Why Is English Rugby Turning to League Coaches For Help?

Is the number of English rugby league coaches switching codes the result of a core skills crisis the 15-a-side game? Lee Calvert investigates.

Last July it was announced that former rugby league international and Wigan coach Paul Deacon was taking over the role of attack coach for Sale Sharks, making him the latest in a growing number of coaches from a purely rugby league background to find employment in the fifteen-man code.

What these coaches all seem to find is that union players’ core skills – passing, catching, running lines – are lacking compared to their league counterparts. “You don’t have to coach [league players] to catch, pass and tackle,” says Mike Ford, a former league international and, until last week, Director of Rugby at Bath. “What we learn from [league] is the actual detail on the execution. And we’ve learned loads.”

Since rugby union went professional there has been a greater move towards conditioning and coaching – as you would expect in the increasingly sports science dominated era. But have the core skills of players suffered as a result?

Tony Fretwell, National Player Development Manager at the Rugby Football League and England Rugby League Academy coach, explains: “A significant amount of time in rugby union is spent at the breakdown, lineouts and scrums – areas that do not really feature in rugby league. When a union forward is working on these areas, he is working on skill, but not what people would refer to as the ‘core’ skills of either rugby code. Most core skills happen in the loose, so it stands to reason that league, a more ball-in-hand game, would be in advance of union with this.”

Union players are no less skilled; they’re just spreading themselves thinner: “[They] have to apply that talent to a wider range of skills for the fifteen man code,” says Fretwell. “League players have a narrower core skill set but as a result of the narrow focus they can place on them, the levels of those skills is higher.”

This would certainly bear out with even a cursory glance at the forwards in the northern hemisphere, where a genuine ball-playing forward is rare and exceptional rather than expected. Commentators often speak of the likes of Mako Vunipola, who can actually pass a ball, as if they can control the moon and the tides.

Denis Betts, another league legend, spent some time as skills coach at Gloucester and echoed the view of the difficulty of maintaining basic core skills in rugby union. “You’re trying to develop a fully functioning line-out, a strong scrum and a creative backline. In bringing all that together, you can lose sight of the fact that none of that works unless you do the simple things properly. All these are little things that you don’t often think about because they are just part of the game. But they are things you have to work on constantly.”

Factor in the obsession with size and the time spent in the gym, plus the issue of circumspect gameplan coaching. Warren Gatland has arguably the most talented Welsh squad since the 1970s, yet forces them to be beasted in Poland and then execute a gameplan which resembles two gym monkeys headbutting each other for eighty minutes. The really scary thing is that it gets results a lot of the time, at least until they come up against a Tri Nations team.  And therein lies the rub.

For too long northern hemisphere rugby has not had an all-court game and the use of league coaches appears to be one of the many strategies employed to solve this issue. But in reality, the timidity of the coaching is the biggest problem. As Tony Fretwell states, union players are not less talented, but until they are set free from the gym and endless drills at every level of the game, then the solution may be some way off.