Interview: Bryan Redpath, rugby player

Published on Saturday 5 December 2009 20:51

IF THE old adage about learning more from defeat than victory is true then Bryan Redpath's head must be fit to burst with the information overload that he's had in recent weeks. The Gloucester coach is in his debut year as the top dog at Kingsholm and after just two wins from the last seven outings the former Scotland skipper is acutely aware of the meaning of the term "hot seat".

Had his side lost to Newcastle Falcons yesterday afternoon at Kingsholm it may have been one defeat too many for the club's famously impatient fans, something that Redpath openly acknowledged last week.

"I said going into these three games against Leicester, Quins and Newcastle that, to save my arse, we needed to win two of them. We got a win against Leicester and we got a bonus point out of Quins so we need to win against Newcastle."

They did. Redpath will be a relieved man after finally silencing the notorious "Shed" at Kingsholm. The punters there are never slow to voice an opinion, they wield real power at the club and yesterday's victory may just have earned the little Scot a bit of breathing space.

Gloucester's poor start is not without precedent, especially to anyone who saw the club's final matches of last season. With Redpath's predecessor Dean Ryan living on borrowed time the players went through the motions and lost the last four games by an aggregate score of 137-45. Ouch.

Ryan left the club over the summer and he was not the only one. In all 14 players headed for the exits including such influential characters as Olly Barclay and Ryan Lamb, the latter a local boy who has compounded his sin by playing like a superstar for his new club London Irish, not least when scoring 20 points against his old club.

"It's been a tricky start," Redpath admits. "It wasn't too daunting to start with but then you lose games and the pressure hits you. You rely on experienced players who have been there before but sadly we do not have them. The younger players are frightened and fractured and it's been difficult to keep them positive the whole time.

"We're in this little bit of a rut and getting out of it is difficult but we will. I don't know if we can compete at the very top of the league but we are a better team than we have shown so far."

Ryan used 53 players last season and seemed to sign a new fly-half for every other match but the financial landscape has shifted and belts are being tightened. Redpath has a 39-man squad at his disposal, eight of whom are U21 players, and boys who have only recently learned how to shave rarely know how to tough out a narrow victory in a tight Guinness Premiership encounter.

Gloucester have lost recent games by two, three, five and six points and Redpath makes the point that they could have gone either way. However when the Cherry and Whites capitulated to Wasps 35-6 at Kingsholm the Shed inhabitants were seriously unimpressed.

"They are very powerful," Redpath says of the vocal locals. "And they know how to use that power either by not turning up or by criticising. They can be very forthcoming to criticise when they think that players are not giving their all. That was maybe true at the end of last season but I don't think they are questioning the commitment of the players now. I'd rather they thought that I simply wasn't good enough than have them think that the players don't care about the club.

"Against Wasps we had so much territory and possession but we let ourselves down with three or four silly little mistakes and each time resulted in a try for Wasps. That's been the story of our season so far, individual errors. It's not as if one player is missing tackles, because then you can make a change for the next week. We have eight different players missing eight tackles."

The coach recently got a vote of confidence from fellow Scot Tom Walkinshaw, but if the club chairman is backing the one-time Melrose man then Lady Luck very obviously is not. Redpath's squad has been blighted by a spate of injuries, removing the few experienced bodies that were left standing after the summer clear-out. Mike Tindall and Marco Bortolami were just two of 16 fully fledged internationals who were unavailable for selection recently. As Redpath points out, he had one hell of a squad not playing.

The club resorted to dragging former skipper Jake Boer off the South African beach despite the fact that the flanker had not kicked a rugby ball in anger for five months. Against Biarritz in the Heineken Cup the back five of the scrum picked themselves: they were the only ones still standing. Needless to say Gloucester finished a distant second in the south west of France and they will be keen to get an away win, desperate to get any sort of win against Glasgow next Friday.

After two Heineken Cup defeats Sean Lineen's team is already out of the running. The match may appear to have little to recommend it although a recent rumour briefly added a little spice. The story goes that Redpath was approached by Gordon McKie in the summer with a view to replacing Sean Lineen at Glasgow. It's a good story, plausible even, but untrue.

"I had a chat with Gordon McKie in the summer," Redpath confirms, "but it was more of a general talk about where I saw my future and whether I would consider a return to Scotland at some point in the future and I wouldn't rule it out. He wasn't offering me the Glasgow job and, anyway, I have a contract at Gloucester.

"I want to win the league down here, make sure that I am a success in England first. I am learning through the tough times and provided you learn something then you have not failed."

In their present predicament Redpath could be forgiven for, to borrow a clich from football, "concentrating on the league" but the Gloucester coach sees things differently.

"I can't. Wining is a habit and winning is everything at the moment to me. Whatever game it is, we see that as a chance to get on a run where we can gain some confidence as a club and as individual players. We've not got the luxury of picking and choosing as maybe they have had in the past at Gloucester. We've got to start winning more games."

The coach is promising to go back to basics in order to do just that. All too often in the last decade Gloucester has played all the rugby while other clubs, noticeably Leicester and Wasps, have won all the trophies. Redpath points out that his side plays too much rugby in the middle part of the field where they concede 60 per cent of the penalties that are scored against them. He uses Saracens as a yardstick, stating that the current league leaders run through half as many phases in their own half of the field as any other club in the Premiership. "Relieve pressure to create pressure," is club and coach's new motto or, to translate into English, "hoof it and hope".

If Redpath sacrifices Champagne rugby on the altar of winning a few matches the aesthetes may argue but the season ticket holders in the Shed will roar their approval and they are the ones that matter; they have Bryan Redpath's immediate future in their hands.