Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Team culture and the 'we, me' call to arms

Date: March 18, 2013

Comments 15

John Eales

A friend of mine believes that all boys need are cuddles, a kick up the backside and food – but he doesn’t indicate how much of each and in what order.

With the events of the last month, a growing number of sporting organisations may be subscribing to his theory as there are more red derrieres in Australian sport than there are marked hinds on an Australian cattle station.

The highest profile of the recent miscreants was for seemingly the most innocuous of offences, with four Australian cricketers suspended for not handing in a personal reflection of where they needed to improve leading into the third Test in India.

Prior to and post their indiscretion we have had drunken and disorderly Raiders in rugby league, a Reds rugby boy in trouble for an incident at a pub, Aussie rules and rugby league in supplement/performance enhancing drugs furores, male swimmers bullying and hazing their teammates, and even a tennis player who can’t keep himself out of the news.

It seems no sport is immune except maybe women’s sport, which either continues to cover itself in glory or continues to avoid attention.

Appropriately the vogue and most cited incubation for these various symptoms is the team culture, for it’s from the team culture where behaviour – good and bad, useful and useless – originates.

The thing about team culture is that you have one, whether you like it or not, so you may as well have one by design, not just by default.

And despite their lack of success in India, that’s what I like about Michael Clarke and Mickey Arthur’s stand in Mohali. They are specifically defining the disciplined culture their team needs to turn also-rans into world
beaters, or at least Ashes victors.

Just as the road to crime is often a thousand little steps, rather than one big step, in driving a culture the little things are often the big things. And that’s why, unless they are obvious halfwits, you have to give the appointed leaders the right to lead in the way they see fit.

We might have done it differently but it is their show and they are accountable for the outcome. Clarke, in particular, has earned that right through his innovative and forthright leadership in his short time in charge.

Former Wallaby coach Rod Macqueen was a master of culture and its effect on a team and was fastidious about the little things. Ad nauseam he would bang on about “standards”: get to meetings on time, do your preparation, leave no stone unturned. And though no one got sacked for not handing in their homework, neither did anyone last who didn’t contribute.

There are both hard and soft drivers of culture and they are equally important. For example, hard systems and structure like an open plan, flexi-seat, office environment, are created to facilitate an open and collaborative culture and discourage silo behaviour.

Softer symbols are important as well. In 1998, through Macqueen’s influence, the Wallabies instituted the jersey presentation by the “classic” Wallaby. As the team made its transition to the professional era, the presentation was designed to create a strong link to the history of the Wallabies and the men who had worn the jersey before. Players needed to know they were not the game, they were part of the game.

One of the most confounding challenges to team culture is the cult of the individual and the challenge to get players to, at times, subjugate their personal ambition for the sake of the team. This is easier said than done as all great sportsmen and women have a touch of selfishness about them.

To have got to where they have, they have undoubtedly needed to, because high performance must at times be an individual pursuit. But if this selfishness overrides the selflessness required to be part of the team, you don’t really have a team.

When the Wallabies’ 1999 World Cup-winning flanker Matt Cockbain was tasked to come up with a quote of the week he cited the world’s shortest poem, as recited by the great Muhammad Ali; “We, Me.” His message was that you had to think of the team before you thought of yourself as an individual.

Sometimes the quote of the week was relevant for an hour, sometimes a week. Cockbain’s became a rallying cry for an era. It was a mechanism for peers to check each other when their balance tipped the wrong way. To an outsider it may sound trivial; to an insider it was crucial and a call to arms – get to meetings on time, don’t drink when you’re injured, get your homework in on time.

Some of the current troubles in Australian sport will remedy with the swift actions taken, others might not. At the very least, while the time for cuddles may soon be nigh, our crop of chastised athletes have been given
plenty of food for thought while they gingerly get back to sitting comfortably again.

Players Peaking?

Senior Australian players not focused on Super Rugby: Hansen

Date: March 19, 2013 - 10:36AM

Paul Cully

All Blacks coach Steve Hansen. Photo: AFP

All Blacks coach Steve Hansen has suggested that established Wallabies scratching around for form in the early rounds of Super Rugby might already have one eye on the British and Irish Lions series.

"Any time the Lions come to town or there's a big event on, your senior players gear themselves up for that and maybe their focus on winning the Super 15 is not quite as strong as it could be," Hansen has told LiveSport radio in New Zealand. "But I think that they'll come together and produce a pretty good Australia team."

Both the Waratahs and Reds, who provided the bulk of players invited to the Wallabies logistical camps earlier this year, have been unconvincing in the opening rounds, with NSW coach Michael Cheika already dropping the axe on Benn Robinson, Drew Mitchell and Sekope Kepu. Meanwhile, the likes of Dave Dennis and Quade Cooper have been overshadowed by the strong early performances of the Brumbies, raising the troubling prospect that the Wallabies will have to opt for either form or experience, but not both.

However, Hansen saw similarities in the Reds' sluggish start with their 2012 campaign and said all experienced players would pace themselves to peak at the right time.

"[Will} Genia has just come back for his first game back, so he's only going to get better," Hansen said. "Queensland, even last year, they were up and down a bit early on in the season.

"It's a massive tournament now, the Super 15. To get right through to the end of June, July, and get into the play-offs, it's a long time smashing your body around, so you can't peak for the whole season.

"You've got to pick the right times to peak, and the senior players do that."

Hansen, a former Wales coach, also admitted he enjoyed "a wry smile" at Wales' 30-3 demolition last weekend of the England side that has been showered with superlatives since their big win against the All Blacks last year.

"Expectations on you grow and once you get higher expectations you get greater scrutiny, you get greater pressure," Hansen said. "So perhaps they [England] are finding what life is like when you are considered a good side and they're not coping that well. They weren't in the match at all. Wales just completely thumped them."

However, he warned that the Warren Gatland's Lions side would have "fundamental flaws" if it was selected too heavily from one nation.

"There'll be a lot of Welsh guys in it, as there will with English [players], and there are some quality Irish players and Scotland stood up under Scott Johnson," he said.

"If he [Warren Gatland] gets the mix right then there will be harmony off the field and that is just as important."

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Plenty of useful insights in this article

Tahs' turnstile of transition keeps turning as Cheika cultivates change

Date: March 14, 2013 - 5:33PM

Comments 1

"When things are going good, it's pretty easy to run down the hill but, when you've got to run up the hill, that's when you need to put in" ... Cheika. Photo: Anthony Johnson

So here we are. Three games in, one hopeful win, two losses – one as bad as anything NSW have put out on the park for 11 seasons – and a back line with the ominous swing of the turnstile about it as Michael Cheika shuffles the deck at the Waratahs.

No one said it would be easy. Certainly not Cheika. Recall his words of five months ago almost to the day on what it took to take Irish club Leinster from big city underperformers to Heineken Cup champions.

"It was the losses that changed us more than the wins, the big important losses," Cheika said of that four-year process.

"That's what makes the difference, because when things are going good, it's pretty easy to run down the hill but, when you've got to run up the hill, that's when you need to put in."

There is no disputing the Waratahs were running up hill this week. They may as well have been back heaving themselves up the Coogee steps, such was the emotional fallout from their submission to the Brumbies in Canberra last weekend.

Tonight, back home at Allianz Stadium, they are hoping to atone for those sins with a win against the Cheetahs. If their three outings to date have indicated anything, it is that this is a squad in transition. There is a new coach, new players and a totally different playing style. Cheika himself has warned against expecting a "short-term fix" while the Waratahs are "working towards the bigger picture."

The question is less can Cheika do it than does Sydney have the patience to see him through the kind of change he implemented at Leinster five years ago?

"I don't think Sydney has got the patience for us to be truthful," Waratahs assistant Alan Gaffney said on Thursday. "But it's the only way forward. You've got to go through it. We still expect to have success. We're not [saying] 'live with us while we lose these games because of what we're trying to do'. We're going out to win every game."

The central plank of Cheika's vision for the Waratahs is their much-talked about new commitment to attacking rugby. After a mixed start to the season it has also been the source of most of their growing pains.

"For too long players have been too regimented in what they've done, there have been too many structures put in place for too many players, when they just don't back their own abilities, nor recognise what's in front of them," Gaffney said.

"Of all the phrases I hate 'we play what's in front of us' is the worst but that's all we're trying to do. It's a philosophical change going from this massively structured play to this play where you give them a bit of shape but generally speaking it's not structured rugby. That is what's going to take a little time."

The players who adapt the quickest will have the most success in Cheika's squad this season. In that context his championing of unestablished talents such as Ben Volavola, Tom Kingston, Cam Crawford and Israel Folau (in rugby at least) makes perfect sense. All hunger, no baggage.

He did the same at Leinster when he joined in 2005, developing the likes of Cian Healy, Jamie Heaslip and Rob Kearney, who all went on to Test careers with Ireland.

"Leinster had plenty of big names when Michael arrived but he always wanted to make sure there was depth there without internationals like [Brian] O'Driscoll and [Gordon D'Arcy], he wanted to marry talent with depth," Leinster media manager Peter Breen said.

The parallels with the Waratahs are plain. A large and comfortable cluster of longtime Wallabies has learnt in just the first three weeks of the new season that nothing is certain.

Winger Drew Mitchell was dropped this week, prop Benn Robinson was benched in their season opener, lock Sitaleki Timani followed soon after and Sekope Kepu was the next high-profile scalp. All while former Wallaby Lachie Turner, with 15 Test caps to his name, has barely touched his boots to the turf.

"It's a lot tougher on them this year, a lot more is being demanded of them and expected of them and that level of accountability they've now got is [unprecedented]," Gaffney said.

"Eventually people are going to be given time on the pitch and it is about which guy does aim up and which guy doesn't. It's not a God-given right for some of these guys now to take a position."

Breen, who has seen off four different coaches during his decade with Leinster, says Waratahs fans can expect evolution instead of revolution from Cheika.

It was not until the club won the Celtic League title in 2008, three seasons into Cheika's reign, that Leinster found the belief required to nab the big one, their drought-breaking Heineken Cup.

"I would just say let the man make decisions because success seems to follow him everywhere," Breen said. "If he is given time to do that he will achieve great things. I have no doubt about it."

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Selections

Variety can be a curse or a curve ball when it comes to selection

Date: March 14, 2013

Comments 1

Ewen McKenzie

There are a lot of factors that go into selecting a team and they are not always empirical or scientifically based.One of the first considerations to go through my mind after a match is picking the team for next week.

Obviously, the approach of choosing the notional team straight after a game is fraught with danger as the emotional roller-coaster that surrounds winning and losing could have half the team being changed after a poor result and none following a win.

At the Reds, selection is something we devote an enormous amount of time to in the days that follow a game. The fact that it enters your thought process straight after a match highlights the importance of getting it right.

There is a lot to consider when choosing your side; along with the team's tactics for the week, all have a heavy influence. But, there is more to it than that and as a coach you find yourself asking many questions.

Can, and has, this player answered the call before; can he outperform his opponent; and does he know what it takes to win?

These are the types of attitudinal elements that need to be considered and you need to have some answers before you commit.

However, one of the biggest elements that is often overlooked is how each individual fits into the specific weekly game plan. Some teams prefer to play the same team each week, but the importance of ensuring the tactics you devised are good enough to negate your opponent and enhance your opportunities can't be overstated enough.

For example, if you are playing a team with a good lineout and likes to maul, then it would be silly to give them that opportunity - you don't kick the ball out. If a team thrives on counter-attack then don't kick the ball to them, instead kick it 10 rows into the grandstand and make them win the ball before they get to use it.

Sounds simple enough but for me the real enjoyment in coaching is to create a winning strategy and then get the players to embrace and trust in the plan before taking on the responsibility of executing it on the field.

Once you have determined your approach then you need to back it up with players who can understand the plan, who can execute the detail under pressure and who have skills that will ensure it happens.

So, when you are picking players you need to have one eye on how you are going to get the ball, how you are going to use it and then obviously how you are going to retain it. The public enjoys the notion of "horses for courses" as a catch-all phrase but that is perhaps a bit simplistic and does not give the importance of the game plan enough credit.

At the Reds we have become accustomed to dramatically changing our game plan depending on the circumstances and opponent, while employing a new set of tactics. Some argue this leads to confusion but a 72 per cent winning rate over the past three or so seasons means it can't all be bad.

Naturally, over time the game-plan elements become familiar so it's possible to use and park different approaches for different teams while keeping an element of surprise week to week. There is nothing better than a rival not quite sure what is going to happen next.

Uncertainty is a most powerful tool, and if you can employ it against your opponent then brilliant. Use it against yourself and then it can be your undoing.

I have been amazed at how many teams can function with players not knowing if they are in or out of a team as late as two days before a match. I still recall one rugby league team not finalising their line-up until the day of the game.

Anyone can be good at writing down a list of good players. Some can even articulate why they are good players and what they might bring to the table. The real challenge is to take all of that then work out whether their abilities are going to help or hinder your tactical approach to winning - the ultimate task set for the group.

Picking players is the easy part, getting them to collectively perform is the challenge

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Great Coaching?

A great coach needs more than just winning ways

Date: March 4, 2013 - 12:01AM

John Eales

Reds coach Ewen McKenzie. Photo: Getty Images

Despite at times vastly different personalities, the best coaches are typically more similar than they are different – they have to be.

And one of the ways in which they have to be more similar is in their resilience to criticism, both fair and unreasonable, up front and from the blind side alike.

Last week Ewen McKenzie, Australia's most successful provincial coach of the past decade, copped one such cheap shot. It was reported on ESPNscrum.com that a high-ranking Australian Rugby Union official who will play a major role in determining the next Wallabies coach, had recently told colleagues: “As long as my backside is pointing to the ground, Ewen McKenzie will not coach Australia. You cannot have a front-row forward in charge of the Wallabies because they know nothing about backline play.”

It is both an interesting and ignorant assessment of a guy who has led Australia's most successful and entertaining team since the Brumbies of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is also poor form for someone to make such comments through the media behind the veil of “unnamed sources”.

Coaches need the resilience of a tank and an unwavering sense of self which is neither pandered to by fickle plaudits nor dented by the inevitable barbs from the outside.

It's not as much a matter of “if” you have to deal with such criticism, though, but “when”.

And while no one is immune to criticism, experience instructs the most resilient to not get distracted by the noise on the periphery and to focus on the task at hand, rather than transferring the pressure on to their team.

The noise can become deafening, as it has at times for Robbie Deans throughout his tenure as Wallaby coach. In the public domain, however, despite criticism of his heritage and coaching practices alike, Deans as stoically held himself with an appropriate and admirable dignity throughout.

Winning is often the only remedy to criticism but, as seen with McKenzie, sometimes even that isn't enough.

Despite their differences, our best rugby coaches, as well as those across other sports like Wayne Bennett, Leigh Matthews, Ric Charlesworth, Darren Lehmann, John Buchanan and others, share five key qualities.

A high tolerance for bad news. There is nothing more certain than the fact that “shit happens”, so deal with it when it does. Injuries, losses and bad referees are just as much part of the script as trophies and tickertape parades and you won't get to the latter without the former. A composed head in a crisis will help ensure that, when all is not well, you don't panic and you focus on how to make a difference, rather than dwell on the past or dissolve into inaction.

Be a critical and lateral thinker and embrace challenging and diverse thought. If you don't invite criticism in the same way you welcome flattery you are setting yourself up to fail. It doesn't mean you have to change your strategy at a whim but some robust debate might serve to validate your thinking as much as contradict it.

Embrace a healthy level of paranoia. Too much paranoia and your environment can become infectiously unhealthy and defensive. Too little, and complacency can rear its unwelcome head.

Understand and truly care for your people, appreciate their strengths and weaknesses, promote them for their strengths, and support and develop them in their weaknesses.

And it also helps to be bright and a lifelong learner. Be prepared that the most valuable lessons can sometimes emerge from the most unlikely sources. Sometimes you will learn more from a person playing their first match than you will from the 10-year veteran – as long as you are prepared to listen.

Fortunately, in Australian rugby we have a bright group of established and confident coaches in Deans, Jake White, Michael Cheika and McKenzie himself, who have all won major titles at the top levels of professionalism in different regions around the world.

We also have aspirants such as Damien Hill, Richard Graham and Michael Foley at various stages of their journey.

Unfortunately, criticism such as that copped by McKenzie and Dean can not only undermine those on the coaching journey but also deter those who may be considering such a career but unwilling to subject themselves or their families to such invalid, inaccurate and faceless scrutiny.

Rugby Coaching Excellence

Welcome

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

We, Me Cry?

Team culture and the 'we, me' call to arms

John Eales

Players Peaking?

Senior Australian players not focused on Super Rugby: Hansen

Paul Cully

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Plenty of useful insights in this article

Tahs' turnstile of transition keeps turning as Cheika cultivates change

Georgina Robinson

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Selections

Variety can be a curse or a curve ball when it comes to selection

Ewen McKenzie

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Great Coaching?

A great coach needs more than just winning ways

John Eales