All Blacks, the successful coach makes his players believe they are better than they are. The reverse tends to be true at struggling sides.

Leicester, after staring relegation in the face last season, should be wondering why they, and not Northampton, did not make a move for Chris Boyd, who coached the Hurricanes to the 2016 Super Rugby title. The New Zealander arrived in England just before the start of last season at the club that had been, in playing terms, the Premiership’s most conservative and risk-averse.

Seeking contact rather than space had brought them success earlier in the decade, but that had long faded and they were muddling along in the bottom half before approaching a coach who encouraged players to look for space and play with their heads up. It took a while for players to acclimatise to the winds of change and when the Saints were beaten by Leicester at Twickenham 14 months ago, it was their 16th defeat in 22 Premiership matches: relegation form.

They have won seven of their last nine and, if Boyd himself says there is still a way to go, and Saturday’s Champions Cup match at home to Leinster should reveal how far, they are far removed from the highly structured automatons that he inherited. Bath are another who should take note, a club not short on ability that play by numbers on a bog of a pitch.

Unless Irish or Worcester collapse, a giant will go down. If the table reads the same with five rounds to go as it does now, they will be twitching in boardrooms. If it is hard to see anyone advocating ring-fencing to prevent Saracens from dropping into the Championship, although clubs who told Saracens to accept their punishment and not appeal should now take their own advice and regard that matter as closed while Premiership Rugby polices this season’s cap, but Leicester, and their army of fans, going down would be another matter. The cost would be felt by everyone.

Do Leicester, a club whose slow, steady decline became precipitous because problems were not addressed, deserve saving? This could be the most enthralling, ghoulish relegation battle yet, an attraction the Pro14 lacks. In France, Stade Français are bottom of the pile in the Top 14, the grandees laid low, and with the recent investment into the game something could be done about bolstering the Championship to better prepare teams for promotion.

Bristol could have gone back to the top of the table on Sunday on points difference from Northampton. Lam still has work to do, but he was an inspired appointment. What separates the top from the bottom (taking out Saracens) is coaching: the right appointment provides a better return than any marquee player.

Ruddock returns to Wales with struggling Ospreys

Wales’s 2005 grand slam-winning coach Mike Ruddock has returned to the country for the first time since his abrupt departure 13 years ago. He has accepted a month’s consultancy at Ospreys, the region that carried what passed for a Welsh flag in Europe but is now slumped at half-mast.

Fewer than 2,500 spectators turned up at the Gnoll to watch their latest defeat last weekend. It marked the end of an extraordinary week in which the region’s head coach Allen Clarke had apparently been relieved of his duties but no Ospreys executive would say anything about it.

So when a coach, Matt Sherratt, and a player, James Hook, turned up as the region’s representatives at a Pro14 event in Cardiff last week, they were asked by journalists what was going on. If supporters were in the dark, the pair were operating by candlelight and said they were not sure what was going on.

When the Ospreys board eventually faced the media two days later, their managing director, Andrew Millward, took aim at the press for asking Sherratt and Hook about the Clarke affair rather than rugby, repeating how disappointed he was.

Never mind that they were exactly the questions Ospreys’ supporters would have asked had they been at the event, but what do fans matter? There may be legal reasons for Ospreys’ lack of information over what has happened to Clarke, who remains in talks with the region, but they, not the media, have handed the issue poorly.

It will be familiar to Ruddock whose departure from Wales also contained a number of unanswered questions. He is expecting to return to Dublin and coaching duties at Lansdowne Road at the end of the month. It will take a lot to convince him to stay.

Still want more?

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“My wife asked if I would change anything. I told her I wouldn’t have done anything differently in the week leading up to the game. I wouldn’t have changed anything the team did, meetings, anything.” Ben Youngs talks to Robert Kitson about the World Cup final and more.

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