Next England manager: English rugby needs to trust itself, rather than seeking foreign coach’s magic touch - Kevin Garside

COLUMN: Warren Gatland is a good coach but has a great crop of Welsh players to work with

(Gallo Images )

Garside:

Is Warren Gatland still favourite after declaring his apathy for the England post, or have we gone back to Australia to chase Michael Cheika? Or maybe Jake White has been spotted house-hunting in Richmond.

Here’s a radical idea: why not let our performance in international rugby be a test of Englishness, and by that I don’t mean from a narrow xenophobic perspective. I mean let it be test of the English rugby system from top to bottom, of our ability to produce coaches as well as players.

The idea that a foreign coach might enter our orbit and wave a magic wand both misunderstands the nature of the job and the capacity of a Special One to bring with him the necessary elements of the culture from which he emerged.

I’m sorry, all you guru-lovers out there, but there is no short cut, no silver bullet. It’s about the quality of the players in the shirt playing the game as they know it.

One of Stuart Lancaster’s mistakes was to think he could bring about a sea change in outcomes by imposing a culture from the top down. It is one thing creating a positive environment, quite another trying to win by absorbing the zeitgeist in abstract.

England failed because they were not good enough to execute under pressure. That’s the All Blacks’ game, born of identity and belief unique to that small congregation adrift in the South Seas. What it means to be an All Black in New Zealand is a key factor in performance. Lancaster recognised that and took steps to replicate it by establishing as far as he could what it meant to be English.

He sent out questionnaires to the players and their parents in some kind of McKinsey-esque management move to identify performance drivers. If only he had thought as hard about how to win the next match.

Any attempt to determine identity in this way is bound to fail. Identity is something players feel. It comes from a shared set of values established at birth and played out in every aspect of life, not just sport.

Playing rugby in New Zealand is not just sport, it is an expression of community, a way of belonging. England might be better served going back to the bar after matches and sinking a few pints – at least everybody knew the score then, the players understood the “culture” and their place in it.

Lancaster turned playing rugby for England into a philosophy symposium. No wonder Sam Burgess buggered off back to Australia, his head aching with the gravity of it all.

Gatland is a fine coach but his New Zealandness has not made Wales the sharp outfit they are. That would be the boot of Leigh Halfpenny, the line breaks of Jamie Roberts and the freakish George North, the back-row brutality of Dan Lydiate and Sam Warburton, and we have yet to mention the likes of Taulupe Faletau, Justin Tipuric, Jonathan Davies and Mike Phillips. This is a rare crop of brilliant Welshmen that has given a good coach rich stuff with which to work. High-spec Welshness is the key ingredient.

As a long-suffering observer of English football, I was once easily persuaded by the foreign appointment. It turned out that Sven Goran Eriksson was more English in approach than Sir Alf Ramsey, having been a student and admirer of the English game, particularly Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town.

And then came the great Fabio Capello, the messiah of Milan and Madrid. What he didn’t know about the finer arts of football, the intricacies of technique and tactics, was not worth knowing. He would soon have us weaving bewildering patterns on the pitch, caressing that ball, camping in the opponents’ half, forza Inghilterra, and all that.

It turned out he was worse than Sven, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa quite the most joyless experience in memory, England tucked away in the remote northern mining community of Rustenburg, isolated, alienated, disengaged and ultimately useless. Capello believed the England shirt weighed too heavily on the players but was no nearer than the next man to solving the enigma.

Once cured of the foreign quick fix, it is easy to accept the premise that in the field of international competition, if the contest is to mean anything it has to be a test of national qualities and attributes.

The club environment is the arena for all-comers, and in that English rugby has quickly followed the football example. And marvellous it is, too.

So let’s stop this headless pursuit of the cure-all foreign genius. There are no secrets in this game. New Zealand demonstrate every time they take the field how they win matches. We don’t need Gatland to identify their qualities.

So let’s set about getting better by investing in ourselves, believing in ourselves as Englishmen, working harder and taking responsibility for who and what we are. After all, that is how the All Blacks do it.