Stuart Lancaster
He was only supposed to be ‘holding the fort’ while England scoured the world for their next coach, but Stuart Lancaster had other ideas. He had five matches to prove his worth and he rolled the dice for the first one, selecting eight uncapped players as he started his bid to change the face of English rugby.
Rob Andrew told me that Johnno had resigned, so I asked what the plan was,” explains Stuart Lancaster, as he sits with Rugby at Weetwood Hall in Leeds, a regular base for his England side and only a rugby field or two from his own home. “I don’t think they had one, so I asked if I could do the interim role and hold the fort during the Six Nations 2012.
“He could see the logic in it, I think because he’d held a similar role on a New Zealand tour not long before,” he continues. “I knew how the format worked, I knew how the camps were working, I knew what had been set up, I knew the players, I’d been to the world cup – I’d even been involved in the review of that world cup. It was all there.
“I went and spoke to the board, explained the plan, what I would do, and they went with it. There was no CEO at the time, Ian Ritchie hadn’t arrived, but doing this would allow them to leave me to get on with the Six Nations so they could scour the world for the next head coach.”
Less than two months after England had limped out of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand at the quarter-final stage, 19-12 to France, Stuart took the helm from English rugby icon Martin Johnson. Two months later, Stuart would be taking England into their opening Six Nations fixtures against the oldest of old [or auld] enemies, Scotland – the country he represented at student and age grade level and the birthplace of his mother, Ann.
But before that, with the players only set to get together a week or so before the match at Murrayfield, Stuart had a lot of work to do to put his plan into action. Unlike perhaps other definitions of ‘holding the fort’, Stuart’s intention was more to knock down the fort completely and then rebuild it – all within a five-match tournament spread over seven weeks.
“Without going through the whole back story,” he says, “we changed the team to put some younger players in with a view to building towards the future, so the first couple of weeks were spent redoing all the plans to make sure we could achieve what we wanted to. We visited senior players to explain why we wanted to bring in the younger group, which was obviously very difficult.
“We spoke to all the players – the ones that were staying, the ones I felt we needed to bring in a younger player in their position, and also the younger players, saying to them, ‘just be aware you might be involved with England, so get yourself ready’.”
For the Scotland matchday squad, Stuart named eight uncapped players including a completely novice centre partnership in Owen Farrell and Brad Barritt. “It was pretty unique circumstances, and probably won’t happen again,” says Stuart, “but I didn’t have to put my hat in the ring, I didn’t have to step forward, and say ‘I’ll do the interim job’. I pretty much instigated the plan because I often think, with coaching or leadership that while, yes, you need a bit of luck, you need to put yourself forward as well, and I did that.”
Almost 30 years before his international coaching debut, an 11-year-old Stuart made his Five Nations fan debut at Murrayfield. “We went on a school trip when I was 11 and Jean-Pierre Rives was playing for France,” he recalls. “I just thought he was the best player I’d ever seen, with this mop of blond hair, running around tackling everything that moved.”
Living in Cumbria already meant he was geographically closer to Murrayfield than Twickenham, and coupled with having a Scottish mum and a dad who was a regular for Scotland games, a visit to the home of English rugby was never on the agenda. “We never went to Twickenham as a kid growing up,” he says. “In fact I can’t remember the first time I went to Twickenham, it must have been when I joined the RFU – probably was actually!”
His first club was Wakefield, then a powerhouse of northern rugby, where he found himself as a 19-year-old training with England stars. “I played at Wakefield when I first started playing and Mike Harrison was the England captain, Bryan Barley the centre, so I began to train with players who’d been in and around that international environment.
“England selection back then was done by the North v Midlands v South West v London representative rugby route. So you’d play for Yorkshire, then the North, then England, that’s how you’d get picked.”
So you knew your playing limitations? “I wouldn’t say I knew my limitations, but I knew that to be playing for the North you’d have to be starting for Wakefield, and I wasn’t. I was in the 2nds as an 18 or 19-year-old, which was a strong team, but Wakefield was full of top players.
“They played a great brand of rugby in those times,” he continues. “We were coached by Jim Kilfoyle, who I’m still I touch with now. We’d spend most of our time playing touch and pass – which I do actually think brought out a lot of the intuitive football skills that Wakefield always seemed to possess. It’s a real shame that the club doesn’t exist anymore.”
He moved to Headingley in 1991, staying with them as they merged with Roundhay to form Leeds RUFC [later Leeds Tykes, Leeds Carnegie and now Yorkshire Carnegie].
“I was a teacher really, rugby wasn’t a career option,” he continues on the topic of his playing days. “I just enjoyed training Tuesdays and Thursdays, playing Saturdays, week-in, week-out. Leeds were my team and, if you were going to play for England or Scotland, you’d need to be in the Premiership and Leeds were in the third division at that point.”
As the game turned professional, he took a season-long break from his beloved teaching. “I took a sabbatical for a year, during the late 90s when I was about 28 years old but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would,” he admits, adding, “I had too much time on my hands.
“I enjoyed teaching,” he continues, “I enjoyed being busy so I found having a Wednesday off with nothing to do didn’t suit me at all. It also coincided with Simon Easterby arriving at the club, he went on to play for Ireland, so I was battling to get in the team with him there. With no second team, you’d do all this training in the week and then not get a game at the weekend.”
What was it you liked about teaching? “I enjoyed helping the talented kids, helping the kids that were demotivated and maybe struggling to go down the right path,” he explains. “I enjoyed the variety of the sports I used to teach – I was always an all-rounder as a sportsman so I wasn’t just a rugby player; I played tennis, badminton, squash, cricket, basketball, I enjoyed coaching them all. I liked teaching the theory too, the academic side of it, the training principles, just trying to enthuse kids to continue a sport once they’d left.”
It was only when the opportunity arose to combine both passions, coaching and rugby, that Stuart was persuaded to leave teaching. “I got an injury that meant I had to stop playing, it was a hamstring avulsion off the bone [when the tendon tears from the bone]. A Leinster player had the same injury a few weeks ago actually, but he will get looked after I lot better than I did back then!
“The RFU had literally just started up the academy system, I was 30, only a part-time player anyway, so I applied for the job to set up the Leeds academy and I got it.”
“It was the only job I’d have left teaching for,” he says, “a dream job really, to set up and run your own rugby academy. I knew all the schools and clubs in the area, I’d played there all my life and knew all the personalities in Yorkshire rugby too.
“I felt like I could make a difference, I knew there was talent in Yorkshire,” he says. “A lot of players had left the county and I felt I could help retain the talent.”
Working alongside director of rugby Phil Davies, taking learnings from sister club Leeds Rhinos who shared the same office – “they had one of the best sporting academies in the world at the time,” he says – and having paid visits to the renowned Leicester Tigers academy, Stuart developed a stream of talent for Yorkshire and beyond. Calum Clark, Danny Care, Joe Bedford, Matt Stockdale, David Doherty and Matt Challinor all came off the production line.
Although Leeds had won the Powergen Cup and finished fifth in the top-flight, a poor subsequent campaign led to Phil’s departure. As he would do with England, Stuart put himself forward. “It was a big step to take as a 35-year-old going to be a director of rugby, but I was ready for it, I’d done my level five coaching [one of the first in the UK to do so] and I knew the club really well.
“The challenge was big though,” he admits, as he took on a side relegated from the Premiership and shorn of big names, “we had to get promoted back to the Premiership with virtually no players at the first hit. We had a parachute payment, but if we hadn’t done it first time, the money would’ve run out. It was tough.”
Taking on the role of director of rugby while also being head coach, especially in his second season after winning an immediate promotion back to the top table, proved to be big ask. “It was tough because you care about all the players, you want them to succeed, but ultimately you’ve got to make the contractual decisions,” he says, “it’s very hard to be the head coach and director of rugby at the same time – I think there was a lesson in that.
“I drifted away from being head coach – I was working with Daryl Powell and Simon Middleton and they’re great coaches and I did a lot more of the bigger picture stuff. It was hard in the Premiership, especially when you were losing more games than winning – you were just trying to keep the ship together.”
The ship stayed together, but was relegated nonetheless. Seven years after launching the Leeds Tykes Academy, Stuart was put in charge of the biggest ‘academy’ in English rugby, as he took on the role of Elite Rugby Director at the RFU. “I was effectively running the academies and age grade teams, coaching England Saxons for Churchill Cup and two Six Nations games,” he explains. “I started at the same time as Johnno and we got on well, we made sure we were aligned.
“I’d have an eye on up-and-coming under-20 players, suggesting players, or if a player had dropped down from senior team, I’d try and get them back, working out what they needed to do.”
When he talks of his time with the Saxons, losing the Churchill Cup final to Ireland stands out, as does going one better the following year in New York, beating Canada. “That was a great trip, we had a great management team and a great group of players,” he remembers, “probably the best side we had, a lot of the players in that side went on to play for England.”
Which brings us back to Murrayfield. His first camp had taken place in the same hotel in which we meet. In taking the England seniors north he had made his first signal of intent. “I wanted to give a message to the rugby fans that we had our feet on the ground,” he says. “I’d been here with England Saxons before, I knew the chef at the restaurant, so I knew they’d get quality food here, there was good pitch here, we knew how things worked, we knew we could be in control.”
Against Scotland, England’s opening Six Nations match, on the face of it, Stuart had nothing to lose, but from a personal point of view, it meant everything. “The stakes were high,” he says. “The worst case scenario was that we lost all five games and I went back to being Saxons coach and probably something beneath that.
“I was reasonably confident with the squad we had and the players we’d selected, and I was confident that in myself, Andy Farrell and Graham Rowntree, that we had a good enough coaching team to get them to play.
“But when the first game comes around and you realise you’re in charge of England and you’re singing the national anthem and it’s at Murrayfield – that’s a big deal.”
Blooding so many youngsters was a risk, but he wasn’t tempted to go with experience. “I went with the plan, pick the younger lads,” he says. “I think Scotland had about 500 caps in their squad, we had about 210 in total, which is nothing at international level.
“Seven got their first caps so it was a lot of young, young players who hadn’t played for England before. In some ways it helps because they haven’t got the knowledge of what’s to come. They just went into it as if it’s another game, but it isn’t.”
Former England coach Andy Robinson was in charge of Scotland, adding even more interest to a fixture already cranked up high in the pressure, history and rivalry stakes. “I tried to be as relaxed as I could, but you do realise the stakes are high when the anthems are being sung, obviously I’d played for Scotland, my mum was in the crowd, my dad was there too.
“As a coach though, you try and lock yourself into neutral and completely focus on the job; to try and shut out any of the external emotion that can affect your thinking under pressure,” says Stuart of that first game. “Obviously there are moments though – like when we scored and I remember punching the air and cutting my hand on a light.
“There was a fair bit of blood so I had to get bandaged up and all the media were like, ‘what have you done?’, ‘yeah, I just punched a light’.”
A 13-6 win against Scotland set them up for Italy in Rome. The dream seemed to unravel quickly, with Ben Foden’s intercepted pass leading to Italian centre Tommaso Benvenuti running half the length of the field to help the hosts to a 15-6 half-time lead. “I don’t think people ever truly give Italy the credit they deserve, even then. I’d be as respectful of Italy as any other nation,” he says, “the media weren’t, but as a coach I was.
“There was a huge snow storm that came down two hours before the game and so it was played in really tricky conditions. We were at the hotel and had to follow a snow plough to the stadium.
“I remember the overhead camera’s wires also got caught around the post, so this camera was dangling down around the pitch and what with all the snow as well, I remember thinking, ‘this isn’t how it’s supposed to be’.”
A charge-down from Charlie Hodgson helped England get out of jail, winning 19-15. Two wins from two, and a perfect record to aid the job application process. “Basically the job was opened up and I was invited to apply maybe five or six weeks into the interim job,” says Stuart, “it was towards the start of Six Nations, and I thought, ‘I might as well have a crack at this’.
“I thought the plan I put in place was a good plan. I knew the players, I knew the club/country relationships in England well, there weren’t many homegrown coaches, there were a lot of overseas coaches, so why not apply?
The most important job application of Stuart’s life all took place during the Six Nations. “There were a few interviews, three I think,” he says. “The fact I kept getting asked back for an interview was a good sign. The interview panel was made up of Ian Ritchie, Ian McGeechan, Conor O’Shea, and two others – maybe Richard Hill? Anyway, there were five people on the panel and they would quiz you about what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it.
“At the same time as I’m saying, ‘I would do this, this and this’, I was then able to say, ‘by the way I am doing this, this and this’. I was basically doing a live interview right in front of them.”
The decision was made after the tournament in which they won four from five, losing only the third game at home to Wales 19-12. “It wasn’t long after the Ireland game, maybe a week and half, that Ian Ritchie said he’d like to offer me the England job.”
Memories of his first Six Nations? “The wins, the moments, the moments after the games, the players, there was a real energy about England at the time,” he says. “I think Wales won the Grand Slam, but we were so close to beating them at Twickenham, that motivation to beat them the following year was always going to be there.”
Things changed after the first year. “Every subsequent one the pressure builds,” he says. “Especially as the next year when we were four out of four going into the final game against Wales away, and we lost by 30 points – we lost a Grand Slam, Triple Crown and championship in one game.
“We were confident but very wary and respectful of how difficult Wales would be to beat in the Millennium Stadium. That proved to be the case, I think it was 9-3 at half-time so pretty tight, but, before we knew it, the gap’s gone away from you and you have to chase the game. And it doesn’t just feel like you’re playing against 15 players, it’s against a whole country and we didn’t deal with it – Wales took everything away. It was devastating because we’d made so much progress.”
The 30-3 defeat was put behind them, and the next Six Nations saw England lose the Grand Slam at the first attempt. “In the Six Nations you have to start well,” says Stuart, “and we played France in France first game, we conceded two tries early on which gave them belief and momentum. Then we played unbelievably well to come back [16-3 to France became 21-16 to England] but then they scored a try in the last moments.
“We won the next four games on the bounce,” continues Stuart, “and it came down to that final weekend and we needed to go to Italy and win by as many points as we could – we scored 50-odd. Then Ireland went to France, and it came down to the final play – we were watching it in the team hotel – and a French pass was deemed forward, they had a try disallowed and Ireland won the championship on that moment.”
His fourth Six Nations, in Rugby World Cup year, turned out to be his last. It was memorable though, right to the end. After being simply outplayed against Ireland, losing 19-9, who then duly lost the next game against Wales, it was another final day shootout to decide the title. “We were the last game on and Ireland had gone to Scotland and scored 40 points, none of us predicted that, but it meant we had to beat France by 26,” he recalls. “It was 55-35 and on the final maul of the game, if we’d scored from that, kicked it, we’d have won.”
Despite the best of intentions, the game didn’t remotely go to plan. “The one thing we didn’t want to do was concede, we talked about being tight in defence and ambitious in attack,” he explains, “but as soon as you concede ten points, you need to score 36, and we conceded two early scores. I was sat in the stand, doing the maths, thinking how hard it was going to be to score 40 points against France – and we ended up scoring 55. But they scored 35.
“I’ll never forget the atmosphere though,” he says, “the only time Twickenham was ever like that was when we beat the All Blacks in 2012 – that France game was incredible.
“I remember looking at Andy Farrell with about five minutes to go and we just shook our heads just thinking this was such an incredible game.
“That’s what makes the Six Nations special,” he continues, “it’s so different to any other competition, the tribal rivalry that builds, what it means to the supporters, it’s such a difficult tournament to go five from five, that you have to respect any side that does that.”
The best year? “I think they were all in their own way successful,” he responds, “we won 16 out of 20 games during my time, so I wouldn’t really like to take one year. They all had their moments, there were a lot more positives than negatives. We played our best, most cohesive, rugby in 2015, scored 18 tries, but then the first year was great because we won four out of five on the back of a completely new team.”
The 2014 defeat to Wales ‘because of the stakes’, and 2015 loss to Ireland – ‘if we’d won, we’d have been confident of a Grand Slam – do get singled out though. “International coaching is the best job in the world when you win, but it’s such a tough job when you lose.”
Considering the remarkable consistency Stuart introduced to a faltering England side, it does seem amiss he never won a championship. “I think somebody said to me the other day that if the bonus system we play now was in place then, two of those four second places would’ve been championship wins because we scored so many tries,” he says.
The Six Nations stirs plenty of conversation topics. Firstly, the number of players he used.
“Not as many as you’d think,” he says. “People will talk about the number of players I used, but during any Six Nations tournament I think it was less than 30, and we tended not to make changes once we had that core team established.
“The trouble is trying to get that core team together because you’re waiting for what happens in rounds five and six of the European Cup the week before you go to camp, so that always has a huge bearing. We’ve missed people like Owen Farrell for the whole of one Six Nations. You’re never picking from your strongest hand in the Six Nations, not many sides are, but certainly not England.”
Just how big the tournament was also took him by surprise. “You don’t know how big it is until you go to the launch,” he admits, “you then realise the scale of the media event that surrounds it. That was the big thing when I was interim coach, going to that launch thinking ‘wow, this is huge’. It’s on terrestrial TV, so the viewing figures are incredible, something like ten million people watched that France game [in 2015] and then other viewing figures were eight or nine million as well.”
Did you feel you needed to win a Six Nations? “Yeah there’s a bit of that,” he admits. “There was a feeling that we needed to get a trophy in the back pocket so people could see the progress.
“I felt as validation of the work we were doing, we needed to get over the line and win it. That was why 2015 was so gut-wrenching really, to be winning a game by 20 points, driving over their line and have a penalty given against us – print that one, he laughs – that was tough to take. You just wanted that validation for the work you’d be doing, for the boys to win a trophy and then take that into the world cup.”
Ireland now provide the biggest Six Nations interest for Stuart. With 18 of his Leinster players named in their 2018 squad, while not part of the national team set-up, he’s responsible for coaching a good chunk of their squad on a day-to-day basis. “It’s more with intrigue,” he says of how he watches the Six Nations these days. “I always do the ‘what if’ scenarios, what would I do if I was coaching here, and how would I set up the Ireland team to beat the Wales team – I do that during the game. I’m always in coaching mode, so I’d be intrigued about how both coaches set about each other.
“I look at how teams are defending and attacking, how they’re breaking them down. Then I’ll be listening to what people say, what the pundits are saying and usually thinking, ‘you’ve missed a really obvious thing there, I can’t believe you didn’t see it’.”
His way of breaking down a game is something he’s eager for his players to pick up. “I keep saying to the Leinster players that I don’t want them to watch the game, I want them to study it.”
Does it take away the fun at all? “That is the fun! Coaching is thinking about it, it’s a game of tactics, a game of chess – who’s going to play which hand when.
“You do miss the buzz of it [international rugby], but equally I’m lucky in that I’m not far off that level in my opinion. I’m coaching a lot of the Ireland team, there’s a lot of European games and big Pro14 games. You’ve also got more chance to impact on your players because you’ve coached them for a longer period of time than with an international side.”
How does he look back on his time with England and the Six Nations? “With pride and enjoyment,” he says. “Hopefully when people read this, they’ll remember some of the enjoyment. The media tend to take it to ‘they never did this or they never did that’, but it was a really young team that did a lot of special things, created a lot of memories, home and away. And then there was this energy around the crowd, you feel it when you’re on the bus driving to Twickenham – I think Twickenham did become transformed in that time. People were proud to wear your white shirt and had a real connection, I think the fans could see that.
“When we were away from home the travelling support was amazing and the wins, whether it was with the players or back home with your family, you look back on all of those moments. But on the flipside, you always want to do so well for your country that when you do lose, it does cut you. But we were fortunate, 16 out of 20, more wins than losses.”
“I was pretty young, 41, when I got the job and it gave me a fantastic amount of experience, I coached England 50 odd times, which is a fair number of games, it wasn’t just Six Nations.”
When he talks about all the times, he’s put himself forward, whether it’s for the Leeds academy job or the England job he believes even if rugby hadn’t taken over his life, he’d still have been just as ambitious. “I just wanted to put my head above the parapet and have a crack and see if I could make a difference.
“I don’t want to finish on this world not having had a go and it would have been the same whatever I ended up doing, if I’d carried on as a teacher I’d have wanted to be the deputy head or head of department.”
And the future? Could he have another crack at the Six Nations? “People ask me a lot, ‘would I go back to international coaching’,” he admits. “I really, really enjoy the club coaching, I enjoy the day-to-day interaction, the growth you can develop in the team, but equally, Johnno described it as a drug – I can see why people get drawn to it.
“But for the time being I’m enjoying what I’m doing and, hopefully, I’ve got a long way to go in coaching and who knows what’s down the line.”
Words by: Alex Mead
Pictures by: Philip Haynes
This article was taken from issue 5 of Rugby.
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