Matt Williams: Disparage improving Italy at your peril

Every big rugby country across the globe wants to see Italy win — as long as it is not against them. The other Six Nations teams believe that a competitive and vibrant Italian team is vital, as long as the Azzurri are not too vibrant or competitive.

Just ask the recently dismissed coaches of Wales and Australia.

Last season both Wayne Pivac and Dave Rennie selected players from their extended squad against the Italians. As both Wales and Australia have exceptionally shallow talent pools, they were simply doing their job as coaches in attempting to create squad depth by providing a few players with an opportunity to learn and grow in the international environment.

Brilliantly for the Italians and disastrously for Pivac and Rennie, Italy triumphed in both matches, creating high drama and glorious tries. It also rapidly accelerated the rumblings that eventually led to Pivac and Rennie leaving their posts.

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Andy Farrell has observed the lessons from the Welsh and the Wallabies and has selected his best available 23 players. An act of respect from the world’s number-one team to the Italians.

Farrell has also learned that organising “A” fixtures as a vehicle to provide experience to developing international players is far less risky for coaches than playing a weakened team. Defeat to an improving Italy places the opposition coach’s future in grave peril.

At the same time, when a tier-one team performs poorly against a so-called lower-ranked side, the powers that be are utterly wrong to place all the responsibility for the performance on the shoulders of the coach. Once a player is selected, that individual is responsible for their performance. It is ridiculous to blame coaches for player errors.

This warped thinking started in soccer and has now leached into all sports, where a chorus of opinion from the ill-informed (and that is being kind) can drive boardroom decision-making.

In taking the responsibility for performance away from the players and placing it totally on the coaches, we destroy the truth that all players, even internationals, need to learn by playing

This mentality is now in our game and it is killing two of rugby’s greatest truths. First, rugby was designed as an educational tool to empower the players to learn decision-making under great physical pressure. Learning to perform under the pressure that the international game generates is an acquired skill. This drives the ethos that once the whistle blows, the players are responsible for their game.

The second concept under threat is that the game itself is the greatest of teachers. By playing, we learn how to play. In taking the responsibility for performance away from the players and placing it totally on the coaches, we destroy the truth that all players, even internationals, need to learn by playing.

Linked to this is another truth: that a player’s greatest learnings can come from an honest reflection after a painful failure. Just ask Ross Byrne, and more power to him.

For many decades of rugby’s history, there were no coaches. A group of senior players under the direction of the team captain took all responsibility for matchday tactics and performance. The concept of this model remains the coach’s most powerful tool, which is their selection of the individuals to form their team.

The truth of these statements is personified in the improved performances of the Italian team over the last 12 months. The individual performances of the players on the international stage have grown with experience and so has their efficiency as a team.

These excellent Italian performances had their genesis in 2016 when Conor O’Shea took control of the national team and brought in another Irish man, Stephen Aboud, to drive the elite player and coach development pathways. Aboud then established what I consider to be the best rugby academy system I have observed.

Bear in mind that to improve at the international level, teams must develop from within. Unlike clubs, national teams cannot recreate themselves with a spending spree in the off-season. International teams must be created from the grassroots up.

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At its heart, Ireland’s rise to number one in world rugby can be traced back to the exceptional schools and junior club systems that flow into the powerful provincial academies. These elite player development systems produce high-quality players that drive competition for places within the national team.

This is a process that takes time and cannot be accelerated.

The fact that this current Italian team have become so comfortable with the ball in hand and are defending far more effectively than any Italian team of the past decade did not just happen by chance.

Akin to the Leinster academy, the Italian system has educated and prepared this Italian team to compete. It is beyond belief that this world-class system which is so obviously successful is now being actively dismantled by the Italian Federation

The academy system created by Aboud has produced high-quality players that have performed with success across recent international Under-18 and Under-20 competitions and are now arriving ready to succeed for the Italian coach Kieran Crowley.

Akin to the Leinster academy, the Italian system has educated and prepared this Italian team to compete. It is beyond belief that this world-class system which is so obviously successful is now being actively dismantled by the Italian Federation.

All international coaches are hostage to the elite player development programme that sits below their senior team. Ireland, France and New Zealand have excellent programmes. Italy is now mindlessly sleepwalking along the same disastrous path that Australian rugby walked. The Wallabies once had the world’s best elite player pathway system and allowed internal ignorance to destroy it.

Crowley is benefiting, from the long-term planning of two great Irish rugby minds. Sadly it may only be a brief Roman holiday, spanning just a few seasons, before Italian rugby once more descends into the failure that short-term thinking condemns on every rugby programme that is not brave enough to look beyond the horizon and plan for the future.