More surprising than Andy Farrell approaching Paul O’Connell to become Ireland’s new forwards coach was that O’Connell actually agreed to do so.
True to type, O’Connell had wondered aloud as to whether this coaching lark was for him. After leaving Stade Francais in 2019, he said he had no long-term plans to go into coaching. Enjoyable and rewarding yes, but it was very tough from a family and health point of view.
Last October, he reaffirmed he wasn’t looking to go into coaching. It wasn’t something that whetted his appetite. Clearly though, akin to Don and Michael Corleone, Farrell made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“Yeah, I suppose the opportunity was great. My family don’t have to move anywhere. We’re back in Limerick,” said O’Connell in reference to his wife Emily and children Paddy (10), Lola (6) and Felix (3).
“I’ve young kids and I think there are certain jobs in club coaching which are probably incredible jobs but they are pretty relentless when you’ve a young family. Some of the guys that are in those jobs are young guys, there are some older guys as well where a lot of the hard work is done with their kids.
‘Big challenges’
“That was one of the big challenges of Paris for us. It was incredibly enjoyable but you’ve a game on Saturday, you’re upstairs in an office for six or seven hours on Sunday and then you’re leaving the house on a Monday morning at five o’clock. So when you’ve young kids that’s a challenge.”
Comparing this to Ronan O’Gara’s experience with the Crusaders, with less than 20 games a year, O’Connell said: “You’ve got all this opportunity around that then for development and learning and to refresh and to be able to be good at your job.”
While noting that Farrell has admitted he wished he had more games each season, Test rugby offered the chance “to reflect, look at what other teams are doing and learn from those”.
Another important consideration was “a great working relationship” with Simon Easterby from the end of O’Connell’s playing career, and Easterby’s continuing presence on the coaching ticket.
“I remember Alan Gaffney saying when he came to Munster he didn’t want to die wondering. If Andy hadn’t picked up the phone to me I probably would have moved on happily but when he did pick up the phone to me, I felt it was something that I would have regretted refusing, even though it meant I had to get the skates under me and start preparing very quickly.”
O’Connell believes that his relatively recent experience of playing is an advantage. That said, the game has also evolved in the intervening five-plus years. Physicality is more a product of technical coaching than it was then.
“So rather than it being talk of physical dominance, there is a coaching method behind every physical moment you see in a rugby match now. That intent piece then has to be layered on top of it so you can’t just bring your emotion and your passion for playing for Ireland. You have to have a solid foundation beneath that and I think coaches have been very good at coaching that.
“You remember Brian O’Driscoll, the way he could come out of a line back in the day and read the defence and make these tackles out the back. It was something that was very hard to coach 10 years ago but it can be coached now and there’s so many of those moments that you see in games that are really well coached. It’s up to the player then to be able to take that on and to be able to deliver it physically, but that’s the biggest change I’ve seen.
“A lot of the parts of the game are very similar, or not too different, but the ability to coach the tiny little parts of the game now is really interesting.”
Mishaps
There will be renewed focus on the Irish lineouts following last year’s mishaps, but as Noel McNamara said in these pages yesterday, it would be unfair to expect an immediate and dramatic improvement.
“There’s no ripping up the script, I mean some of our high-profile losses at lineouts have been very, very marginal, and very often it’s a combination of things,” maintained O’Connell.
The causes can be varied, he added, be it an overthrow, a missed lift, a good defensive guess, adding that in the Autumn Nations Cup “we won some really good ball at the back of the lineout but there was also a few 5m losses which hurt you because people get excited when you go to the line and it can be tough.
“But you have to work with the players. One of the things I learned in Paris is that they have a very different way of doing things and you have to try and figure out where the players are at.” He had to “build relationships” rather than “transplant your thinking into their thought process”.
“A lot of the best lineouts in the world are player-led. You look back on that South African lineout with Victor Matfield, you look at the current England and Saracens lineout, you look at the Crusaders lineout with the way Kieran Read practically did the same thing in the Crusaders as he did in the All Blacks.
“They’re the ones that are in there,” he says of his players. “They’re the ones that have to stand in the middle of it and feel what’s happening. So we just have to help them along that journey of gathering experience and learning from their experiences.”
