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Piecing together the Brad Thorn and Quade Cooper relationship - the feud explained

By Ben Smith
Quade's Reds career was ended twice, by two different coaches.

Much has been made of Brad Thorn’s decision to drop Quade Cooper from the Reds squad, telling him he is surplus to requirements in the pre-season without a satisfactory explanation other than telling the media he ‘struggled’ at everything.

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Highlanders first five-eighth Lima Sopoaga added another theory that this is about Thorn installing an “Origin mentality” at the Reds and “it’s got nothing to do with him and he can’t do anything about it.”

It has nothing to do with him? This has everything to do with Quade Cooper. Let’s just call a spade a spade and attempt to piece together how this saga unfolded.

The relationship between the two when they were both players was never stable. The ‘beef’ on the field formed a rocky foundation to the relationship. They never really understood each other, and incidents that occurred on the field only served to feed perceptions.

2011 was the year the two came entangled in a litany of on-field exchanges. In the Super Rugby final, few will remember Brad Thorn being penalised for a foot trip – on none other than Quade Cooper. An unsportsmanlike, but deliberate act, and one Thorn escaped being carded for.

The Tri-Nations followed and Quade’s infamous knee to the head of All Black captain Richie McCaw sparked an on-field scuffle and national outrage in New Zealand. Brad Thorn, in particular, took exception and was the third man in, throwing Quade onto the deck in a visible display of disgust.

The incident occurred at the base of a ruck – one of many that Thorn would have ‘policed’ over his career. Cooper’s biggest mistake was a lack of craftiness. The knee was an obvious, ugly incident but not uncommon of underhand tactics employed at the time.

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Cooper showed a willingness to rile the All Blacks in the open and become the antagonist – we know definitively that this got under McCaw’s skin. In his autobiography, he stated “Shortly after that happened, I was carrying and should have passed, but I lit up and I saw Quade standing in front of me and clattered into him instead,” before claiming players like Quade “get sorted”.

Is it hard to believe that other members of the All Blacks pack, like Thorn, felt the same way?

The incident became fuel for the New Zealand public to label Cooper “public enemy number one” heading into the 2011 Rugby World Cup, shaping Cooper’s image as a villain. In the Rugby World Cup semi-final, Thorn took pleasure at seeing Quade implode, at one point rubbing it in his face after the flyhalf spilled a bomb.

The two probably would say this is all water under the bridge. A foot trip, a knee and some words exchanged. However, when two professional competitors clash when stakes are high, the beginning of a ‘mutual dislike’ is highly probable.

Sometimes opposite don’t attract

Brad Thorn is an Australian who played for the All Blacks and Quade Cooper is a Kiwi who played for the Wallabies. Thorn was a shrewd tactical enforcer that loved the dirty work. Cooper was a peacocking playmaker that did things his way. Thorn is old school. Cooper was new hype. The two couldn’t be more different as players, and likely have different views on how the game should be played.

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Based on on-field incidents there is an obvious conclusion to be made that there is a personal dislike or at least ‘indifference’ of one another. However, this alone is not enough to explain Thorn’s decision to drop Cooper. To understand it we have to consider the circumstances of the Reds organisation, going back to 2011.

The rise and fall of the Reds

Flashback to 2011 and modern-day patterns aren’t recognisable, zero-ruck strategies were almost non-existent and line speed wasn’t really a factor deployed by teams.

Playmakers like Quade could sit back deep and find substantially more space as forwards crowded around rucks. Enforcers like Thorn could roll their sleeves up and get involved in a heap of questionable activities at the ruck.

That backdrop paved the way for Cooper’s stratospheric rise in 2011. The Reds pulled off the impossible – beating Thorn’s Crusaders twice, including in the Super Rugby final. The Wallabies pulled off a Tri-Nations Championship with him at flyhalf. Cooper’s exuberant play was mesmerizing. It was unplanned at times, playing off raw instincts, throwing ridiculous behind the back passes and long cutouts.

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In that era, you didn’t need to be clinical or retain possession with high levels of precision to be successful. Turnover ball was common, and errors were everywhere in the game. The breakdowns were a dog’s breakfast – it was niggly, messy and resulted in a slower game but with more space out wide. A risk-taker with immense talent, Quade flourished and became a superstar with wild play that sometimes paid off and sometimes didn’t.

Winning a Super Rugby title with a franchise that spent the better part of two decades in the doldrums brings a certain level of entitlement. It was both a blessing and a burden for the Reds. That 2011 Reds championship was a fairytale run, catapulting young stars like Will Genia and Quade Cooper to global stardom.

As they tried to build on that success, whispers of conflict surrounded the team. The Australian reported in 2013 that key strategist and mastermind of the 2011 tactics, Phillip ‘Chook’ Fowler, left after a difference of opinion over a player review. There was no indication that Quade was involved, but it started a new chapter where the players remained but the coaching staff began to move on.

Next came the Reds biggest mistake and all-time PR disaster, the recruitment of Richard Graham as head coach. Graham was at the Western Force at the time and had a player mutiny on his hands after he announced his Reds gig mid-season. They rallied to see him sacked – it was a premonition of things to come.

With growing player dissatisfaction, adding Graham to the mix at the Reds was like pouring kerosene on a fire.

Graham had not proven he was capable of being a successful Super Rugby coach, with a winning record below 30%. A team full of confident players with growing influence needed more. His bureaucratic, conservative approach and obsession with set-piece dominance was not the way the game was developing. Kiwi sides were speeding the game up, with skill-based play and new flat patterns aided by changes in breakdown laws.

First-hand accounts describe an authoritarian coach who didn’t build relationships with his players, only reserving conversations for the captain. The environment was far from collaborative, with player empowerment non-existent. Combined with poor strategy and game planning, this quickly became the worst possible place for a player with unique attacking skills like Cooper.

Appointing Graham effectively killed Cooper’s Super Rugby career and set the Reds back 10 years. They lost a host of key players over his reign, old and young. Graham took the team on a downward spiral that alienated the fan base and left stars like Cooper in limbo, who ultimately left the team for France. It was so bad that fans started a #sackrichardgraham campaign and nearly every post-match comment on social media called for Graham’s resignation as the team’s play deteriorated beyond repair.

In that kind of environment, players can easily develop poor habits out of frustration. The outside noise was impossible to ignore and the feeling of hopelessness descended on the leaders, many of whom jumped ship. When your most experienced players, ones who just delivered a championship, don’t have a say in what the team is doing when it clearly isn’t working, it’s a recipe for disaster.

It was a systemic organisational failure by the Reds to let the situation drag on and hand Graham a two-year extension, completely oblivious to the damage being done to both the fans and playing group. He was then sacked just two games into the 2016 season but the catastrophic fall was complete.

Quade’s return and Thorn’s appointment

Following Graham’s departure, the Reds’ favourite son returned home on a massive three-year contract with rookie head coach Nick Stiles now in charge.

It was like a public admission that the Reds had stuffed everything up, paying a massive price to have their best player back. It said ‘please come back and fix this mess’. That kind of leverage makes a player almost untouchable.

The team was in arguably the worst shape it had been in, desperate to regain relevance, and called its biggest hero from the past to make that happen. With a young impressionable squad and rather inexperienced coaching staff, never before had their been a situation at the Reds where one player held so much power.

This was Quade’s team now.

The appointment of Brad Thorn as head coach following the 2017 season was partly surprising. The Reds were moving onto their fourth coach in five years. He had limited previous head coaching professional experience having only retired from playing a few years ago.

When asked what he will bring to the Reds, Thorn extolled the virtues of culture.

“Probably number one thing is care, I’m big on the team caring about each other, big on caring about the cause and big on caring about who you represent,” he said.

‘I’m massive on working hard, you know talent is not enough’.

Were these the same words being repeated to Quade in private? You don’t care enough, you don’t work hard enough and your talent is not enough? He didn’t talk about skills or tactics or execution in that press conference, which is surprising given those were his reasons for Quade’s omission.

He explained his Queensland Country side was a test case in changing culture, which gave him belief after they won the NRC that he could do the same at the Reds.

Thorn wanted to change the culture and believed that couldn’t be done with Quade Cooper on the team. He could never mould the Reds into his team while it was Quade’s team, and one of them had to go. His personal dislike of him didn’t help, but it likely wasn’t the main deciding factor.

It was about power and control and Quade had too much of it.

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Jon 4 hours ago
Jake White: Are modern rugby players actually better?

This is the problem with conservative mindsets and phycology, and homogenous sports, everybody wants to be the same, use the i-win template. Athlete wise everyone has to have muscles and work at the gym to make themselves more likely to hold on that one tackle. Do those players even wonder if they are now more likely to be tackled by that player as a result of there “work”? Really though, too many questions, Jake. Is it better Jake? Yes, because you still have that rugby of ole that you talk about. Is it at the highest International level anymore? No, but you go to your club or checkout your representative side and still engage with that ‘beautiful game’. Could you also have a bit of that at the top if coaches encouraged there team to play and incentivized players like Damian McKenzie and Ange Capuozzo? Of course we could. Sadly Rugby doesn’t, or didn’t, really know what direction to go when professionalism came. Things like the state of northern pitches didn’t help. Over the last two or three decades I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have all that Jake wants. There was International quality Super Rugby to adore, then the next level below I could watch club mates, pulling 9 to 5s, take on the countries best in representative rugby. Rugby played with flair and not too much riding on the consequences. It was beautiful. That largely still exists today, but with the world of rugby not quite getting things right, the picture is now being painted in NZ that that level of rugby is not required in the “pathway” to Super Rugby or All Black rugby. You might wonder if NZR is right and the pathway shouldn’t include the ‘amateur’, but let me tell you, even though the NPC might be made up of people still having to pull 9-5s, we know these people still have dreams to get out of that, and aren’t likely to give them. They will be lost. That will put a real strain on the concept of whether “visceral thrill, derring-do and joyful abandon” type rugby will remain under the professional level here in NZ. I think at some point that can be eroded as well. If only wanting the best athlete’s at the top level wasn’t enough to lose that, shutting off the next group, or level, or rugby players from easy access to express and showcase themselves certainly will. That all comes back around to the same question of professionalism in rugby and whether it got things right, and rugby is better now. Maybe the answer is turning into a “no”?

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j
john 6 hours ago
Will the Crusaders' decline spark a slow death for New Zealand rugby?

But here in Australia we were told Penney was another gun kiwi coach, for the Tahs…….and yet again it turned out the kiwi coach was completely useless. Another con job on Australian rugby. As was Robbie Deans, as was Dave Rennie. Both coaches dumped from NZ and promoted to Australia as our saviour. And the Tahs lap them up knowing they are second rate and knowing that under pressure when their short comings are exposed in Australia as well, that they will fall in below the largest most powerful province and choose second rate Tah players to save their jobs. As they do and exactly as Joe Schmidt will do. Gauranteed. Schmidt was dumped by NZ too. That’s why he went overseas. That why kiwi coaches take jobs in Australia, to try and prove they are not as bad as NZ thought they were. Then when they get found out they try and ingratiate themselves to NZ again by dragging Australian teams down with ridiculous selections and game plans. NZ rugby’s biggest problem is that it can’t yet transition from MCaw Cheatism. They just don’t know how to try and win on your merits. It is still always a contest to see how much cheating you can get away with. Without a cheating genius like McCaw, they are struggling. This I think is why my wise old mate in NZ thinks Robertson will struggle. The Crusaders are the nursery of McCaw Cheatism. Sean Fitzpatrick was probably the father of it. Robertson doesn’t know anything else but other countries have worked it out.

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A
Adrian 8 hours ago
Will the Crusaders' decline spark a slow death for New Zealand rugby?

Thanks Nick The loss of players to OS, injury and retirement is certainly not helping the Crusaders. Ditto the coach. IMO Penny is there to hold the fort and cop the flak until new players and a new coach come through,…and that's understood and accepted by Penny and the Crusaders hierarchy. I think though that what is happening with the Crusaders is an indicator of what is happening with the other NZ SRP teams…..and the other SRP teams for that matter. Not enough money. The money has come via the SR competition and it’s not there anymore. It's in France, Japan and England. Unless or until something is done to make SR more SELLABLE to the NZ/Australia Rugby market AND the world rugby market the $s to keep both the very best players and the next rung down won't be there. They will play away from NZ more and more. I think though that NZ will continue to produce the players and the coaches of sufficient strength for NZ to have the capacity to stay at the top. Whether they do stay at the top as an international team will depend upon whether the money flowing to SRP is somehow restored, or NZ teams play in the Japan comp, or NZ opts to pick from anywhere. As a follower of many sports I’d have to say that the organisation and promotion of Super Rugby has been for the last 20 years closest to the worst I’ve ever seen. This hasn't necessarily been caused by NZ, but it’s happened. Perhaps it can be fixed, perhaps not. The Crusaders are I think a symptom of this, not the cause

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T
Trevor 11 hours ago
Will forgotten Wallabies fit the Joe Schmidt model?

Thanks Brett.. At last a positive article on the potential of Wallaby candidates, great to read. Schmidt’s record as an international rugby coach speaks for itself, I’m somewhat confident he will turn the Wallaby’s fortunes around …. on the field. It will be up to others to steady the ship off the paddock. But is there a flaw in my optimism? We have known all along that Australia has the players to be very competitive with their international rivals. We know that because everyone keeps telling us. So why the poor results? A question that requires a definitive answer before the turn around can occur. Joe Schmidt signed on for 2 years, time to encompass the Lions tour of 2025. By all accounts he puts family first and that’s fair enough, but I would wager that his 2 year contract will be extended if the next 18 months or so shows the statement “Australia has the players” proves to be correct. The new coach does not have a lot of time to meld together an outfit that will be competitive in the Rugby Championship - it will be interesting to see what happens. It will be interesting to see what happens with Giteau law, the new Wallaby coach has already verbalised that he would to prefer to select from those who play their rugby in Australia. His first test in charge is in July just over 3 months away .. not a long time. I for one wish him well .. heaven knows Australia needs some positive vibes.

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