Mark McCall: The quiet Irishman behind Saracens’ success

There may be no Irish teams in European rugby’s semi-final weekend. There aren’t even that many Irish players, but there are quite a few Irish coaches. Geordie Murphy and Ronan O’Gara will no doubt have a pitch-side discussion as assistant coaches in advance of Leicester hosting Racing 92 in Nottingham tomorrow, as was assuredly the case when Conor O’Shea and Bernard Jackman (along with assistant Mike Prendergast) met as head coaches of Harlequins and Grenoble in their Challenge Cup semi-final at the Stoop last night.

Yet the one with the lowest profile is as successful abroad as any. As a director of rugby with Ulster and Saracens, Mark McCall has presided over three titles in two different leagues. This season, Saracens have reached the semi-finals of the European Champions Cup and Premiership play-offs for the fourth season in a row, earning home ties in both by dint of topping both the Premiership and their Euro group.

With 21 wins, a draw and just four defeats in 26 games, Saracens are by some distance the form team in Europe this season, and victory at home to Wasps today would put them within three games of a double.

Perhaps that would raise McCall’s stature in Ireland, not that he would look to increase his profile. He fulfils his weekly and post-match media duties with his customary good manners, but unlike some of his contemporaries, McCall does no punditry, and requests for interviews are politely declined with the response: “I’d rather not.”

Despite his many achievements as a coach and in contrast to, say, O’Shea, McCall’s name is rarely ever mentioned in despatches for vacancies in Irish rugby. Perhaps this is partly because he has already coached for a three-year stint. Thus, like O’Shea, whether he is ever likely to coach in Ireland again appears to remain a long shot for the time being.

Few Irish players pass through Saracens, although McCall and the club left an indelible impression on Peter Stringer when he spent three months on loan with the club four seasons ago.

“The first thing I noticed was how happy an environment it is, and that’s credit to him. He has an ability to keep a big squad really happy in the way he rotates players. You’re left in no doubt where you stand. You know four or five weeks in advance the games in which you’re going to be playing and whether you’re going to be starting or on the bench,” Stringer says.

“Yes, they have resources to bring in quality players and have great back-up in every position, but to be able to manage players of that calibre and be that consistent domestically and in Europe is a credit to him.”

Saracens aren’t known for their style, as no team is more effective at applying pressure through their kicking game and “wolf pack” defence and then translating turnovers into scores. But it is mightily effective.

“There’s a lot of negativity from the outside with the way Saracens play,” says Stringer. “His mindset, which he very much gets across to the players, is that if a certain thing is working and wins you games, that’s ultimately what you do.”

Ruthless efficiency

Expanding on the ruthless mentality McCall espouses at Saracens, Stringer says: “When they get into the lead other teams start to chase the game and cough up errors, and that’s what they want; they want you playing from inside your own 10-metre line and your own 22. That’s when they ramp up their line speed and force errors, then spread the ball wide to score tries”

Come into the parlour, said the spider to the fly. Perhaps no game demonstrated Sarries’ ruthless efficiency more than this weekend two years ago, when they beat Clermont 46-6 in the semi-finals at Twickenham while making three times as many tackles.

Stringer says: “What they’ve really added is the strength of their forward carriers, with [Mario] Otoje being added to the Vunipola brothers to get over the gain line; it takes three guys to bring some of these fellas down, taking teams through phases and then ultimately there’s going to be space for Chris Ashton and Chris Wyles to gain huge reward on the wings.”

McCall also seems quite content within the Saracens’ bubble and their “No one likes us but we don’t care” mentality. They host Wasps in the first of the weekend’s Champions Cup semi-finals this afternoon and his Wasps counterpart Dai Young, who has overseen a far more flamboyant title charge, spoke for many when labelling Saracens boring mid-way through the season. McCall responded defiantly by maintaining: “I genuinely don’t care.”

“If boring is having continuity with players and staff, then maybe we are. That’s a far cry from where we were six years ago, when people were just coming in and out of the door. The people are happy and the staff are happy. I’m pleased that we’ve got an identity of our own,” he said.

“There are a lot of disciplines in rugby. For me, there’s a bit of beauty in defence and pressurising opposition – as there’s beauty in scoring tries and moving the ball. You can’t just be good at one thing, you’ve got to be good at them all. If other teams change their game plan completely, then I don’t know what their players think of their original game plan. Six years ago, nobody cared about Saracens because they were ninth.”

Saracens’ unpopularity also stems from the Premiership Rugby investigation into breaches of the salary cap, for which they and Bath were widely implicated in the English media. Last October the issue was brought to a swift but unsatisfactory conclusion after lawyers representing Premier Rugby Ltd (PRL) were unable to prove a case against Saracens.

The PRL refused to say how many other clubs had charges against them dismissed and merely declared that “Premiership Rugby and the clubs have now resolved the issues identified and have entered into appropriate confidential settlements”.

PRL didn't even inform their own clubs of the amounts agreed or how the settlements were reached. Former England hooker Brian Moore wrote in his column in the Daily Telegraph at the time: "It is the cover-up that has done most damage and the cynicism it generated will be difficult to remove."

Coaching career

Like his friend David Humphreys, McCall never really seemed to plan for a career in coaching. He is the son of former Irish cricketer Conn McCall, who died in June 2002 and who made seven first-class appearances as a right-handed batsman.

From Bangor, the aptly nicknamed “Smally” captained all his sides from Bangor Grammar to Ulster, played 13 times for Ireland in midfield, making his debut in the summer tour of New Zealand in 1992 and winning the last of his caps in the “Battle of Pretoria” in the summer of 1998.

“A limited player size-wise but, as he is in life, he’s just so dedicated, determined, mentally strong and very intelligent,” says Jeremy Davidson, a former teammate at Ulster, London Irish and Ireland. “Guys like that can make it, and he’s like that as a coach as well.

“He’s a shrewd guy, he’s always on top of the game, he knows what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. He’s always meticulously prepared and one of the most important things is he gets on with everyone. He’s a tiny bit shy, but not in rugby. He wouldn’t be scared of telling a player what he thinks or being direct if he has to be. He has a hard edge to him that doesn’t come out very often because it doesn’t have to. He’s not the soft touch that some people thought he would have been before he took the Ulster job.”

Tough environment

A prolapsed disc forced McCall to retire at 31. As the injured Ulster captain, he and Humphreys lifted the European Cup trophy together in Lansdowne Road in 1999. Like Humphreys he had a law degree and had worked part-time for a solicitor, before being drawn into coaching.

McCall coached the Irish Under-20s and Ireland A sides and was an assistant coach with Ulster before becoming the province’s head coach in 2004 at the age of 36. Under his watch, Ulster won the Magners League in 2005-06, but after finishing fifth the following season, while winning two of six European pool games, McCall departed.

Some of the Ravenhill crowd had turned against him and the experience could have been a devastating blow, but McCall resurfaced at Castres for the ensuing two seasons as an assistant coach when brought there by Davidson, who had just been made head coach for the 2007-08 season.

“He was pretty much near broken and he was going to stop working in rugby. I was very lucky that he came because Castres is a tough environment to work in,” says Davidson, who is again guiding little Aurillac into the Pro D2 play-offs.

“There are always breaks between the French guys and the foreigners and then the guys from outside Casrtres and those in Castres. It was a tough time for me but I kept my head down, worked hard and Smally was a brilliant man to have because he’s very, very loyal. He gave me a lot of strength when he was there and we had the best second half of any team in the Top 14, climbing from 11th to fifth and just missing out on the play-offs.”

With Davidson and McCall having no input into recruitment or their pre-season programme and the squad derailed by injuries, their second season proved more difficult. While Davidson went back to Ulster as an assistant coach, McCall was then brought to Saracens as first team coach in 2009 by his former London Irish midfield partner Brendan Venter, with whom he had remained close friends and who was then director of rugby at Saracens.

When Venter stepped aside in the 2010-11 season to become technical director, McCall became director of rugby. At the end of that season, Saracens avenged the previous year’s loss to Leicester in the final to claim their first ever Premiership trophy; they added their second last season when beating Bath in the final.

Saracens have a heavy South African influence on and off the pitch, prompting the moniker “Saffracens”, and they have their own brash, globe-trotting way of doing things, whether it be mid-season training breaks in exotic locations or developing relationships with clubs in Japan, Abu Dhabi, Kuala Lumpur, Moscow, São Paulo and Tonga.

Stringer says McCall is more a hands-on coach than a besuited director of rugby. “He was always out there on the pitch. Yes, he had his deputies – defence coach, forwards coach, attack coach – but he’s out there, very much involved, and overseeing the whole thing. He’s not sitting up in his office, looking through the window. He has his track suit on and is very hands on.”

Calm and collected

However, McCall does not believe in the hairdryer treatment. He is “very quietly spoken”, according to Stringer. “He has other guys there who do the roaring and shouting if needs be. He is very calm and collected, and players respond well to him. That’s one of his attributes, being a man manager and speaking to players directly, treating them as adults in the workplace. He’s very direct and to the point. You were left in no doubt where you stood, and as a player that’s all you can ask for.”

Could he coach Ireland one day? “He could,” says Stringer. “I certainly think he’s a man who could do a job. I suppose, like any head coach, you need a good team around you when you’re coaching at that level. It’s certainly not a one-man job, and it’s about having the right guys around you to implement your game plan.

“But certainly he’s an intelligent guy who has come up with some really good game plans over the years and knows how to win rugby matches. He wouldn’t be out of his depth coaching Ireland.”

Davidson concurs. “I would like to think so, because he is the most successful coach in Europe. He has created such an incredible legacy at Saracens. What they do, they do so well. I’m not saying they play the most expansive game in the world, but they are so well organised and they’ve developed so many English players. It really is a success story.”

Small in stature maybe, but his reputation is growing all the time.