Western Force coach Simon Cron on poaching Rebels, life advice from Steve Hansen, and Wallabies aspirations
With Melbourne Rebels’ Super Rugby future looking bleak, a rival coach says teams would be “stupid” not to already be scouring the club’s list for talent.
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Having just inked a two-year extension to remain head coach of the Western Force until the end of 2026, Simon Cron opens up on the life-changing advice given to him by former All Blacks coach Steve Hansen, why he’ll be targeting Melbourne Rebels players, and his aspirations to coach the Wallabies.
Jamie Pandaram: You’ve just extended for two years. Why commit to the Force, when on the open market you’d get other offers?
Simon Cron: It’s only been 14 months I’ve been here, a lot of the players we’re bringing in, and guys in the academy, it’s really important they see that we’re committed as well to the growth and the cause here.
It gives the players some stability here around who is going to be here, the standards and the expectations.
When you’re talking to players about extending contracts, they are interested in when yours ends, so it became topical. And they’re great boys, so it’s important we show the same level of commitment. And then with the organisation heading the way it is, around what we want to do, we’re pretty well aligned.
JP: You’ve got a new CEO who has given you this contract extension, but she’s only just come into the role herself. What is Niamh O’Connor like, and what is she bringing to the Force?
SC: Niamh’s very professional. She comes from a construction background, she works out who’s who in the zoo pretty quick. That’s a skillet, she can work out who is doing what quite fast, you don’t need to tell her, that’s always a good thing. She’s passionate about rugby, she’s driven, and she wants the organisation to be the best it can be so there’s good alignment there.
JP: So what does it look like at the end of your tenure, a title?
SC: Yeah, we’ve got to be getting better every year, every game. For me it’s about producing Wallabies, we want guys to have success at the next level, we want to have success through winning.
But more than that, we want to drive a culture here that people show up, come into our environment and they get sucked into the culture, they rip into a really strong professional culture that you just can’t avoid. Ultimately when we’re finished here, if we do our job properly, this team will be strong long after we’ve gone.
If we do our job right, you’ll see a number of these players in the Wallabies. At the 2027 home World Cup, I think we’ll have quite a few in there.
JP: The Force were kicked out of Super Rugby in 2017 and the fans really drove their entry back, but what is the state of rugby in Western Australia right now?
SC: The fact that they were pushed out of Super Rugby definitely caused some lag, what I mean by that is in pathways, structures and systems.
The problem is that now we have to take up that lag. There’s some delay in trying to fill the holes that were left behind.
The exciting thing is the rugby public still exist here, there’s a massive amount of Australia, South African, English, Irish fans, they all love the game.
Now what we’ve got to do is give them a game they want to watch and be involved in.
JP: That diversity is reflected in the organisation; an Irish CEO, Kiwi head coach and attack coach (Mark Ozich), an English defence coach (Will Eggleston). Is it difficult to bring together, or does it actually help?
SC: It reflects the melting pot here, every game I go to there are a heap of Saffers. I’m lucky enough to have coached some South Africans. They are all passionate about rugby, but it’s about getting the best people under our roof to make the players the best they can be. We’ve got to pick the best people, otherwise we’re wasting our time.”
JP: You’ve been in the Australian system before as assistant coach of the Waratahs. You’ve gone away to Japan to coach Toyota Verblitz, now you’re a season down with the Force. Where are you at in your development as a coach, how much wiser are you now than when you were at NSW?
SC: I’m definitely wiser. In Japan I got to coach Pieter Steph du Toit, Kieran Read, Willie le Roux, Patrick Tuipulotu, some of the best in the world. But I also got to coach players at a lower level coming through the Japanese system.
So you’ve got to be constantly coaching, the environment requires high coaching time. They’re not environments you survive or thrive in, they can really break you down. For me it was good because it’s my natural personality type. At the Tahs, I was pretty ready there, I was ready to go.
But over there [in Japan] I was lucky enough to have Steve (Hansen) as a mentor. He gave me different angles on building team culture. But Steve’s biggest thing with me was working on work-life balance, that was his big focus, putting longevity in my career. And he genuinely cares.
He is a very smart man, he did all his homework and sat me down and told me where he thinks I am as a head coach and why I should leave and go with him. But he does that much homework on you, you really do have a lot of respect for it.
JP: That’s the former policeman in him. So what changed when he spoke to you about work-life balance?
SC: One of the things he said to me was, ‘Bring your family on your journey’. And he was right, I don’t, I tend to isolate rugby from home. Because I’m in rugby so much, when I come home I don’t want to talk about rugby.
He told me to bring them on the journey, let them experience it and be involved, otherwise you end up with two separate lives’.
The other side of that coin was, he’d say ‘You need to cut your hours back’. He’d get up in the office and say ‘You’re done’. I’d say ‘I’m not finished yet’, and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, you are’. He just genuinely cares, him and his wife Tash were great.
Because he does his homework, he’s hard to say no to.
JP: You’ve made some key recruitments for this season (including Nic White, Ben Donaldson, Tom Franklin, Ben Funnell, Will Harris, Harry Potter and Harry Hoopert). What excites you about this group and why will you do better than last year?
SC: Well we’ve got the guys that we’ve had for a year longer, that’s a start. They’ve had 12 months of us, changing the skillet and mindset doesn’t happen in a month or two, it happens over time.
And it’s an everyday thing, you can’t do it for five days and have two off. Now we’re 12 months into the cultural change, the good thing is the players are putting their foot on the accelerator rather than us. It is cool, we love seeing each day them driving each other now.
As a result of that, we’ll get more consistency in the level of training, and the level of games.
And then the people we’ve added into our environment are people we think add to our culture and skillet, it’s exactly what they’re doing.
JP: When you talk about culture, what rules a player in and what rules them out?
SC: One, will they put the team first? Team first, individual second, that’s what we live by.
They have to want to be the best player they’ve ever been. Don’t come here if they want to be 99 per cent of the player they’ve been before, don’t hop on the plane, don’t get in the car, don’t come to training. They’ve got to have the mindset that they want to be the best player they’ve ever been. They’ve got to want to learn and put themselves in dark places.
The other thing we look at is how well they’ll get on with the other great humans we have in our environment. Usually if you meet criteria one and two – you put the team first, and you want to be the best player you’ve ever been – you’ll get on with 99 per cent of our squad.
JP: It’s impossible to ignore the news around Melbourne. As a coach, are you anticipating that there will be a bunch of players coming on the market from the Rebels after next season that you could potentially recruit?
SC: Every coach would, and we’d be stupid to pause and not to plan for it and go after them.
“Let’s be realistic, every overseas team will be doing it right now. So if we don’t, we’ll lose them out of our borders which we don’t want.
We need to be smart, proactive, and positively go after people over time, while at the same time respecting that the Rebels have a Super Rugby season to play.
They’ve got a great squad, gee there’s some good players there.
But when the French and the English are putting their fishing lines in the water, we’ve got to make sure those boys have other options, and not just overseas.”
JP: What about you personally? Do you have ambitions beyond the Force to coach internationally, to coach the Wallabies?
SC: Yes. My biggest focus is training today, making sure I get that right today, and then tomorrow. I can be a little bit shortsighted in that I want to make sure the team is as best prepared today, and then the next day. But aspirationally yes, over time if things progress well enough and I do my job well enough, maybe that will happen. That’s out of my hands. What is in my hands is what happens with the Force.
Originally published as Western Force coach Simon Cron on poaching Rebels, life advice from Steve Hansen, and Wallabies aspirations
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