KURT McQUILKIN INTERVIEW: GERRY THORNLEYtalks to the departing Leinster defence coach who believes it is the right time to take a break 'from living the rugby dream' and head back to his native New Zealand
IT BEGAN with a Christmas visit to see the folks in 1992 and almost 18 years later will end, for the time being at any rate, with an indefinite trek back to New Zealand. It’s a chance to hang out with family and friends, have a few beers by the lake, maybe some golf and fishing, maybe a business enterprise. Kurt McQuilkin likes to go with the flow.
Right now, his star has never shone brighter. Leinster seek a third major trophy in his three seasons as defensive coach and McQuilkin could have stayed, or if he’d fancied, moved on to another club. But he wants to have a few beers by his lakeside house.
What about money and career and all that stuff? Your name can slip off the radar quite easily in any sport. “I still see it as a career, but at this point in time I need a break from it, you know, and I just need to freshen up. With Michael (Cheika) leaving I think it’s a good time for me to leave and just bring in some fresh ideas.”
McQuilkin sat down with new incoming head coach Joe Schmidt, who would have liked him to stay, and was apparently offered a new improved deal by Leinster. But he and Barbara love the outdoor life of New Zealand, and their newly-built house on Lake Taupo in King Country on the north island, near where he grew up in Tekuiti. As the Irish squad will be based there for a few days during the World Cup he’ll be their liaison officer that week.
Coaching can be intensive, and demands most weekends. He wants to see more of their girls, Ella (nine) and Lilly (six). He’s considering opening a courier business but for the moment he just wants a holiday.
“I’ve been living the rugby dream. I’ve been working with world class rugby players on a day-to-day basis, just living the dream and it’s been great. People say I’m mad but I just think it’s time. It’s a good time, you know.”
Good timing in terms of the legacy he has contributed to also. Leinster can now soak up the pressure and roll with the punches thanks to an all-enveloping defensive effort which, last time out, shut Munster out for the fourth meeting in a row.
“I think now that the defence and the attack complement each other to a point where in the past Leinster were known as a flat-out attacking side, ‘You score six we’ll score seven’. It’s now a case of the defence stepping up to the mark along with the attack and they complement each other nicely, to the point where they can play many styles of games. They can dog it when they need to and they can flash it when they need to,” he says, with a hint of pride.
There have been many aspects to this, a shift mentally and technically, greater line speed, improved communication and work-rate, but the key, according to McQuilkin? “The players have bought into it and obviously Cheiks put the structures into place for the players to buy into it and the likes of Knox, Brewer, Gaffney and Johnno Gibbs, along with everyone else, have homed in and it’s just clicked.”
Expanding on this some more, McQuilkin talks of a mongrel mentality. “They call it defence but it’s actually attack. We’re attacking them to get the ball back off them.”
With Cheika and Alan Gaffney also moving on, Leinster face into their most uncertain future since Cheika first arrived five seasons ago. McQuilkin highlights Cheika’s ability to delegate as the mark of a good coach, lauds the way “he’s a straight shooter”, and admits his boss “will be a big loss to Irish rugby”.
McQuillkin concedes he hadn’t really thought about the coaching exodus. “I think the major thing is that Johnno is staying on for a bit of continuity. He’s an intelligent guy and Joe is an intelligent guy.
“I don’t think it’s going to be easy for Leinster by any shot because obviously the year that’s in it, too, the World Cup boys won’t be around as much as they would have been. So it will be a challenge for them but I think they have two good blokes in Joe and Johnno that will take the challenge on. But will it be easy? No.”
He heads off to his lakeside sunset confident Irish rugby is in rude healthy, and grateful for all that Irish and Leinster rugby has given him. As a player a product of New Zealand, but as a coach “an Irish product”.
“There’s no way I’d see myself as a New Zealand coach and probably by a long shot. Down there you’re let know that you’re an overseas coach, which I don’t mind, because I’m very proud of the fact of being an Irish product.”
After another couple of good seasons with Bective, his Leinster debut was a win over the Natal Duikers in Anglesea Road under lights at the start of the 1995-96 season. “It was brilliant. We tore the swingers off them. We had a great old game and I scored a try.”
Leinster went on to win the interpros and reach the semi-finals of the inaugural Heineken Cup.
Different times. In contrast with Southern Hemisphere teams and players particularly, with their professional mentality and conditioning, he describes it as men against boys. “These are totally different from those dark days. But I must say I’m still very proud of those days; some good guys, fun days and we played good, hard rugby, we played some cracking rugby.”
That Christmas, McQuilkin was called into the Ireland squad under Murray Kidd and John Mitchell for some warm-weather training in Atlanta and his debut. “It pissed down for a week and we played the Yanks at the end of it. It was so wet that they had to spray paint the ground green. We were coming off covered with green.”
It would be the first of five caps for his adopted country. “I’m very proud, very proud. I wasn’t the most brilliant rugby player but I got my five caps and I’m very happy with it.”
In truth, he does himself a disservice there. Maybe not the quickest, he was a teak-tough, hard-carrying inside centre with a good offloading game who fully deserved his stint in the Irish number 12 jersey.
Now married to an Irish woman and with two Irish daughters, he considers himself an Irish Kiwi, and it doesn’t stop there. “My mum now, she is for Ireland; that’s the state of it. If the All Blacks play in Ireland she cheers for Ireland. My old man is getting a little bit on the fence now too.”
The lowlight of his playing career was his last cap, a 45-10 defeat in Paris to a rampant French, when players went hiding and left McQuilkin looking very isolated as he accompanied French players to touchdowns. “We just got done, absolutely filleted. I got slated and rightly so. I had a poor game, and didn’t deserve to get the next cap.”
The highlight was captaining Leinster to a 16-9 win over a Leicester side who had beaten Leinster 27-10 the season before en route to reaching the final at Donnybrook in the 1997-98 season. “A lot of their players had come back from the Lions and had beaten the Springboks.”
When he returned to New Zealand to coach King Country and become a regional development officer for the NZRFU, like us he thought that would be the last we’d see of him. Four years ago the IRFU invited to come aboard their high performance unit. He combined this with working for Colin McEntee in the Leinster academy, and then the Ireland Under-21s at the World Cup in Belfast. Cheika must have spotted something, for offering McQuilkin the post of defensive coach proved inspired.
“I nearly took his arm off, mate,” laughs McQuilkin, referring to the choice of working on a lap top or being out on the training pitch. The lowlight of his coaching career, thus far, was conceding six tries in a 52-23 defeat at home to the Scarlets. “It was a real kick in the ass and it really focused me into the job ahead. I think it was good, looking back.”
The highlight’s easy – winning the Heineken Cup three weeks after that bumper day out in the Croke Park semi-final. “I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life, 82,000 people in Croke Park, watching us playing Munster and the way we played was just something awesome. Words can’t describe the feeling. I feel very privileged to be part of that.”
Likewise the emotion on the faces of Brian O’Driscoll, Shane Horgan, Malcolm O’Kelly and all the others who’d worked so hard for so long, all the more so as he’d been there at the start. A fairly chilled bloke, McQuilkin becomes most animated when discussing O’Driscoll. “Amazing,” he says, shaking his head in mild wonder. “He is the best . . . I don’t care who they say, he is the best defensive centre in the world, along with one of the best attacking centres in the world. But defensively he is second to none, second to none. He really thinks so well, his anticipation is second to none and he’s very hard on himself too. He’s awesome.”
He’ll have time to reflect on that now. The future is “sitting around a lake with a beer, and throwing a line in the lake and seeing if I can catch a fish.”
He came over to Ireland for Christmas dinner 17½ years ago and looked what happened? He had a cast on his knee and his father, Noel, was then coaching Bective. “ The old man says we’re training tonight and you’d better get that cast off because I’m down a player so . . . I remember he got the kitchen knife out and cut my cast off and I went up to training with him in Donnybrook to training.”
He recalls this, laughing, while sitting on the steps of the Old Wesley, at the other end of the ground. Which merely proves there’s not much point in planning ahead too much.
“Go with the flow mate. If it’s meant to happen, it will happen.”
