Interview: Craig Chalmers - A born winner, popularity contests aside

He's no Mr Nice Guy, but Craig Chalmers is another Borders prodigy

IF GLASGOW and the west of Scotland was a hotbed for great Scottish football managers, then there is an intriguing suggestion that the small Borders town of Melrose is becoming a rich nursery for Scottish rugby coaches.

Just as Alex Ferguson, Jock Stein, Matt Busby and Bill Shankly emerged from a stretch of industrial Scotland from Bellshill to east Ayrshire, with Glaswegians Kenny Dalglish and Alex McLeish taking the baton on, there is a talented trail of rugby leaders now winding its way back to the small Borders town in the shade of the Eildon Hills.

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Bryan Redpath and Carl Hogg last week agreed a new three-year contract at the helm of Premiership challengers Gloucester, Graham Shiel is piloting the Scotland sevens team at Twickenham and Murrayfield over the next two weekends, Stevie Scott assisting Steve Diamond at Sale and Craig Chalmers has steered Melrose back to the top of the club game.

Before Kenny Murray took over, Craig Redpath was the main driver in Ayr's return to the top level of Scottish club rugby. Rob Moffat soon returns to education, but only after helping to develop a glut of internationalists in the professional ranks and having the country's most-capped player, Chris Paterson, hail him again this week as his greatest inspiration, and of course the most successful Scottish coach, Jim Telfer, launched his career in Melrose.

There is another similarity between most of those names and their football predecessors: they were fiery and not universally liked. The football managers are idolised now, but Ferguson, Stein and Shankly, in particular, had infamous run-ins with authority and supporters, players and managers of opposing teams. Ferguson still does, frequently.

Now Chalmers, one of Telfer's pupils, is running the gauntlet, emerging as one of the country's most promising coaches without any prizes for popularity. The former Scotland fly-half, now 42, was at the SRU's annual awards ceremony at Murrayfield last night to see his players lift the Club of the Season award.

He was not even nominated for the Coach of the Year title, however, which went to Dave Cockburn, who led Lasswade to the National One (effectively Scottish Division Four] title and the National Shield, at something of a canter.

Currie coach Ally Donaldson, Kenny Murray at Ayr and Boroughmuir's Eamon John have all picked up the award in recent seasons, which does little to alter the perception that the dislike of Chalmers runs deep.

His influence in guiding Melrose to the top championship for the first time in 14 years, the cup final for a fourth year in a row and two wins from four games in their first British and Irish Cup involvement, while also doing enough locally with the same group of players to win the Radio Borders Border League and BSPC Kings of the Sevens trophies is clear.

Melrose have a more home-grown squad now than at any time in recent decades, in common with the general state of club rugby have less money than in the past yet are again, like 15 years ago, setting the standard in club rugby.

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Chalmers insists: "Whether I am popular or not isn't going to change my approach. I have made mistakes. I have learned a lot, on and off the field, and changed as a coach, and I will always be learning. But I'm passionate about the game and want the best for me, my team, my club, and tend to say it as I see it. I'm not always right, of course, but people outside the teams I work with, and those inside, who do know me, have different perceptions. But as I grew as a player, and the teams I played in got better and more successful, I attracted more abuse, and so you accept it. The diehards who abuse me during a game come and speak to me in the bar, slap my back. Seeing my team being booed when they pick up medals, as they were at Selkirk Sevens for finishing runners-up, disappoints me more than anything anyone says about me."

Jim Telfer can tell Chalmers a thing or two about popularity, from drawing the ire of New Zealanders on a Lions tour in 1966 to upsetting club men at the onset of pro rugby. Chalmers is a very different character, and his and Telfer's schooling in life was a long way from football managers' backdrop of pits and dockyards, but it brought similar principles Chalmers is turning to now.

"What we learned under Jim (Telfer] and Rob Moffat was the importance of discipline and work-rate," he explains. "Jim had us on the end of a string. We'd train on Sunday mornings, with the ethos of 'others won't be doing this; we're working harder than anybody else'.

"It was that desire Jim bred into us to work harder than anybody else. We were youngsters and would be out after the game on a Saturday night, but would turn up on Sunday, and you didn't just turn up; we actually trained pretty hard.

"But what that did too was it brought us together on another day. From there we'd go up the street and have lunch, and sit and talk rugby; who did this and that the day before, and why, and how we could improve.

"Players like Hoggy and me could talk all day about the games. We didn't spend time discussing things we did well, just the negatives, things we had to improve. That was Jim's way, but I've learned that you do have to leave time for the positives as well.

"Jim was fantastic. He was a great motivator, and is still the same with the Melrose Wasps (under-18s], looking to move the game on, learning from the Super Rugby or Premiership games he watches on TV and trying it with them. Myself, Basil (Redpath], Hoggy, Shielly and others learned from him."Chalmers accepts that Telfer had a rare group of talent at his disposal, but insists, strongly, that without the Sunday morning training and desire he bred in them to reach ever-higher they would not have dominated Scottish rugby the way they did with six championships in eight years through the 1990s.

What Chalmers brings to his coaching, however, is that innate belief. He has a desire that drove him as a player to make the most of his ability, topped by a Grand Slam success with Scotland in only his second year as an internationalist, the kind that means his three sons still win no contest without genuinely beating their dad.

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He has run the gauntlet of abuse around Border grounds and while he claims he is "confident, not arrogant", that depends on whether you are on his side or against it. Against it, it can appear arrogant, but so it does with most leading sportsman or woman. Michael Schumacher and Roger Federer win few popularity contests, and Chalmers responds in the same way Sir Alex reacts to taunts from Arsenal or Man City fans, with a smile and perhaps a wave.

Chalmers was not an easy guy to like. He grew up in Galashiels; the star player from a rival town you were invariably encouraged to target and bring down a peg or two. But get to know him and Chalmers is far from the self-assured, cocky character he likes to portray, but a more genial, even (whisper it) self-deprecating individual, and good company particularly for worshippers of rugby.

Not superhuman, not super-maniacal nor even super-injunction. Mistakes Chalmers has made have quickly become public knowledge. His arrest at Melrose Sevens last year - when a bouncer ignored his requests to pass on a message to his wife inside a club function, refusing to believe he was the Melrose coach, and a drunken Chalmers let rip with a volley and foolishly continued to argue when police officers stepped in - was Facebook news before he had even reached the police cell.

That was a sobering lesson, one believed to have cost him involvement with the Scotland Under-20s, even though he chastised himself over the embarrassment in front of the young players. Was that a reason to keep Chalmers out of Murrayfield, or an excuse to?

The SRU have turned him down for numerous age-grade and pro posts since he first lost out on the Borders job to Steve Bates six years ago, and one wonders if those of influence at the SRU can see beyond the Chalmers' faade and recognise the values of a challenging character; someone with an edge.They turned instead to Irishman Michael Bradley for the Edinburgh hotseat and if he is not handed an assistant's role to Bradley - he has heard nothing - Chalmers' fear that he may have to become the latest in the Melrose seam of coaching talent to head south may be realised.

He added: "I will keep coaching and keep trying to improve. I enjoyed my time as a player with Melrose, the South, Scotland, and in the professional game, and I believe that I understand players and have something to give back.

"I've made mistakes and I've held my hands up, just as I did as a player. But it won't knock me.

"I love this game and coaching is the best thing after playing, and watching the players learn from things you have said, things you have shown, and use their talent to achieve the success this season after a good few years of striving to get there, has been a fantastic experience.

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"But you never stand still. We have to better next year. Improvement comes through discipline and hard work, and while, yeah, I would be frustrated not to get an opportunity to coach professionally, I will love the challenge again of trying to help Melrose stay at the top, and the abuse that comes with it!"

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