Ethics and chemistry high on syllabus

RUGBY/Interview with Declan Kidney: Ah, Leinster. The city slickers. So much ability, and so much expected of them from the biggest, most fickle and demanding of publics. And so easy to tag. The mercurial ones. The great underachievers. The chokers, even, as they've been labelled. Cue the new Kidney on the block. The great redeemer.

No Irish rugby coach has asked us to think more positively of our rugby players, and indeed sportsmen and sportswomen, than Declan Kidney. And it comes as no surprise that, as Matt Williams sought to do, no one is striving more to make us re-evaluate our cliched perceptions of what Leinster are really about.

"What is success?" he asked repeatedly one evening at Riverview in this, his first official week as Leinster coach, during a lengthy chat. And that is what it is. Interviews with Kidney don't tend to follow the normal protocol for these things.

Typically, he provides as many questions as answers. Elusive maybe, but there's a purpose to it as well.

"What is underachieving? And what is potential?" he asks, because, as he concedes, these are the labels associated with Leinster.

"Everybody can be accused of underachieving if you want to be negative," he adds, highlighting that Leinster only missed out on the Heineken Cup final two seasons ago by one score, and from the knock-out stages last season by one try.

As an example of the fine line between what we perceive as "success" and "failure" he cites the European Cup final of last May, when Wasps beat Toulouse "literally thanks to a bounce of the ball".

"So the real question is, what is success? The aim will be to be as good as we can be. That mightn't be good enough to win anything."

For no one has a divine right to win anything, Leinster in the European Cup included.

You point out that Leinster are blessed with more creativity and potency out wide than any other team in Ireland, and he counters: "What you're doing there is placing inordinate pressure on two or three players in the squad. But the great thing about rugby, different from other sports, is that you really are only as strong as what is perceived as your weakest component. Not your strongest."

Never more so than in this age of in-depth video analysis, he adds.

"There are players (in Leinster) who are recognised as very talented players, but in rugby everyone is interdependent on everyone else, and we have to build on that interdependence."

It amazes him, for example, that John Hayes - "if not the most, then certainly one of the most valuable players in Irish rugby" - has never won a "man of the match" award.

As a further example, Kidney cites the case of Lawrence Dallaglio, easily Wasps' most influential player, yet in winning the English-European double last season he was far from an ever-present. And Dallaglio himself has stressed that the reduced dependence on him was one of the prime factors in Wasps' progress.

Wasps, he points out, were the first team from a capital city to win the European Cup, also adding that, similar to Leinster, Dublin carry the biggest burden of expectation come All-Ireland time.

"People will always make judgements about things and they're entitled to. The bigger the population, the more diverse opinions you're going to get." That said, he adds: "But it won't worry me if there's only 300 people at a (Leinster) match, because I know they'll all be genuine."

Though the Leinster bean counters might disagree.

Back in an environment where he's wanted, Kidney comes across as the ebullient character he had been until the last couple of years, though he gives his time as Irish assistant coach a straight bat. Ditto any question about any future ambitions to coach Ireland. If it's back to teaching, so be it.

"My school (Pres Cork) have been brilliant," he stresses, "just to allow me to do this and then (eventually) go back there."

That's still his plan, even if he admits his "sabbatical" as a rugby coach - six years and counting - arguably disqualifies him from providing career guidance. "It's a little bit ironic when you think I've taken on one of the most unstable jobs in sports management."

Ask him if his contract is for three years, and he answers in the affirmative, albeit with the rider, "or three losses."

"What is a coach?" he asks rhetorically, before suggesting something of a hands-off philosophy.

"A coach's role is only to help the players to play as well as they want to play. And if a coach does his job properly, in my view, he makes himself redundant because the players are running the ship."

All he can do, he maintains, is find out from the players what they want to achieve, help them outline what's then required, and do his damnedest to provide the working conditions and organisational back-up to make that possible. He's already invited Leinster Branch officials down to Anglesea Road to show them previously "unworkable" office conditions and had the portakabins redesigned into one, more functional, block.

Three full-time assistant coaches is testimony to his willingness to take on more specialist help, as well as recognition of the bigger volume of matches compared to his five seasons with Munster. He also intends using Ireland defensive coach Mike Ford.

Well-documented divisions in the Leinster camp hindered the Williams reign as well as last season's disappointing campaign, but one of the Munster trademarks under Kidney was that everyone was equal.

"We must work with each one of them to an equal amount to fulfil their potential, to put pressure on selection, and then to accept whatever way selection goes and then for everyone to row in and help out.

"Who has any right to tell anyone else what they should achieve in life?" he asks.

Yet there must be a core group of players there that feel they've, well, underachieved heretofore?

"If they're going to measure themselves just in terms of medals, it probably decreases their chances of actually winning medals."

We've almost come full circle now, back to that thin line between success and failure. So what does he think constitutes success? "I think success is being able to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and say, 'I did as well as I could. I gave that team and myself, my best shot'.

"And if we do that it will mean that, one, it's a good way to lead your life, whatever walk of life you lead, and, two, we'll probably have great fun doing it, and that will be vital, and then maybe we'll get ourselves into contention and like in the Wasps-Toulouse match the ball will bounce our way."

Many Leinster supporters, and indeed privately some Leinster players, would contend that at the end of last season they might have had difficulty consulting the mirror.

"That's in the past anyway," he counters. But you suspect that at the end of this season they will be able to.