RUGBY:Things began badly for the Leinster coach in his new posting, but the former headmaster never wavered from his lesson plan, writes GERRY THORNLEY

ONE OF the few drawbacks of living in Clermont-Ferrand was that the golf courses would be closed due to snow in the mountainous Auvergne. Hence, prior to arriving in Dublin last summer, Joe Schmidt warned his wife, Kellie, that he would be playing golf once a week. Since arriving last June, he has played the sum total of nine holes in one visit to Killeen Castle.

Schmidt can well understand why Vern Cotter is not of a mind to leave Clermont Auvergne, where Cotter drives into the countryside for some shooting. Even though 65,000 people congregated at the Place de Jaude for the Sunday homecoming with the cherished Bouclier de Brennus last June, the town of Clermont-Ferrand has a population of 140,000, and Schmidt too loved the surrounding countryside.

He’d go into his office on a Sunday morning (he’d already have looked at next week’s opposition a little) and review the previous day’s game as well as look ahead to next week’s. He’d try to be finished by lunchtime, to leave the rest of his day for Kellie and their four young children – Abby, Tim, Ella and Luke.

Wednesday was a day off, so the morning would be taken up with a French lesson and then go for one of those lunches that only the French do, before sharing in his kids’ sporting activities in the afternoon.

“I really enjoyed that about French life, just because they take the time to do things, you know?”

Moving from Bay of Plenty to the Auckland Blues as assistant coach was one thing. “Lifestyle wise, the Blues was great, because it was only six months of the year and then the rest of the time you kind of went around and did a little bit to help club teams or provincial teams, so that was quite a nice lifestyle . . . because I got quite a nice big break, in amongst having to do other things.”

By contrast to Auckland and Clermont, the lifestyle in Dublin as Leinster’s head coach is, he says, “manic”, with supposed days off often entailing planning for the week or beginning to look at the opposition which, in the case of, say, less familiar opponents such as Northampton, would require more homework.

“You want to just get the themes that are most important. ‘This is what they do, this is how they do it’, and you want the repeated themes – ‘once a season they play this play’, that’s irrelevant. And then you want also to keep the focus on your own team, and we make sure we don’t do this or that or if we do do this then we should be okay. You look at that counter-attack threat of Ben Foden, (Chris) Ashton and (Paul) Diggin, you’re looking at the kicking game of (Stephen) Myler, where we need to position our back three and work them as a three, you’re looking at the way they scrum . . .”

Hence, never mind golf, he’s only been out for lunch with Kellie once as well, but such is the lot, he reasons and hopes, of a new job. “It was the same I remember when I first went into looking after a school of 1,600 boys. The first year was just catastrophic, workwise, because you’re learning the systems, you’re learning the kids. I know a lot more about even the Magners League. I didn’t really know the Magners League, so now I know the teams better, I know the way they play. It won’t be as tough.”

Then again, the departures and arrivals in the Leinster squad, the additional demands placed by the World Cup for the first two months of the season, will make for more, new balancing acts.

Back in the first month of this season, September, if Schmidt had a fair idea that he was stepping into something different, a warm bath into the fire, that much was confirmed to him just three games into his tenure after they had lost 29-13 in Treviso (with what would prove to be eight of their Heineken Cup final line-up).

“The first question at the press conference was ‘is this the beginning of the end of Leinster rugby?’ ” Schmidt recalls with a laugh, before delving into his nice line in dry wit. “That was the first question over there, the same place that Munster lost, the same place that a number of teams lost, you know they are very hard to beat there, Treviso.”

Indeed, they won eight of their 11 home league games.

Fast-forward eight months, and the end of Leinster is hardly nigh. Instead, they stand on the verge of a historic double of Heineken Cup and Magners League, a week after one of the extraordinary games of all time. Schmidt has tasted emotionally draining success before, and refers to Clermont reaching their Holy Grail of a first Bouclier de Brennus after 99 years in existence and 10 losing finals, prior to which he was head coach when Bay of Plenty won the Ranfurly Shield for the first time in 2004.

Then, Bay of Plenty overcame an eight-point deficit against an Auckland team containing Isa Nacewa to win by five. But last Saturday’s near biblical resurrection was something else again. Schmidt doesn’t socialise with the players much, but he made an exception last weekend.

He went in to work on Monday, but admits to having achieved very little on the day. One thing that has struck him is how Nacewa, “the consummate professional and a lovely fella”, typifies a squad of “genuinely nice blokes”.

When he initially began his coaching odyssey with Bay of Plenty they had finished last in the NPC the three previous years, then finished fifth and third in the years he was there.

“I find that that’s a lot more comfortable position to start in, Clermont had been always under-achieving, never consistent, and after four finals in a row, finally winning one, that’s easier than coming in here. They’d won the Heineken Cup and they got beaten in the semi-final last year.”

He was not over-awed by the quality of players in Leinster. After all, he’d been assistant coach to an Auckland Blues team which as well as Nacewa contained Luke McAlister, Mils Muliaina, Joe Rokocoko and Carlos Spencer, among others.

By contrast, he didn’t know most of the young players in Leinster’s set-up, whereas at Clermont, Cotter and himself usually replaced like with like, ie, internationals with internationals.

“I knew the top end (Leinster) players, but not the younger players, and you couldn’t just buy in players like in France and maybe put in a couple of academy players and then you’ve got two sets of good backs. Whereas we have one set that I knew, and then I go ‘well, I don’t know who he, he or he is really’. I’d seen them a little bit. I’d tried to do some homework, but to be honest you’re working so hard just to try to get to the Bouclier success that you didn’t have a massive time for that.”

Furthermore, his frontliners were making delayed, gradual returns at the start of the season, and then, on foot of losing three league matches in September (all away from home), one or two pundits were quick to criticise him personally. It can’t have been a pleasant time.

“No, and especially because it affects my family. I think sometimes journalists don’t think that coaches have families and they’ve got go to school and they get a hard time at school. They get affected by it as well.”

He was particularly hurt by a headline at the time suggesting he had blamed the players. “It didn’t even represent what was in the article. I thought that was a disgrace. But obviously, I know that journalists don’t write the headlines.”

Another theory which rankles was that Schmidt had the wit and imagination to change what he was doing after the first four games because he had lost the dressing-room.

“After four weeks I stuck closer than ever to exactly what we had done, right through the pre-season. We didn’t change a thing. We stuck to our guns and the people who wanted to stick to their guns were the players. They just had to get it to work.”

While not on the scale of football’s never-ending “sack race”, such is the lot, more and more, of modern coaches even in rugby. Vindication and reward for close on 11 months’ hard work came by way of last week’s triumph, but even then, after the thrilling nature of the comeback, the over-riding emotion was not of elation or happiness or even contentment.

“To be honest it’s just a massive relief, you know?” he says, laughing at how faintly ridiculous that might sound. “You don’t get satisfaction really.

“Relief’s good though,” he says, chuckling again. “It’s a good emotion. It’s better than disappointment, and I know that Jim Mallinder would have felt that because of where they were at half-time.”

He retained belief at half-time because he felt that if Leinster could hold on to the ball then Northampton might struggle, for the only English team he feels who attempt to play at such a tempo is Gloucester. So he had some sympathy for Gloucester’s Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu when their Samoan centre was roundly derided for his tweeting his grievances over their Premiership semi-final defeat to boring Saracens, even if he feels that Sarries tried to develop their game this season.

Given the stresses and the strains, and a reward measured firstly in relief, you wonder why he wouldn’t get a real job.

“Well, I’ve had a real job,” he says, laughing again. “I ran a school of 1,600 boys, you know,” he points out, in reference to his previous incarnation as a headmaster.

“And I’d be more than happy to do that again. In fact, just before I went to Clermont I got a phone call from a school where there’s 2,000 boys, just asking if I was interested in going back to running a school. They were looking for a principal, so it’s not something that I wouldn’t go back to.

“I’d quite happily go back into the teaching. It’s just more regular. It allows you space and time for family at weekends and things like that, because I work seven days a week and, unfortunately, I’m a bit of a rugby nerd. I look at everything. I mean, I look at it again and again.”

He can separate himself from the game, and to make the hours spent watching rugby on a TV or laptop screen relevant, he has, for example, so far limited his time watching this year’s Super 15, mostly to games involving Leinster’s incoming duo of Natal Sharks secondrow Steven Sykes and Canterbury Crusaders outhalf Matt Berquist.

A third, monumental meeting with Munster presumably won’t have required as much homework as Northampton. Leinster, he says, will go to the well once more because they want to do something that’s never been done before.

“We could tick a fair few ‘never been done before’ boxes already, but this would be great. My thoughts on this game are we want to win this game. They need to win this game. Want versus Need.

“There’s a good more depth in a need than a want.

“And you know that’s going to be the massive challenge for us, because they are fresher. They’ve been watching us, they’ve had more time to prepare for us, they need it more than we do, we’ve got a trophy and they just probably want one and, to be honest, they deserve to get something from the season they’ve had.”

“I’d be the first to say it’s kind of a pity there’s not a trophy for the team that finishes top, then a play-off cup or whatever, but it’s just not the way that rugby works, and I guess it was a bit the same for Leinster last year when they topped the league.

“But one of the things I suppose for us is we just have to try to focus on the process and it’s just what we’ve done all season, try to just make sure we get what we can do right. And we know that they’ll be doing their best to stop that happening.”

Never a truer word.