Sean Everitt and Edinburgh: Attacking beliefs, coming out of comfort zone, plenty intrigue

It’s fair to say that Edinburgh Rugby took their time to appoint Mike Blair’s successor.

New Edinburgh senior coach Sean Everitt was involved with the Cell C Sharks in South Africa for 15 years. (Photo by Steve Haag/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

The announcement on Thursday of Sean Everitt as the club’s new senior coach came almost five months after Blair revealed he would be standing down at the end of the 2022-23 season. In his place comes Everitt, a similarly attack-minded coach from South Africa whose professional career has largely been bound up with the Durban-based Sharks. His experience and rugby philosophy appealed to Edinburgh who are keen to build on the progress Blair made in his first year in charge but which stalled during that difficult second season which saw the capital club fall out of the URC play-off places and fail to qualify for the Champions Cup.

So is Everitt the man to get the Hive buzzing? His attacking beliefs will help. The Edinburgh hierarchy see him as someone who can get the best out of the squad’s abundant talent and who is far removed from the stereotypical South African model of a forwards-orientated, pragmatic coach. Which all sounds fine in principle but Everitt knows his team will need to firstly win ball before the likes of Darcy Graham, Blair Kinghorn, Emiliano Boffelli, Duhan van der Merwe and Mark Bennett can be unleashed. Edinburgh found themselves on the wrong side of a number of close encounters last season, edged out of matches by a couple of points here and there. The margins are small but any club who can beat Saracens and chalk up home and away victories over Castres, as Edinburgh did in the Champions Cup, aren’t too far from being a top team.

Some early concerns have been expressed about Everitt’s appointment, specifically around his title and the brevity of his contract. In the official announcement the 53-year-old was trumpeted as “Senior Coach for [the] upcoming 2023/24 season, on an initial one-year deal”. So how do you define ‘senior coach’? And why such a short contract? Let’s try to deal with the title first of all. Edinburgh were at pains to point out that Everitt “will lead the club’s coaching group for the new campaign”. But it also built in a bit of flexibility, with Scottish Rugby chief Mark Dodson saying, “We may also take the opportunity to make additions to further strengthen the coaching group as the season progresses.”

It has been speculated that this could mean a director of rugby-type figure being brought in which might ring alarm bells with the new man whose 15-year association with the Sharks ended a couple of months after Neil Powell was appointed DoF. Powell, the former head coach of the South Africa sevens team, was originally supposed to be an assistant coach at the Sharks but became DoF at the start of last season’s URC and took over from Everitt when the latter was sacked in the aftermath of last November’s 35-0 defeat by Cardiff.

The fact that Everitt has signed on for a year, initially at least, suggests short-termism. The official line from Edinburgh is that this puts all the club’s senior coaches on the same page, with the contracts of assistants Stevie Lawrie and Michael Todd also due to expire next summer. But it may also allow Everitt the opportunity to see if working in Scotland suits him and his family. His entire coaching career has been in South Africa – he worked with the Blues briefly after leaving the Sharks – and he spoke recently about how important it was to be close to his loved ones. “Family comes first,” he told SA Rugby magazine, stressing his desire to be close to his wife Jacqui, a teacher, and his youngest son Christian, a promising South African schools rugby player. Coming to Edinburgh takes Everitt out of his comfort zone and represents a big commitment. It promises to be an intriguing season.