Rivals Super Rugby coaches let love find a way

All good coaches, like good families, are alike. OK, it might not be quite as Tolstoy wrote it but the sentiment in still much the same.

Reds coach Brad Thorn has built a young squad that is rising fast

All good coaches, like good families, are alike. OK, it might not be quite as Tolstoy wrote it but the sentiment in still much the same.

Certainly good coaches vary in their tactics, their way of dealing with various situations but the common denominator they share is the care they have for their players. Brad Thorn used another word, “love”.

When he spoke of how he loved Shane Webcke and Shane Webcke loved him, even he realised he had strayed over into “mushy” talk. But the intent comes through.

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With Webcke back then, with his Queensland Reds players right now, Thorn recognises that the level of commitment, of faith in each other, does reach the level of love.

Brumbies coach Dan McKellar probably wouldn’t express it quite that way. But he gave an indication of his what his players mean to him when he turned down the Wallabies forwards coaching job. Not just any appointment, that one.

The intention, both from Dave Rennie and from Rugby Australia, was that the role would ultimately lead to the Wallabies head coaching job. Rennie has made it clear — not quite sure why — that he does not envisage him remaining in the job beyond the next World Cup in 2023. And he sees McKellar as the man who might very well replace him. It might still work out that way, but it won’t be the way Rennie imagined it.

McKellar, however, saw it differently. His attack coach, Peter Hewat, had accepted a coaching job in Japan and he wanted to be there on the ground when the new attack coach started work.

Of course, there were no guarantees that joining the national team coaching staff would actually have given him the inside running on the head coach’s job but there is little doubt that working with Rennie would surely have bolstered his chances.

Now he is on his own, which is how it was for Rod Macqueen, Eddie Jones, John Connolly, Robbie Deans, Michael Cheika and Rennie himself. In the professional era, only Ewen McKenzie has graduated to the Wallabies head coaching role after previously having served on the Australian team coaching staff but I suspect his appointment may have had more to do with taking the Waratahs to the Super Rugby finals in 2005 and 2008 and the Queensland Reds to the title in 2011 than with anything he had ever coaching-wise with the Wallabies.

And by standing on his own two feet, there is no way McKellar’s coaching record will become muddled or entangled with Rennie’s — for good or bad. On the downside, though, he has now removed himself from the position of being heir apparent.

According to the Rennie timetable, he sees himself remaining as Wallabies head coach until the 2023 World Cup. That means another four more years — starting with tonight’s Super Rugby AU grand final when McKellar’s Brumbies take on Thorn’s Reds in Canberra — for another coach to come through and establish himself as the best in the country at Super Rugby level.

Let’s not lose sight of how this situation came about. For a long while it was a done deal that McKellar would fill a dual role — head coach of the Brumbies, forwards coach of the Wallabies — until the end of next year’s provincial competition. But when Hewat was offered a job in Japan, which is the next natural stage of his own coaching career, McKellar wasn’t prepared to leave the Brumbies in the lurch. Not saying that’s “love” exactly but it does show a very deep level of attachment.

For Allan Alaalatoa, it’s McKellar’s approachability that makes him stand out as a coach and as a person.

“Everyone feels comfortable enough to go up to him and have a conversation,” said the Brumbies captain. “Not necessarily about rugby but about life as well. I think that is his biggest positive as a head coach. When you are approachable, when the boys would do anything for you as a coach, he definitely has that respect among the whole group.”

He knows how it feels for players to be passed over for selection, which is a regular feature of Brumbies selections. He himself was two years a member of the Reds squad in 2005-06 but never once played a game for Queensland.

It was with the Magpies that he first took on a head coaching job, in 2008-10. Then on to the role of coaching director and head coach of the Tuggeranong Vikings and back-to-back Canberra titles.

A lonely period in Japan followed and he was just about to turn his back on coaching entirely and request his old job back in orthopaedic sales when, as Brumbies folklore reminds us, he happened to open his junk mail. There, almost buried among all the detritus, was a job offer from his now-assistant Laurie Fisher. And so began the journey that has led him to tonight’s grand final.

It’s fair to say that Thorn, who pretty much was in a class of his own in terms of playing achievements, has some distance to travel to catch up with McKellar on the coaching front.

Still, it is a gap he is closing fast, with the help of people like Jim McKay and Michael Todd, his respective attack and defence coaches. Good coaches, indeed good families, will be pitted against each other tonight. The Brumbies years of dominance in Australian rugby are beginning to merge into “an era”, on their way to becoming “a dynasty”. But there is no question a threat is rising in the north. Thorn has taught his players to be humble, respectful, but not when they are playing.

We may well also be witnessing the clash of the two men vying to become the next Wallabies coach. And perhaps this time, love won’t stand in the way.