Ireland v Wales:Wales are going for the Grand Slam next Saturday, but there's a little more than that at stake
TONY ADAMS, the former Arsenal and England footballer, once cited a US study into champions and their coaches over a 20-year period to conclude the maximum impact of managers, even the great Arsène Wenger, is 10 per cent. Whether one deems that figure too arbitrary, the product of inexact science, it perhaps puts the Eddie O'Sullivan v Warren Gatland subplot into context.
Come 1.15pm next Saturday what unfolds will be 15 men wearing green against 15 men in red representing their countries. The personal history between the two coaches will probably not have a significant bearing on the result. Even so, until next Saturday at 1.15, it's fair game.
There's never really been a coaching match-up quite like it, certainly not in the Test environment. John Mitchell coaching the All Blacks against his erstwhile head coach of England, Clive Woodward, created a fair frisson of tension in the build-up to England's wins in Twickenham and Wellington in 2002 and 2003. But this is different. This is a former head coach revisiting the country to take on the erstwhile assistant who supplanted him in a very Irish coup.
That is why ever since Gatland was appointed Wales coach in the aftermath of the World Cup, Irish, especially, and Welsh fans have been intrigued by this match-up.
In the build-up to the Six Nations, Gatland seemed happy to mischievously up the ante with a few mind games when talking about pride in his coaching legacy to Ireland and the importance of "trust" among his staff. Now, though, one suspects he and O'Sullivan will dutifully maintain the mantra that this game is not about them. And it isn't, and yet it is.
Gatland has every reason to voice pride in his legacy. Having spent four fruitful years as player-coach at Galwegians, he actually replaced O'Sullivan at short notice as Connacht coach at the start of the 1996-1997 season when the latter had wanted a longer-term contract.
Connacht's stunning turnaround under Gatland - he took them into Euro territory where no province had gone before - was one of the little acorns from which the Irish rejuvenation grew and made him the obvious contender to succeed Brian Ashton at short notice one match into the 1998 Five Nations even though, at 34, he became the youngest head coach in Irish history.
He immediately instilled "self-belief" is how one player describes it. "Ashton came in with all these high-falutin' ideas, bringing in any players who were qualified to play for us and bringing in a totally different style of Irish rugby," he says. "Gatty came in and basically said: 'Okay, guys, this is who you are, this is who we are, we don't go away from those values; if anything, stamp them all over the way we play'."
"He didn't try and reinvent the wheel, and made us better in the areas we were good at."
"He just brought a belief," says another, taking up the theme, "a cohesion and a spirit that hadn't been there. He made training fun, he made being a part of the Ireland team fun, and he just generally brought in that self-belief and that four-up defence . . . he was one of the first to bring it in, certainly at international level."
The day before Ireland's first game under Gatland, against France in Paris, one French paper published a list of Ireland's 10 heaviest defeats and speculated on whether France could score 100 points.
A decade ago next week, a rejuvenated Ireland and their rush defence nearly defied odds of 33 to 1 against beating France first up in Paris, losing 18-16.
"We should have won. They couldn't deal with it at all. He restored our pride in playing for Ireland again, because it wasn't much fun before that," says one Ireland player
The seeds of Gatland's demise are generally traced to the 28-24 World Cup quarter-final play-off defeat to Argentina in Lens - even though the events of the two subsequent World Cups have put that in a different perspective.
When O'Sullivan was co-opted to the ticket - with Gatland's approval, if not at his instigation - as assistant/backs coach in place of the comparatively inexperienced Philip Danaher, first off there was a 50-18 defeat to England in Twickenham, when, Gatland claims, he was persuaded by O'Sullivan to abandon his four-up defence, but soon there was a palpable improvement.
Three players from the time, speaking to this reporter in the past few days, recalled it as the time when players were selected on form and the playing style began to broaden.
"They actually picked players on form and gambled a little, and it paid off," says the player. "People got confidence from playing with each other. Eddie brought in a pod system in attack. It was an easier way to make sure we had proper numbers around the pitch. He made sure everybody knew it was his idea; he brought it in on sheets of paper. It gave players a focus and a way of playing.
"Eddie looked at the group of backs that were coming through and realised they were going to be something special.
"That's why the ball started coming off the top an awful lot more. It wasn't as though Gatland wasn't in favour of that; it's just that once Eddie came in that's the way it was going to be. It was about the team's personnel. In that way you can say he (O'Sullivan) was quite lucky."
The shift in style came with an increase in try-scoring ratio. Instead of just running moves, the players were encouraged to have a go and everybody became more accountable. That said, the likes of Niall Woods and Conor O'Shea - or, from an earlier vintage, Simon Geoghegan and Jim Staples - must have looked on enviously.
Initially, the players detected no major issue between the two men, though as one puts it, gradually he detected a little friction: "By the end, I don't think it was a particularly good working relationship."
Gatland was a relatively quiet, standoffish coach who liked to leave the players to get on with it and intervened only to pick up the intensity or suggest a move when he felt it was needed.
"He'd bring in little plays that you could work off lineouts. He was always nifty at that. But there'd be times when he would be very quiet, as Eddie would be, around the team."
Gatland, still relatively inexperienced, was not as smart as O'Sullivan in cultivating IRFU committee men, one of whom Gatland rebuffed with two words, the second of which was "off". And the more successful the team's results, the more impatient O'Sullivan became for the number-one job. In his corner too was the Ireland captain Keith Wood.
Wood "wanted more of a dictatorship" than Gatland was prepared to provide, says one team-mate: "Even talking to players at Wasps, he (Gatland) had a way about him that would let the players get on with it. Wood felt Ireland players needed to be dictated to more often - otherwise they'd get lost out on the pitch."
Wood's relationship with Gatland hit a snag in the second Test in Perth in the summer of 1999 when the hooker was substituted after 56 minutes. Wood was also frustrated by Ireland's defensive system in letting slip a 21-7 lead against the All Blacks, Gatland's last match in charge. Wood since claimed the defeat pushed him close to retirement and he clearly genuinely felt a change would be beneficial to the team.
It didn't help Gatland's sense of security that after he had been given two short extensions, first to 2000 and then to 2001, O'Sullivan came aboard with a three-year deal. It didn't help either that he lost an important, hands-on ally in Donal Lenihan, to manage the 2001 Lions.
When Gatland agitated for a contract extension through to the 2003 World Cup, a three-man IRFU sub-committee chaired, and driven, by Eddie Coleman, and also comprising Noel Murphy and Syd Millar, in tandem with the IRFU director of rugby Eddie Wigglesworth, treasurer John Lyons and CEO Philip Browne, held separate briefings with the head coach, assistant coach and manager Brian O'Brian. The day before Gatland's dismissal, two Sunday newspapers supportive of O'Sullivan ran a story that he had been offered a six-year deal to coach the USA Eagles.
Two days after the Monday briefings, the sub-committee decided to dispense with Gatland's services. Coleman, who last week was still declining to be interviewed on the subject, informed Gatland they believed he had taken the team as far as he could. O'Sullivan would not have dissuaded them from this thinking. The next day, Wood hosted a meeting with O'Sullivan and O'Brian in his house in Killaloe while Billy Glynn negotiated a pay-off for a stunned Gatland.
"There was general shock," recalls one squad member. "Our results weren't too bad. We should have beaten the All Blacks; we had them on the ropes and we missed a few tackles. But we were all pretty positive going forward and the next thing we got the news that Gats had been fired and Eddie was taking the job.
"A lot of players just got on with it. A few of us rang Gats and expressed our thoughts, but the way it's structured here you just grin and bear it and get on with it."
Wood's captaincy - which had been kept under check by Gatland, Lenihan and Danaher - was given much more influence under the O'Sullivan ticket.
"Woodie's personality is such that no matter where he is or what he's doing, he sees himself as a dominant personality in a group situation, and he's very good in that, and a very good captain," says the squad member. "In some ways it's like (Brian) O'Driscoll now. What they say, goes. Eddie was the coach, but with Fester (Woods) and with Drico, they basically dictated how we did things."
A team-mate interprets this in another way: "Eddie couldn't talk to the players like Gatty, who was a hard-nosed, former All Black hooker. So he got Fester or Drico to do it."
Gatland's removal followed a run of just five defeats in 17 games and six wins in his last eight matches. His tenure saw Ireland end a 12-year losing sequence to the Scots, a 17-year winless run against the French and a 26-year losing sequence in Paris, as well as first back-to-back wins over France since 1973, a first win over England in seven years, a first Anglo-French double in the same year since 1983 and a highest finish in 16 years.
It's worth recalling that Ireland were two from two, with wins over Italy and France, when the foot-and-mouth outbreak forced the postponements of the games away to Scotland and Wales and at home to England until the following autumn.
Undoubtedly mistakes were made in selection for the Scotland game in September, the 32-10 defeat that probably sealed Gatland's fate, but as one player put it, echoing a widespread view, "It's hard to beat a team that taped your last training session, isn't it? Gregor (Townsend) told someone afterwards they had full footage of our last session. They knew how we were going to attack and where we were going to attack, and we just ran into brick walls all day."
O'Sullivan was undoubtedly backed more by the IRFU, who had, against Gatland's wishes, let his fitness coach Craig White go for monetary reasons; White going on to achieve notable success with Bolton Wanderers, Wasps and Leicester.
O'Sullivan is credited by the players with bringing in more specialist coaches, notably Mike Ford as defensive coaching, and improving details, such as better hotels.
"He tried to build up a club atmosphere like Gatland had done, with a "club Ireland" mentality. It was the same faces every week. After one bad game you weren't kicked out of the squad," recalls one player.
"He developed a lot of confidence, although a lot of that was coming from the players. He was dealing with the best group of players who have come through with Ireland for a long, long time . . . He had a lot of luck in the timing of the team, but he was very precise, brought in a big support staff which you can say was a good thing or a bad thing, and he achieved results. Those Triple Crowns backed up what he was doing."
Opinions still vary among some players as to whether it was the right move at the time.
"I don't know. You look at (Gatland's) results and what he did with Wasps and Waikato, and you think maybe we missed out on some trophies there, but you look at Eddie's - they're not bad, apart from the World Cup. The last World Cup was an absolute disaster."
Another irony about next Saturday's game is O'Sullivan is under much greater pressure than Gatland to win. For starters, Wales can afford to lose and still win the title by beating France at home in their last game. Victory over Wales is imperative to maintaining O'Sullivan's hopes of coaching the Lions to South Africa next year.
By contrast, Gatland is at the start of an even more lucrative four-year contract on the back of his three Premierships, European Cup and Challenge Cup with Wasps and NPC title with Waikato. That his name is even being bandied about as a putative Lions coach is an optional extra his employers and even he have probably not even considered.
For O'Sullivan, the stakes next Saturday in Croke Park are far higher.
