Eddie Jones and Warren Gatland should remember selection is all about luck
Some are billing this weekend’s match at Cardiff as a shoot-out between Warren Gatland of Wales and Eddie Jones of England, though neither of these middle-aged men will make a tackle or pass or kick the ball.
Coaches and managers now get at least as much media attention as players. It did not use to be like this and not only because for a long time the very idea of a coach was anathema to the men – they were all men then – who ran rugby union.
Coaches were all right for schoolboys, but the idea smacked, indeed stank, of professionalism. International XVs were picked by a committee of amateur selectors. Doubtless they made many weird decisions. Anyone who remembers the game then will recall some of them. But of course professional managers/coaches/selectors have also been known to blunder.
Any football fan whose team is on a losing streak knows better than the manager which changes must be made. Anyone who remembers England’s botched campaign in the 2015 Rugby World Cup knows that paying coaches big salaries doesn’t mean they will always get things right. Indeed if you look at any of the HYS pages on the BBC Sport website you will see that there is no shortage of people who know better than the likes of Gatland and Jones. Many of them will select a better team, and do it for free.
If most of us don’t really know just what a manager/coach does , we do recognize that the most important part of his job is getting selection right. The difficulty of course is that it is only results which justify selection.
Back in 1956 the English cricket selectors were highly praised. After losing at Lord’s, as was usual against Australia, they recalled the veteran Cyril Washbrook who hadn’t played for England for five years. Actually he was one of the selectors himself, but they sent him out of the room while they debated whether to pick him. (It might have been embarrassing if they had had to call him back in only to tell him “we’ve decided after all that you’re too old. Sorry, Cyril”). As it was he came to the wicket with England 17 for 3 and went on to have a big partnership with Peter May. May made a hundred, Washbrook 98, and the selectors were geniuses.But he might just as easily have got something well-nigh unplayable – especially for a 41 year-old – as soon as he came in, and then the selectors would have looked stupid. The sensible coach or selector’s theme-song comes from “Guys and Dolls” : “Luck, be a lady to-night…”
There was a time when football managers often weren’t allowed to pick the team. The club directors, usually local businessmen, reserved that task to themselves. I suppose it was often the most fun that they had, and it would require a deal of research before you could establish that they made more of a hash of selecting a team than coaches and managers do today. Of course there is now a mass of statistical evidence available to selectors. They know how far any player has run, how often he had touched the ball, made a pass or tackle etc etc. But I would guess that it is only selectors lacking in self-confidence who rely heavily on such evidence.
In cricket there was for years – no doubt still is – much argument about the part the captain should play in selection. Sometimes, in England anyway, the captain might be co-opted on to the selection committee. (This would prove awkward when the other selectors thought a change of captain necessary.) The Australian selectors preferred to pick the team and hand the names to the captain. Richie Benaud said he preferred it that way. His view was that if he had been one of the selectors himself and had argued for X rather than Y, his decision-making – as perhaps when to put X on to bowl – might be compromised or affected by the part he had played in getting him into the team. This seems sensible. On the other hand, back in Edwardian times, the England captain, Archie MacLaren once made his disgust at the selectors’ choices evident; this probably didn’t make for a happy dressing- room.
“Happy” is surely a key word. What has Ole Gunnar Solskjær brought to Manchester United but a long-unfamiliar happiness? No doubt he has tweaked the system a bit, but the chief thing surely is that he has changed the mood, had the players singing to a happy tune. His smiling countenance has replaced poor old Jose Mourinho’s gloomy one and the players are scoring goals and winning matches.
Of course many of the most successful coaches -those whose teams keep winning – know how to employ both stick and carrot, and know also which is appropriate at any given moment. I’ve always liked a story about Brian Clough. His Nottingham Forest team were on a run of defeats. They crouched in the dressing-room in expectation of fire and brimstone. Instead Clough strolled in smiling, tossed a ball on to the floor, said, “that’s a football – go out and play with it”, and left. The story would be spoiled if they hadn’t gone out and won that afternoon, but I like to think they did.
The first thing Napoleon is said to have wanted to know about a general was whether he was lucky. One might say the same about coaches and managers. Sometime, like generals or admirals, they simply draw the short straw, taking over a side in terminal decline, for instance. Sometimes they may make their own luck; sometimes the stars and planets are in their favour. The case of Richard Cockerill is in point. His long – and for years successful – career at Leicester ended dismally – a man who seemed Leicester through and through being held responsible for the club’s decline and getting the sack. There were doubters in Scotland when he was appointed head coach at Edinburgh – a club that had talented players and disappointing results.
Under his guidance the club has been turned round, and in his second year there is enjoying its first successful season for years. The doubters have been silenced. Everybody is singing his praises, and doing so with good reason. But I doubt if he has changed his ideas or his method. What eventually failed at Welford Road is succeeding at Murrayfield. Conclusion: it’s as difficult to predict success in coaching and management in sport as it is in war, politics and business.
The outcome of what should be a riveting match in Cardiff this weekend is just as hard to forecast. However, two predictions may be confidently offered. First, the game will be won or lost by the performance of players over eighty minutes on the field. Second, whichever side wins, you can bet that the media will give an awful lot of credit to the coach of the victorious team. It will be Eddie’s triumph or Warren’s. Conversely, Warren’s disaster or Eddie’s. One will have proved his genius, the other that he is fading, in decline, on his last legs.