Stuart Lancaster achieved redemption as Leinster’s right man after being the wrong one for so long with England
Lancaster's England demise has cast a long shadow over his career
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Your support makes all the difference.Johnny Sexton did not need to mention Stuart Lancaster when he was interviewed on Sky Sports in the immediate aftermath of Leinster’s latest European Champions Cup triumph on Saturday.
The greatest fly-half the northern hemisphere has produced since Jonny Wilkinson could have hailed three-time winning head coach Leo Cullen or the myriad great players who ran out alongside him in Bilbao against a Racing 92 team who threw the Irish province off their stride. Sexton could have hailed the enabling structure of Irish rugby or the departing Leinster great Isa Nacewa in his last game for the province.
Instead, Sexton singled out the man who three years ago was bundled out of English rugby after a calamitous World Cup campaign which he oversaw, with some doubting he would ever re-emerge in the professional game.
“What a special coach to come in and do what he's done,” Sexton told Sky Sports. “He did an unbelievable job with England. That gets overlooked by one result; a result in the World Cup that could have gone either way against Wales.
“However things turn out for a reason and we might not be European Champions today if England didn't lose that game.”
In 2016, everything changed for Lancaster when he was handed a lifeline as senior coach of Leinster. On Saturday, his redemption was complete.
Sexton was not completely accurate in his praise. Lancaster was sacked - and let’s be clear he was sacked and did not “stand down” as some revisionists would have us believe - not for one disappointing result against Wales. He was sacked because England lost their way completely and utterly under him just when they needed clarity and direction.
Back-to-back pool defeats to Wales and Australia meant Lancaster oversaw England’s worst World Cup campaign in the history of the competition as the mad-cap selection of rugby league star Sam Burgess became a stick with which to beat him and a divisive element in a squad which patently was not ready for the biggest stage.
Neither was Lancaster ready for the job. He was over-promoted from within. A safe pair of hands when the RFU and English rugby was reeling following the scandal-hit campaign of 2011 under Martin Johnson. Even under the equally ill-equipped Johnson, England had reached the quarter finals.
Lancaster was the wrong man at the wrong time but no-one took any pleasure at seeing him hounded out of the Twickenham gates by the very people who had employed him in the first place.
What Lancaster needed at the time was a senior coach to guide him on his path, just as he is now finding under Cullen at Leinster.
The former Ireland lock has not been given the plaudits he deserves. Cullen does not really “look” like a leader of men and doesn’t speak in tub-thumping tones. But he is getting results and with three European Cup victories now on his CV must surely be the next Ireland coach in waiting. Lancaster is learning from the best.
And in the same way we did not take pleasure from Lancaster’s demise, surely it is only right to hail his resurrection.
England lost four Six Nations games in four years under Lancaster before falling off a cliff in the World Cup. They were ok under him but were never going to fly. He was an excellent organiser and still is, and has an attention to detail few can match. He is not a snarling bully like some, but coaches by consensus and in a calm, understated manner. He may never have the gravitas for a return to the top of the international game but surely, at 48 years old, he has time on his side to re-define himself. He should be allowed to shed the unwanted baggage of 2015.
Who knows what the future holds for him? Perhaps a return to England and a director of rugby role in the Premiership is not as fanciful as it seemed when a cohort of Harlequins’ England contingent hammered down the door of managing director David Ellis in 2016 pleading with him not to give him the job when Conor O’Shea stepped aside. Ellis opted for John Kingston instead. Oh, if he had his time again.
Sexton didn’t need to praise Lancaster, but he did. Sure, Leinster’s success has been built primarily around a brilliant group of hardened, experienced international stars of with Sexton is the figurehead. In Cullen, they have the best coach currently operating in Europe below international level while the structure of rugby in Ireland is infinitely superior to the dog’s dinner England’s players and coaches are forced to muddle through on a year-by-year basis. Ireland’s players are conditioned to peak at key times of the year, England’s are whipped into exhaustion by two unforgiving masters.
But clearly, Lancaster has had a positive effect since arriving. Johnny Sexton is his own man. When he speaks, we owe it to him to listen. Right now, Stuart Lancaster deserves the plaudits which are coming his way.
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