Perfectly primed for number one role

RUGBY/MAGNERS LEAGUE:EVEN BEFORE his identity was revealed you feared a little for Michael Cheika's successor. Five years of steadily developing talent, shrewd signings, changing the culture and delivering them to the Promised Land of a first Heineken Cup. Follow that.

About the only break Cheika’s successor has enjoyed is that Leinster didn’t add more silverware last season. Even so, Leinster’s stellar internationals were always going to be managed primarily with Test rugby and the World Cup in mind this season, after which the new man would most likely have to oversee a transition to a new generation.

For all the talk about Cheika empowering players, and he may have been a marginally more benign dictator as the years evolved, that was only because he had helped to establish a more ruthless culture amongst a slightly underachieving squad. And as with Kidney and Ireland, or any other successful team environment, there can be only one boss.

Cue Joe Schmidt. Anyone who has worked with him, or indeed met him, invariably speaks of what a nice person he is. He’s also, of course, been a number two, latterly as assistant/backs coach to Vern Cotter at Clermont, and previously at the Auckland Blues, Bay of Plenty and New Zealand schools.

He couldn’t have signed off in better style, Clermont reaching their Holy Grail of a first Bouclier de Brennus after 99 years of trying, in their 11th final, and fourth in a row when beating Perpignan, with 65,000 people congregated at the Place de Jaude for the Sunday homecoming.

The official train, with nite club at the front, restaurant in the middle and another carriage at the back, had to end its journey outside Clermont-Ferrand.

He loved the lifestyle in the Auvergne, though he didn’t share Vern Cotter’s love of shooting. Schmidt tried it but admits he was “scared”, simply because it usually followed an, eh, two-hour lunch. He preferred golf, though his favoured course was closed for four months during the winter due to snow. Besides, with four young children – Abby (16), Tim (14), Ella (11) and Luke (7) – there wasn’t time for much else outside of rugby.

He was happy where he was. It was 27 degrees there during the week. Being a head coach had not been an ambition, he admits disarmingly. So why, Joe? “To find out,” he answers emphatically. “If, at the end of my contract with Clermont, I’d decided to go back to New Zealand, I would have wondered ‘what would it be like to take a top job in a professional environment’. I guess it was that.

“I’m not driven to be anywhere in particular,” he continues, “but I am very competitive. I have no goals. My belief is success is not about goal-setting. Success is about values, and if you work hard and you’re honest and you do your best with what you have got, that’s all you can do. If it comes with success, that’s great, but as long as you are the person you need to be.”

From purely coaching, now he has to also deal with the media, the Leinster Branch CEO, the Irish management and the IRFU, and if anyone has a problem they usually come to the head coach.

Sipping a smoothie in the David Lloyd centre (“It’s been a long day”) his phone rings regularly. Yes, his battery runs down much more quickly nowadays. He’s enjoying it though, apart from last Friday’s defeat. “The most disappointing thing is Glasgow were understrength and ripe to be picked,” he says. He also copped a fair bit of flak from the RTÉ boys. One defeat had become three with the inclusion of two pre-season friendlies, even though those results are utterly irrelevant. Welcome to Leinster Joe.

“Peter Sloane, who was coaching the Blues when I first joined them, said ‘look, a word of advice Joe. Avoid reading the good stuff they write about you, and then you don’t have to read the bad stuff’.”

He took this defeat just as badly as he ever did. He arrived home in the wee small hours last Friday, watched a tape of the game and, knowing he wouldn’t sleep, watched a movie before going to bed at 4.30am and getting up at 8am to go back to work.

“By Monday you’ve got to be bouncing and going forward. You can’t be sliding at the front end of the week because that’s when you’re making your investment which hopefully gets the dividend at the weekend.”

First impressions of Leinster are what he expected. He particularly likes the training facilities. The biggest contrast with Clermont, as he expected, is the relative lack of what he calls “middle players”. At Clermont, they drew on players from 10 different nationalities, including the Fijian captain, Seremai Bai, and the Samoan captain, Gavin Williams. There, you replaced like with like.

Not so with Leinster last week, nor this week, and nor will it be for at least half the Magners League games. But he knows the Irish provinces can’t be like Clermont or other French clubs.

Besides, the Irish system is not unlike that in New Zealand, where he began as a scrawny winger.

“I think I made my debut as a 68kg winger and in my first-class debut (for Manawatu) Sean Lineen (the Glasgow head coach) was in the opposition with Counties. It’s funny how in rugby things come round in circles.”

In the 1990-91 season Schmidt was only 25 when he and Kelly came to Mullingar for a year as a player and PE teacher/coach at Wilson’s Hospital. “A fantastic time. We found it cold but with a lot of warm-hearted peopled, and we’ve stayed in touch with a lot of people since then” he says.

But, on returning home, “in my second game of club footie my Achilles went off like a gun shot and then about four or five months later I re-ruptured it.”

That prompted him to coach the senior team at Palmerston North Boys, where he was teaching English, and a couple of national finals led to him coaching the New Zealand Schools. It made retirement easier to swallow.

While coaching as deputy principal at Tauranga Boys in Bay of Plenty, he was asked to become assistant coach at the provincial NPC side. “I never intended to be a coach, not at all,” he admits candidly, and maintains that the most important aspect to being a good coach is to have good players. But success has tended to follow him. In two years at Bay of Plenty (while completing a Masters in Business) with Cotter, and Glen Jackson as outhalf, they rose from 10th (and last) in three consecutive years at the NPC, to finish fifth in his first year and third the following season, while beating Auckland away to claim the Ranfury Shield for the first time in 103 years.

In three years as assistant to Sloane and then David Nucifora at the Blues, he worked with the likes of Isa Nacewa, Luke McAlister, Isaia Toeava, Doug Howlett and Joe Rokocoko.

“We certainly were prepared to have a crack,” laughs Schmidt. “Somebody described it as Polynesian basketball, but it wasn’t quite as flagrant as that. We did play with a little bit of structure, but it was a lot of fun.”

He was weighing up the option of continuing with the Auckland Blues or returning to Bay of Plenty as a part-time head coach cum teacher, while sitting in a Sydney café before the Blues played the Waratahs. “My phone went and it was VC. ‘Schmidty, I got a job for us. I’m going to Clermont’.”

Schmidt had another year at the Blues, in which they reached the Super 12 semi-finals, before linking up with Cotter.

Murphy’s Law drew the two sides together in this season’s Heineken Cup, along with premiership runners-up Saracens and nouveau riche Racing Club, buttressed by more marquee signings such as Carl Hayman and George Smith. Schmidt admits he didn’t go “yippee”. He added: “The expectations around the Heineken Cup do worry me a little bit. The margins are always so tight. Three seasons ago Leinster didn’t get out of their pool. Leicester are English Heineken Cup legends and finished third in their pool. It does undulate. And whoever gets out of our pool is going to be tough to beat.”

Clermont played with extraordinary depth and width, though Schmidt readily accepts this was usually down to their pack’s set-piece strength and ballast in the collisions. He’s surprisingly wary of the amended laws, and the possibility of the game becoming “rugby league” from the kicking ping-pong of a year or two ago, and hopes the pendulum swings back a little again in maintaining more of a contest at the breakdown.

First off he wants a reaction to Leinster’s sloppiness of last week, starting tonight. “I’d love to keep the hard edge, because I think they had a hard edge defensively, but grow the game a little bit.

“I’d like people at the RDS to come along to see the hard-edge, because it is a physical confrontation, and at the same time it is the gladiators on show, and so you want to see a bit of a show. I’d like to think we can get people excited. That might take a little perseverance to start with, but if we can produce that it will be worth seeing.”

It may take him more than one game.