Interview: Andy Robinson, Scotland rugby coach

Published on Saturday 7 November 2009 20:29

NEW Scotland coach Robinson has brought an intensity and enthusiasm to the job and expects the same from his players, reports Tom English

WHEN ALLAN Jacobsen threw a punch (and missed) in training at St Andrews the other day, you couldn't hear Andy Robinson's quiet purring for the mocking roars of Jacobsen's team-mates, but the smile said it all in any case. Intensity is what Robinson demands of his players. It was what was demanded of him all those years ago when he was an emerging flanker at the Rec and had as his mentors a group of men so driven they were positively scary.

You mention Roger Spurrell and Robinson smiles at the memory of his former Bath team-mate. Spurrell, blonde of hair and fearless of nature, was the great enforcer at Bath in those days, the most psyched man around. Stuart Barnes, a member of that crew, once said that Spurrell had the demented visage of a cocaine addict who had sneezed whilst inhaling a sack of the white stuff. Rog was the guy that set the tempo in training.

"I came into a Bath team full of players who knew how to handle themselves," says Robinson. "It was the survival of the fittest down there. Some of the fights were legendary. Our training sessions would be harder than our matches some weeks, that was the way of it. Physically, you really had to be there because if you weren't you got dominated by somebody who wanted your place. A couple of times Jack Rowell (the coach] would say, 'Robinson, get yourself stuck into Rog', and Rog would stand at the back of the lineout and look at me and say, 'Don't even think about it'. What we had within that team was a lot of strong individuals but also a great collective spirit and a fierce desire to play for each other."

Those times might be long gone, but the values remain the same. Robinson wants pride and passion, but those are staple diets of any half-decent team. What he also wants and needs is concentration and anticipation and consistency, the things that elevate a side and that have been missing from Scotland's play for too long. He wants players to lead. Not just the captain, or co-captains. All of them. Nobody opting out, everybody carrying their share of the burden.

He looked at Scotland teams of the recent past and reckoned that an unfair weight of responsibility fell on the captain of the day. When the team was in a hole, everybody looked to Jason White or Mike Blair or whoever to find the way out. It shouldn't be like that. He says it won't be like that, not with his Scotland.

It's not a revolution he's promising, but steady improvement and, at the end of his three years, perhaps some glory to boot. This is the man who coached Edinburgh into second place in last season's Magners League. For splitting the fantastically wealthy provinces of Ireland, respect is due.

"We have to look at innovation, at new ideas. Who says just having one captain is the only way to do it? We have two world-class players in Mike (Blair] and Chris (Cusiter]. Superb rugby players and good men. We're trying to get the best out of both by making them joint captains. Over the last six years, either Chris has been selected and Mike has been down there, as it was when Matt Williams was coach, or Mike has been selected and Chris has been down there, as it was when Frank was coach. It's human nature for the guy who's not in favour to have his performances drop off. Leadership is a big area for me. We need to develop more leaders. We've got two good ones in the No.9 jersey, two guys that any team in the world would crave."

This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but Robinson loves rugby. Really loves it. It's hard to recall a coach who loves it more, quite frankly. It is a game that has given him fantastic success – at Bath where he conquered Europe and as assistant coach to Sir Clive Woodward's World Cup winners – but has also given him much grief, as Woodward's successor from 2004 to 2006.

There are some interesting facts about his reign at Twickenham. Firstly, Jonny Wilkinson was not fit enough to play a single Test match for him and, secondly, he was put on the back-foot early in his term when he lost four of his first six games by a combined 11 points. Oh, Jonny, how different things may have been had you been around to knock over those penalties and drop goals.

"You deal with it. I loved my whole time coaching England. I coached England from 2000 to 2006, I had six great years working with great coaches and great players. I don't really want to dwell on what's been and gone but rugby is about winning, that's what counts. That's the big lesson I learned, this game is about winning. The way that we play, the style, the performance, doesn't matter. You've got to win the game."

It's funny how life works out. Scotland did its share of damage to Robinson's England, beating them at Murrayfield in the 2006 Six Nations and giving him some memories of what a full and passionate national stadium can do for this team. The crowd in '06 was extraordinary, but he recalls the 2008 victory with even greater clarity. He was just a punter that day. Immense is the word he uses to describe the atmosphere. So loud, so passionate, so Scottish. "It was inspirational. Absolutely inspirational. This is one of the great rugby stadiums we're talking about."

Fiji arrive this week. His first Test and a country's new beginning. He's been stressing physicality in training, reminding his players that when they're hitting the Fijians they'd better hit them hard and dump them on their backsides because these boys can only weave their magic if they're on their feet, not on their arses.

"You need warriors in this game," he says. "It's the toughest team sport you can play. You get smashed and you don't know where the hits are going to come from. You're asked to go in the scrum and people weren't built for scrummaging. It's horrendous the forces that are going through you in that front-row, but you've got to be in there and you've got to take those hits and then you've got to get up and get into the defensive line and tackle some big guy and you're expected to tackle better than any of the backs even though your legs are burning and your neck is hurting. You've got to make that tackle. You've just got to. It's tough. So, so tough."

When good ol' Chunk threw his misguided haymaker in training, it was a welcome sign of intensity and hunger and fellas getting the message that they must train like it's their last session and play like it's their last game. In fairness, nobody ever doubted that the Scottish lads lacked passion. They gave it everything they had. Always. But Robinson proved at Edinburgh that he has X factor, that little bit of something that made his players better and brought results that Leinster, with all their superstars and big budgets, could not match.

He reached the end of the road with his club last summer, but for his adopted country, the journey is only just beginning.