Eddie is gone but exodus continues – RFU must ask why coaches keep leaving

The first lesson on the first day of every pre-season from one of the greatest sports coaches was on how to put on a sock. This was John Wooden, still, by a considerable distance, the most successful US college basketball coach of all time.
The sock was one of the many details for which he is now warmly remembered, as was his follow-up when his players thought that they had successfully executed the instructions. “Good,” he’d say. “And now for the other foot.”
Wooden is now 14 years gone and his greatest achievements are five decades past, plus, for what it’s worth, footwear these days no longer requires a masterclass in how to beat blisters. The point, though, is that Wooden was a fastidious details man, he was very process-driven, he wasn’t a tub-thumper or an extrovert, and he remains the best there ever was.
Transfer this to NFL. The coach with the most Super Bowl victories is Bill Belichick, very much the introvert, one of the great promoters of data analysis, a man so wedded to sports science that he has been long known as “Dr Doom”.
Both Wooden and Belichick demonstrate that you don’t have to be Mr Exuberant to be one of the great leaders. They also fall into the thinking that introverted leaders tend to trust less their charisma and communication skills and lean instead on their depth of thought and the detail of their planning.
All of which takes us, of course, to Steve Borthwick, for never was there a man whose planning had greater detail. It has only become a cliché to say that Borthwick is more comfortable studying lineouts in his room than having a drink at the bar because it is true. But it is not true to say that an introverted leader cannot be a successful one; that would be ridiculous.
However, it is certainly not ridiculous, right now, to be asking whether Borthwick can crack it as a successful England coach — and, yes, this is indeed the man who cleaned up the mess that Eddie Jones left behind, was one single point from a World Cup final, beat Ireland in the Six Nations and then nearly won in New Zealand.
One of his many qualities is his fierce intelligence. He was smart enough to understand his shortcomings. He knew he was never going to be the “bantz” and the personality around the training ground himself and so he started off with two brilliant hirings: Kevin Sinfield, as assistant coach, and Aled Walters as head of strength and conditioning. If there was a box entitled “environment”, here was the tick.
Then he hired Felix Jones, not only another great assistant coach but also another tick in the “good bloke” box.
However, the news a month ago was that Walters was leaving to go to Ireland. Last week it emerged that Jones was leaving too. Just leaving. Just didn’t want to stay any more. And with no apparent job to go to instead.
After Jones’s announcement, it was suggested that he hadn’t been happy shuttling between the England camp and Dublin where his wife and family live. But I’m not buying that; this is a guy who spent the previous four and a bit years shuttling between Dublin and his job with the Springboks in South Africa.
• England’s players ‘shocked’ by loss of Felix Jones and Aled Walters
So it’s hard to overestimate the scale of the loss of Walters and Jones. Any new coaching group needs time to bed in and, infuriatingly for England, that bedding-in process appeared to have been completed; momentum had been building. Now, with autumn fixtures against New Zealand, Australia and South Africa pending, England are likely to go one or two steps backwards before they start to head in the right direction again. And all that is before you add in that Sinfield might be gone too.
Sinfield resigned in November last year and is still due to leave this coming November when he has completed his 12 months’ workout clause. There are negotiations that may well keep him with Borthwick’s England but it remains the case that Borthwick may have been deserted by three key men, not just two.
The easy conclusion here is that Borthwick is the new Eddie Jones, so let’s just nail that. That is not what we are dealing with here. Borthwick worked for many years under Jones and on and off for much of that time he played the role of Jones’s favourite punchbag, so he certainly knows how badly Jones treated his staff and he therefore understands why Jones’s camp was like a non-stop revolving door. It would be moronic for him to make the same errors.
However, I do worry urgently for England here. Jones has gone but the exodus continues and I worry that Borthwick and the RFU are not asking: why? Or: why do people still not want to work for England?
I worry that Sinfield resigned a year ago and that Borthwick and the RFU didn’t investigate sufficiently the reasons why. After the shambles of the Jones years, you would have thought that the RFU would be extra sensitive about any such repeat but here we go again. Sinfield should have been the red flag but did anyone learn anything from his resignation because, nine months later, two other key employees have resigned too?
The RFU has a terrible recent history of problem management, of failing to apply sufficient scrutiny where required, of finding quick fixes and hoping that we all move on. It ducked the problem for too long with Jones.
I just hope England are not back there again and that’s not because I’m an England fan (I’m not, I’m a bit multinational, a bit confused and I’ve had most of my national sporting allegiances kicked out of me) but because a bad England is bad for the game and because in Borthwick I see a man who is so much the Eddie antithesis: honest, consistent, selfless, patriotic and unbelievably driven to see his team to do well, although not for him but for themselves and for the country.
But back to Belichick. He failed in his first role as head coach, with the Cleveland Browns; even when he started, then, as head coach with the New England Patriots there were questions over whether the data scientist had it in him to create the required chemistry. Then, in his second season, he won the Superbowl, then again in his fourth and fifth.
Can Borthwick follow Belichick? Can he create the right environment? That is question that the resignations of Walters and Jones and Sinfield are now posing, because more than data, lineouts, even tactics and formations, the head coach’s role is to manage people, to find the optimum talent and then to manage their anxieties, their egos and their flaws and thus allow the best in them to flourish.
Clearly Borthwick isn’t everyone’s type of guy. His furious work ethic is admirable, but not if he doesn’t appreciate that other people need to operate differently. Likewise, his attention to detail is flawed if it translates to others as a lack of trust. International rugby environments are hard and demanding but there have to be moments of levity too. The criticism of Borthwick is that he is such a zealot that he can lose sight of all this.
The introverts who make the most effective leaders are those who see and hear and understand more because they are speaking less. I’m not sure that Borthwick has quite got to that point yet. Belichick took his time to get there too and, in his favour, Borthwick remains young for an international head coach.
Yet this is an important time to stop and assess, to work out what went wrong and how to get it right. And you don’t have to be an extrovert to do that either.