Mind Games

BEING A HEAD COACH THESE DAYS REQUIRES A DEGREE IN PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR FARE. IT’ S A JOB FOR BIG PERSONALITIES AND STEVE HANSEN CAME TO RELISH THE CHANCE TO INDULGE IN MIND GAMES.

The last two weeks of the World Cup drove a level of media interest that was unprecedented.

The four teams that had survived were vastly different in playing style, vision and philosophy.

Yet they were united in that they were all respectively governed by a head coach with a huge presence and a PhD in setting an agenda.

Those last two weeks proved that we are in the era of the ‘Super Coach’. The best teams were governed by men with big personalities. Alpha male types who had been around for an age and knew how to manipulate the media – how to create a storyline that suited whatever angle they were working.

If the World Cup taught us anything, it was surely that coaching now is all about the cult of personality.

A job that was once about organising 15 blokes to run in the same direction has morphed into something entirely different in a professional age of mass media coverage, sponsor influence and free labour markets that have led to the global dissemination of rugby intelligence.

The head coaching role is no longer the domain of the technical and tactical mastermind, operating in the shadows of the training ground, clad in tracksuit and commanding those around him with shrill blasts of the whistle.

What we saw in Japan is that a head coach is now a figurehead, a statesman, a near genius in the art of psychological warfare.

In those last two weeks of the World Cup, the players didn’t make any headlines off the park. It felt like no one was particularly interested in what they had to say.

It was the respective coaches of New Zealand, England, South Africa and Wales that grabbed all the attention. During the week of the semi-final, literally hundreds of journalists crammed into England’s hotel to hear Eddie Jones make any number of priceless one liners and zany observations.