LONG READ Johann van Graan: The Bulls boy who would be England's king

At home in Grootbrak along South Africa’s beautiful Garden Route, Heyneke Meyer has a poster mounted on his office wall. In faded marker pen, it reads ’33 points’, the swooping, scrawled numbers underlined twice for emphasis. The golden plaque on its frame is engraved with the Afrikaans proclamation: ‘niks is onmoontlik nie’ – nothing is impossible.

This picture was gifted to Meyer on his 39^th birthday in 2006. It was the iconography his Bulls staff used to prepare for an assault on the Stormers, their great foes from the Western Cape, a few months earlier. The Bulls had to win by 33 points to reach the Super Rugby play-offs. The final score was 43-10.

The man who wrote, framed and gave Meyer the poster was at his right hand for over 15 years. He had no elite playing career to speak of, no caps and trophies and battle scars to command the respect of his peers or turn the heads of world class athletes.

What he did have was a remarkable eye for detail and the work ethic of a champion sportsman. He made himself an invaluable, indispensable part of the club fabric, so much so that Meyer immediately took him to the national set-up when he landed the coveted Boks job in 2012.

Nearly 30 years since his first steps on the coaching ladder, he has crossed the equator, operated in the Munster pressure cooker and taken the Gallagher Premiership by storm. At only 45, he has three decades of top-end coaching experience. This meticulous, devout, resilient strategist has now carved out his place in English rugby legend, restoring Bath to the throne and completing an unprecedented treble of silverware. His name, is Johann van Graan.

Child of God, son of Loftus

Van Graan was a 16-year-old schoolboy when Meyer first realised his staggering aptitude for the game. His father, Barend, was the union’s long-standing CEO so Johann was forever walking the hallowed passages of Loftus Versfeld, retrieving balls for Naas Botha at kicking practice, quietly immersing himself in the machinations of the Northern Transvaal’s sporting powerhouse.

“There were no computer systems or software – our analysis was all done by hand,” Meyer remembers. “We would sit straight after the game with the VHS machine, freeze the tape, count the players, and write on a piece of paper with dots. It was about 12 hours of work. I still believe we were way ahead of the curve in those days.

“Johann was always around trying to be involved in rugby. I needed someone else to help John McFarlane, our technical advisor, because it was too much work for one person. I started to get him involved and when he was finished he had to give feedback with John about what he saw.

“I could see he was very knowledgeable even at 16. He was more than an analyst. He would come to me and say ‘listen, I’ve seen this guy getting 15 cleans but none are effective’. He would show things to me which I didn’t have time to go into such depth on, small things.

“He would come in every Saturday and Sunday working for me and we spent a lot of time together. He sat in on one-on-ones while we gave feedback. Straight out of school I employed him as my technical advisor, and moved John to defence coach.”

There was no such thing as culture, mission statements were viewed as bulls**t. I remember we put a thing up which said ‘Bulls, best team in the world’, and everybody laughed.

In those days, around the turn of the millennium, the Bulls were a pale shadow of the team who would claim the 2007 Super Rugby title and provide several titans of the world champion Springbok squad that same year. They finished dead last in 2002 and Meyer lost his job, dropping to lead the Currie Cup team and steering them to four championships. Given the side’s toil and his father’s high office, Van Graan’s involvement, formalised in 2003, prompted allegations of nepotism.

“When the Bulls struggled in the beginning, that was definitely there,” Meyer says. “His father didn’t appoint him; there was never pressure on me. I appointed him.”

Meyer took his protégé across the Atlantic, studying the top American sports teams, understanding their use of technology and sleek training bases. The men presented their findings to the Bulls board. They overhauled the facilities, and were among the first club rugby teams to use drones to film their training sessions. Van Graan yearned for innovation.

“Johann worked on all my presentations, videos, team talks,” Meyer says. “We had to beat Eddie Jones’ Reds team by 72 points to go through to the 2007 play-offs and I told Johann what I wanted on the video. We took all the best highlights from all the players and showed it to them with a number 72 flashing the whole time.”

That was one foundation stone. The other was less tangible. Meyer has a psychology degree and always based his coaching on a culture-first bedrock. In this, too, Van Graan was pivotal.

“Nobody wanted to come to the Bulls at first,” he says. “We didn’t have money, we didn’t have the sea like the Stormers – it was very difficult to recruit.

“There was no such thing as culture, mission statements were viewed as bulls**t. I remember we put a thing up which said ‘Bulls, best team in the world’, and everybody laughed. We worked on that and how we would get there. We would go away and do little competitions within the team, and Johann would film that, write out what we said, put it on the boards for me.

“I decided we were going to build an unbelievable culture. Ultimately nobody wanted to leave the Bulls. We had Victor Matfield, Bakkies Botha, Danie Rossouw and Fourie du Preez, who didn’t want to leave. We believed in culture before game plans. If you have that, it becomes easy.”

Van Graan learned the nuances of lineouts from the totemic Matfield. The value of calm amidst the chaos was instilled by Du Preez, the genius scrum-half Van Graan still rates as the finest player he has ever coached. His years running water and relaying messages as the interface between general and soldiers sharpened his instincts. Meyer’s guiding principles of culture and togetherness have never faded.

Johann wasn’t regarded as a top coach, nobody knew him, I had to convince the SA Rugby board to get him out of the Bulls and into the Springboks.

Though the pair are extremely close, their in-game demeanours could scarcely contrast more sharply – Meyer, ferreting and racked with emotion as though perched on hot coals; Van Graan, stoic, composed and virtually expressionless. Meyer swiftly brought him to the international stage when he clambered to the top seat in South African rugby.

“When I went to the Boks, he was one of the first guys I phoned. He wasn’t regarded as a top coach, nobody knew him, I had to convince the board to get him out of the Bulls and in.

“People don’t realise, we played some great rugby. The famous game in 2013 against the All Blacks, Nigel Owens was the referee and said it was the best attack he’d seen.

“Johann was my attack and forwards coach. All the work we did together for the Boks, we’d spent over 15 years planning.”

Right from the off, Van Graan was always writing. He sees putting pen to paper as a concrete commitment to his process, where other coaches might pay lip service to mottos and ideologies. He can tell you the date he was officially hired by the Bulls, his first day at work in Limerick or the West Country, even the exact number of Tests he coached with the Boks.

Today, his house on Bath’s palatial Farleigh estate is thick with notepads. When he stalks the paddocks pre-match or appears before the television cameras, an A5 book is invariably tucked under an arm. The notepad never left Van Graan’s hand throughout the glorious on-field celebrations, the trophy-lift in the Twickenham sunshine or the jigs in the car park after Bath edged Leicester in Saturday’s final. It was an apt metaphor.

Van Graan also had a keen sense of his own identity. Aged 21, his bible tutor tasked him with presenting on the topic of ‘who am I?’. Van Graan returned with three pillars: his personal, relationship and professional spheres. And in Meyer, he had found a kindred spirit.

“He really wanted to learn,” Meyer says. “I liked him from day one; we had the same values. To this day he is probably my best friend.”

‘The two-faced whisperers of Thomond’

Many books have been written on the aura of Munster; its lore, its grit, its people. Its team’s propensity for miracles. Some portray the province as a bastion of unbreakable unity dating back to the 19^th century. Others purport this idea of bloody-minded ‘Munster-ness’ to be a modern construct. Whatever the truth, it’s a hell of a place to take your first head coach gig.

Van Graan had been the only member of Meyer’s staff to retain his job after the 2015 World Cup. He left for Ireland two years later, and fetched up in Limerick hot on the heels of Rassie Erasmus, who had led the province through the desperate passing of ‘Axel’ Foley and back to the higher echelons of European rugby.

There is a sense Munster never truly warmed to Van Graan. He took them to five semi-finals and a final but never quite onto the winner’s podium. His style of play was deemed too conservative; his apparent coolness criticised in a place where emotion is everything. “A pen-pusher” was one leading pundit’s description towards the end of his reign.

He endured injuries to key players – RG Snyman, for instance, managed 54 minutes in two seasons – and had to dance to the IRFU’s tune when it came to recruiting from abroad.

Two ex-Munster players approached to contribute to this article declined on the basis they did not reflect with great joy upon those years. Simon Zebo was not one of them. The gregarious Munster hero saw the first and last of Van Graan’s five seasons at Thomond Park, either side of his stint at Racing 92. His recollections are revealing.

“It took Johann a while to adjust to Ireland, and it didn’t help one or two people in the background were undermining him, speaking badly about him to certain players,” Zebo says.

It was two-faced because there weren’t many people putting their hand up to say anything personally to Johann. There was a lot of negativity from certain people – people who have a track record of that.

“Some people within the organisation maybe didn’t want him there, wanted us to play a different brand, didn’t buy in to his ethos. I didn’t like that. I don’t like whispers.

“It was two-faced because there weren’t many people putting their hand up to say anything personally to Johann. There was a lot of negativity from certain people – people who have a track record of that. Nasty stuff.”

Following the great, galvanising personality of Erasmus could not have been easy. Rassie went home to mend his broken Springboks in late 2017, months after reaching the Pro12 final and being named the league’s coach of the year. Van Graan had to fill the void.

“Johann was on the back foot from the get-go,” Zebo goes on. “It was always going to be tough to replicate Rassie’s tenure. He took us from the depths and brought us back to European semi-finals. Johann was able to do that too but Rassie was more of an imposing figure, they had totally different personalities.

“Those whispers were gone when Rassie was there but that negativity seeped back in. I’ve been around a long time and you can tell when there’s full buy-in from the club and when there’s not. Johann had one arm tied behind his back because of certain people.”

Even amidst such trials, Zebo was struck by two things: Van Graan’s warmth and compassion, and his extraordinary thoroughness in preparing a team.

At the end of his first campaign, Munster faced Racing 92 in the semi-finals of the Champions Cup. When Van Graan unveiled his strategy in the midweek gathering, Zebo scratched his eyes and squinted harder.

“When we were 20-30m from the Racing try line in the second 20 minutes of the game, he had a ploy for us to kick drop goals, because they’d have to take 22m drop-outs and we’d receive the ball. Our plan was to take back-to-back drop goals, make them do shuttle runs, make them defend, and keep them camped there. It took a lot out of their legs.

“In the meeting beforehand I was like, ‘What the f**k are we doing? Can you not give me the ball and let me try something?’

“I’d never heard of that, never dreamed of employing those tactics, but he’d done such research and watched so many videos, he’d learned how teams taking drop goals affected Racing. We probably got two or three drop goals out of it and I just remember watching the Racing front five and they were struggling. It took its toll.”

Munster finished the match like a steam train but chasing a 24-3 half-time deficit, could not conjure another legendary European fable.

I didn’t love the tactics of kicking and chasing box kicks, but I enjoyed playing for him. He understood how to get individuals motivated.

“By the end of the game we were the stronger team and I could see the fruits of his plan come to life,” Zebo says. “We had the run on them. We ran out of time as opposed to losing that game.

“He was a master tactician. That was one example of many.”

Van Graan, with defence guru JP Ferreira at his side, favoured a pragmatic blueprint. Set-piece, astute kicking and a roughhouse defence were his tenets. He just could not wrest Irish supremacy nor the league crown away from Leinster.

“I don’t think everybody loved the way we were playing,” Zebo says. “For players on the fringes, it’s easy for them to look back and not have the fondest of memories.

“We did well under him, you know. He may not have had the weapons at his disposal to really show the quality of coach or attack coach he could be.

“He is well able to evolve his style. He went to Bath and has Finn Russell and these guys and was able to play a more attacking brand. Not completely different, but a different style to what we saw at Munster.

“I really enjoyed playing under him. I didn’t love the tactics of kicking and chasing box kicks, but I enjoyed playing for him. He understood how to get individuals motivated. He and JP were two great guys who wanted nothing but the best for Munster.”

When Zebo was leaving for Paris, he remembers a boozy night in Killaloe, a little town of under 2,000 folk on the banks of the River Shannon. Zebo, Van Graan, Ferreira and beers. The craic, as they say, was 90. Banter exchanged and selfies snapped. Three years later when Zebo came back to begin his home stretch, Van Graan was delighted to have him return.

“He was heavily involved with bringing me back, which I didn’t think he might have wanted at that stage of my career. He welcomed me with open arms. I won’t forget his kindness.”

Sticking to the process

Josh McNally grimaces at the malaise which swamped Bath in the summer of 2022. A giant on its knees, bottom of the league, saved from relegation only by the fluctuating laws governing entry to the top flight. This was a paltry reflection of the talent in the squad and the vast riches spent assembling it.

“Some players on their way out probably needed to move on,” the lock says. “The money was spent in the wrong areas, on the wrong type of player, and we had a disastrous year. You never want that feeling but it was almost like, ‘can we just write that off and get to the new era?’”

As Bath flailed, Van Graan was offered a two-year extension at Munster. When the opportunity arose to resurrect the hobbled West Country heavyweight, he could not resist the project. He sought Meyer’s counsel and Meyer urged him to move. This was a blank canvas backed by the closest thing English rugby has to a blank cheque.

For some time, Van Graan studied his underperforming A-listers from afar. He called them in, one by one, and dropped the mother of all truth bombs.

“When Johann came in, it was such a breath of fresh air, he gave some lads who’d had such an easy ride at Bath a bit of a kick up the arse,” McNally says. “He instilled a bit of discipline and how to be a professional outfit.

“There were a lot of senior players who felt like, ‘oh there’ll be a time in a game when I’ll turn up’. This isn’t a game for being great for moments, it’s about how hard you are going to work for each other, get off the floor and go and make more moments. That was down to body composition, fitness, individual extras – everything.

“To pretty much a man, no one who got those talking-tos came out of them with a negative attitude. Johann understood how to push the right buttons to get the best out of people. Boys would come out and say, ‘I haven’t been spoken to like that for a long time and I’m going to sort myself out’.”

He produced stats to show we were getting better: regaining more kicks, our maul was gaining more metres. All of a sudden, those games started turning.

Just as he and Meyer did at the Bulls, Van Graan had the Farleigh House facilities revamped and upgraded. He also hired new heads of department across the club – athletic performance, medical, nutrition and mental skills. These, he stressed, were world-class operators.

A ‘family first’ ethos was gradually knitted through the camp. And above all, Van Graan had unwavering faith in his vision. The phrase “stick to process” mightn’t have headline writers scrambling for the front page, but it is the perfect, unflustered mantra for Bath’s rise.

The first year was all about becoming hard to beat. Ferreira would solidify their defence; they would compete more in the air and turn their set-piece into a major weapon. Sounds great, right? Except they lost their opening five games. By Christmas, with Wasps and Worcester gone, Bath were bottom of the league – again.

“You can get short-term-focused, lose a couple of games and try to change everything,” McNally says. “Johann was the first coach I’d had where we had a process around how we wanted to play and didn’t deviate from that.

“There’s been stuff he’s put up in front of a group that I didn’t know would land but that was how he felt, he was ready to show that rawness in himself – ‘that’s what I believe in’.

“Sometimes you feel coaches have scripted something, or they think it’s the right thing to say. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him and thought he didn’t believe what he said. Not everyone buys in straight away, but it’s amazing how infectious that can be. Guys who don’t, won’t last on his journey, but not in a dictatorial kind of way.

“He instilled belief that what we were doing was working. He produced stats to show we were getting better: regaining more kicks, our maul was gaining more metres. All of a sudden, those games started turning. We won our last four games to qualify for the Champions Cup. That was the turning point.”

McNally, who left for Cardiff at the end of last season, had numerous eye-opening discussions with Van Graan. During those early months, the coach confided he “didn’t realise the demons we were carrying”.

Van Graan is a famously early riser. He runs, reflects, prays, plans and gathers his coaches. One morning is etched in McNally’s memory, when the Bath lineout leaders were called into Van Graan’s office. They were greeted by what resembled a scene from a detective drama.

“His office was littered with paper,” McNally says. “Clipboard paper, big flipchart bits of paper, all taped to his walls. He’d gone into a bit of a lineout frenzy and felt he could predict Leicester’s lineouts.

“He’d watched every lineout Leicester had run that year. He’d watched all of England’s because he believed Steve Borthwick’s system had stayed with Leicester after he left. It just blew our minds. I’d never seen anyone analyse rugby in that detail.

“We stole six or seven lineouts that game because of a trigger here, a person standing there.

“That was when I decided I didn’t want to coach. He’d slept in his office that night, preparing all this for us, and wow, if that’s the level of detail required to be the best, I’m not sure I’ve got that in me.”

He’s so ahead of where rugby is going. He’s the coach everyone is going to look to in the next 10 years to see where the game is heading

Yet the players were not burdened by this avalanche of data.

“You know he has got the matrix running through his head but that never becomes the players’ problem. They are very clear in the basic roles they have to do, and they do them well.”

Van Graan is on the training pitch for every session but never interferes with an assistant’s area. He leads what he calls ‘ARPG’ – the all-round pressure game – formulating how Bath approach each scenario, which plays to run in which circumstances. “The perfect game, basically,” McNally says. He watches endless hours of rugby, plotting for intricacies and obstacles such as Beno Obano’s early red card in the Premiership final last year.

“There is not a scenario he has not lived,” McNally continues. “He has built scenarios in his head, he will have lived it, he will have spoken to people around the world who have been through that scenario.

“He is such a rugby-smart person that he knows pretty much every decision before it needs to be made. He’s so ahead of where rugby is going. He’s the coach everyone is going to look to in the next 10 years to see where the game is heading.”

In Van Graan’s second year, he signed Finn Russell as his franchise quarter-back and Lee Blackett as his attacking lieutenant. The upshot was a diversified game plan and a runners-up medal. “We’ll just have to win it next year,” Russell told Van Graan after the gut-churning final loss to Northampton, where Bath fought so bravely and came so close with 14 men.

They still kick plenty – more than any Premiership team besides Saracens – but they have the arsenal and the intellect to fillet opponents as well as crush them. They romped the league by 11 points with the most tries scored and fewest conceded. They claimed the Premiership Cup with a core of academy graduates and outgunned Edinburgh and Lyon to lift the EPCR Challenge trophy. Their depth, carefully built and nurtured, and aided by the grim demise of other elite clubs, has forged legendary staying power. Their 6-2 bench is ferocious and their try difference in the second half of Premiership games a remarkable +34.

“You might think Bath are an unstoppable team at the moment but Johann is always thinking, how can we get better? Who can we recruit?” McNally says.

“That might not necessarily be a player, it might be a Ruaridh McConnochie coming in to coach skills next year. He spends his summer doing personal development, meeting Navy Seals, visiting the Miami Dolphins. He’s constantly like, what’s next, what’s next? I just don’t see any other environment doing that.”

I don’t see how this stops. It’s not going to stop overnight, a couple of injuries aren’t going to stop them, the fans are still going to come out everywhere they go.

Even with Leicester vanquished and the mother of all parties in full swing, Van Graan will be plotting anew. The infrastructure and talent flow at the Rec will endure.

“It’ll become such a dynasty club,” McNally stresses. “Every player coming in understands immediately what’s required of them. Young players know what’s been set.

“That’s always how you judge a club. When you see that team win the Prem Cup so dominantly, the younger boys come and do the exact same roles as the world beaters, so well drilled, that’s where you see growth in the group and how good that environment is.

“I see clubs having a good year and competing with Bath, but as long the club is where it’s at, I don’t see anyone coming close. The only teams who really compete to their level are full of superstars in France. It’s a bit like where Saracens were 10 years ago.

In hauling this foundering behemoth out of the doldrums to the promised land, Van Graan has seen his stock soar. There’s an increasingly compelling narrative which propels him back to South Africa, following Erasmus in the iconic Bokke job as he did in the red of Munster nearly eight years ago. Meyer’s view is emphatic.

“Definitely,” he replies, when asked if Van Graan is a Springbok supremo in waiting.

“I always believed he would coach at the highest level. You just need a little bit of luck at the right club. A lot of successful coaches go to another club and are not successful. Steve Hansen, a great coach and good friend of mine, is struggling a bit in Japan, and Stuart Lancaster, another of my friends, at Racing. You need the backing of the ownership. Johann has got that at Bath. And he will just get better with experience.

“We believed we could do anything if we had the right vision, the right culture and the right guys behind that.”

Before Bath played Bristol in the Premiership semi-final, Meyer sent Van Graan a message. It was a picture of the two men dressed in full green and gold regalia inside the South Africa changing room. Van Graan has an arm around the shoulder of his friend. “STERKTE”, Meyer typed in capital letters – “good luck”. The pair spoke again on Sunday and exchanged more texts in the lead-up to the showpiece, against the Tigers team Meyer himself coached way back in 2008, spearheaded by Handre Pollard, the ice-cold playmaker Meyer capped in 2014.

The moments at the end were beautiful. Van Graan, on bended knee, clutching his notepad, thanking a higher power while bedlam erupted all around him. Van Graan, weeping as he enveloped his comrades with the sort of embrace reserved for long-lost relatives at the airport. Van Graan, spamming the horn on the team bus as his players galivanted on the tarmac with their spoils. Every nugget learned, every heartache overcome, every hour poured into the pursuit of excellence, realised now in the ultimate arena.

Bath last had the English crown 29 years ago. A Prem Cup-Challenge Cup-Premiership hat-trick had never been completed. Then again, nor has a 16-year-old been entrusted to critique Springbok rugby players with a VHS machine and a pencil. To borrow from Van Graan himself, ‘niks is onmoontlik nie’. Nothing is impossible.