Alan Watkins: Overseas coaches: Over here and over-rated

David Moffett, the latest Antipodean wonder worker to turn up in my native land, has said that overseas players face "a grim future'' in Wales if he succeeds in setting up his four franchised regional or area teams next season. This is all very well, but what about overseas coaches – Moffett said he hopes all four teams will be coached by Welshmen – or managers? Or, for that matter, group chief executives, the proud title which Moffett holds with the Welsh Rugby Union? They, presumably, will proceed unimpeded on their profitable way. But do they really deserve their present exalted reputation?

François Pienaar started off well at Saracens but did not leave the club a happy ship. His successor, Wayne Shelford, was an equally great, perhaps even greater, loose forward. But as a coach he seems to spend much of his time making incomprehensible selections, such as his omission of Richard Hill against Gloucester on Saturday. He explained this afterwards by saying that Hill was in danger of playing too many matches. The succeeding Zurich Premiership games, in which he hoped to play the flanker, were in his opinion more important to the club than the Powergen Cup quarter-final.

Well, that is Shelford's view. It nevertheless seems strange to me. On Saturday morning Saracens had at least a hope of beating Gloucester. But they did not have a realistic chance of carrying off the Premiership title, any more than they do today.

Then there is his curious habit of issuing bogus team-sheets in a wily attempt to fox the opposition. If this ploy fails, he falls back on criticising his players. As a commentator on the BBC's Grandstand programme on Sunday put it, this was something that Sir Alex Ferguson would never do with Manchester United – in public, at any rate. Austin Healey, who was also doing a turn in the studio, added that Dean Richards would never behave in this way either. To be fair to Shelford, he seemed to have mellowed slightly after Saturday's encounter. "At times my players made silly little errors,'' he said, "not trusting their systems, and they got burnt. But we scored three tries, and maybe we can score three or four more [again, against Gloucester] next week.'' From Shelford, this counts as fulsome praise.

His fellow New Zealander, Wayne Smith, who is now at Northampton, is a grimmer customer – for, personally, Shelford is not grim at all. Smith is in a happier position, with the club that he coaches in the last four of the Powergen Cup and the last eight of the Heineken European Cup.

Napoleon used to ask, if someone recommended a new general to him: "But has he luck?'' In both cup competitions, Smith has enjoyed the most extraordinary luck. This has depended not so much on the bounce of the ball as on the whim of the referee. Knock-ons and forward passes have regularly been waved on, as Steve Lander did when he ignored the touch judge on Saturday and awarded Northampton a try. Other sides are frequently penalised for holding on: Northampton seldom. Perhaps Smith has a way of coaching his players to get on the right side of referees. But it seems more like sheer good fortune to me.

It may be too early to say how Warren Gatland, another New Zealander, will do at Wasps. He left his coaching job with Ireland in somewhat mysterious – anyway, unexplained – circumstances. He certainly made some unusual choices in selection while he was there.

To do him justice, however, one of those mistakes is being repeated. The Irish selectors are reluctant to pick Geordan Murphy, a full-back or wing of Lions class, because he chooses to play his rugby for Leicester rather than for an Irish province. He is back in the set-up only because Girvan Dempsey is indisposed.

The greatest disaster of all proved to be Graham Henry. After he had ceased to be the Wales manager he turned up in the Cardiff stand for an international when the side were being coached by yet another New Zealander, Steve Hansen, the present incumbent. As the big television screen showed his picture, the crowd broke into spontaneous applause. This was generous of them. In similar circumstances I doubt whether a New Zealand crowd would have cheered a coach from Wales.

The case against Henry does not lie primarily in the decline of Wales but, rather, in his handling of the Lions in Australia, where he had all the talent he could reasonably ask for at his disposal. He failed to win a series that should have been won. Worse, he demoralised and almost destroyed some fine players: not only Healey and Matt Dawson (who could both easily have fallen out with Mother Teresa) but Iain Balshaw, Colin Charvis and Ben Cohen.

Here is a shortlist of our best recent coaches after the greatest of them all, Carwyn James: Brian Ashton, Geoff Cooke, Gareth Jenkins, Declan Kidney, Ian McGeechan, Jack Rowell, Jim Telfer, Clive Woodward. Not a New Zealander among them. As Cliff Morgan (the least petty or nationalistic of men) said in these pages on Saturday: "There is no reason why a New Zealander should coach Wales. I would give the job to Jenkins of Llanelli."