Peter Bills: Coaches are driving magic out of game
Riverdance? Forget it. If you wanted to see real footwork, magical stepping and great movement, all you had to do was peruse the rugby fields of the world over the last 50 years and enjoy a long list of world-class out-halves.
Consider some of the candidates for a lead role: Jack Kyle and Cliff Morgan from the 1950s; Scotland's Gordon Waddell from the 1960s, Mike Gibson, Barry John and Phil Bennett from the 1970s, Jonathan Davies in the 1980s...
But alas, there is no current vintage of northern hemisphere players worthy of inclusion in such a list. Some think it a mystery as to why.
For sure, one southern hemisphere out-half justifies inclusion in such an esteemed list. Dan Carter of New Zealand is a supreme talent: calm, authoritative and a shrewd, visionary reader of the play. Australian Quade Cooper is a one-off, a dynamic attacker but not quite yet the all-round performer that Carter is.
Now I know this cannot be an exact science, for one principal reason. The game has changed so much since the era when the likes of Kyle, Morgan, John and Gibson were strutting their stuff.
Yet consider now the list of out-halves who represented northern-hemisphere countries last weekend.
Worthy
With all due respect, can we seriously mention Toby Flood, Stephen Jones, Jonathan Sexton and Ronan O'Gara in the same breath? Worthy performers every one, and in the case of O'Gara and Jones, players of considerable longevity at the highest level.
But will we really mention O'Gara in future years in the same revered tone as Kyle and Gibson? Will Jones in his retirement be elevated to the dizzying heights of a Morgan or John? As John McEnroe might have put it, you cannot be serious.
So do we point the finger of blame for this situation at the game itself? Has its progress to professionalism banished most of the real geniuses in this key role in a side? Or has coaching all but excluded individuals such as Morgan, Kyle, John and Bennett?
If it is no longer possible under the current ways of the game for such individual geniuses to flourish, how come Carter arrived and flourished? And how does Cooper continue to be chosen by Australia if there is no room for that type of unpredictable talent? So I think we should bury that prognosis straight away. I suspect we would do better to adjust our sights and focus our attention on the world of coaching.
Would a single coach of the modern era have recommended Bennett take the action he took as he ran back close to his own goal-line to retrieve a kick in the Barbarians v All Blacks match of 1973?
A couple of mesmerising side-steps and a hurled pass out wide to ensure the attack stayed alive? Most modern-day coaches would have been doing their nut in their touchline seats.
It seems to me that too many coaches of the modern world are too scared to put complete trust in their players -- particularly in the way the great, late Welsh coach Carwyn James, who oversaw that Barbarians game and the triumphant 1971 Lions tour of New Zealand, always did.
James trusted his players and their judgment. He knew they would make mistakes; which human beings don't? But if he had chosen them, he believed in their inherent ability and allowed them to make most of their own decisions.
By making players and teams so pre-programmed, coaches have largely robbed the game of the great individuals, the players of true genius and yes, unpredictability.
Teams may now be organised to the nth degree but the theatre in which individuals with sufficient brio and self-faith could flourish, has all but closed down.
That famous Welsh fly-half factory? RIP.
- Peter Bills
Irish Independent
