While north London was struck by a tornado last Thursday morning, west London offered up a warm southeaster. Barely an hour after vicious gusts had struck Kensal Rise, Tony Stanger, Hawick born, bred, and feted, was hunched over a table in Sunbury discussing the process of picking off his own targets in middle England.
Subtle and inconspicuous though his progress may so far have been, the former Scotland wing could end up imprinting himself on the long-term conscious of his current home with the same force as nature’s freakish blast. In the five years since the 1997 Lion called time on a playing career that took in four countries either side of the professional watershed, he has inched his way back to the touchline in a different role, changing perceptions as well as jobs.
After three years’ laboratory work at the RFU’s Leeds academy, Stanger has spent the last couple applying his own quiet science to the London Irish squad in his dual-role as speed and skills coach. In his second season of responsibility for both their fitness and technical finery, the exiles finished third in the Guinness Premiership (their best yet) and reached the European Challenge Cup final (another first).
And while Stanger rushes to load the credit onto the shoulders of Brian Smith, Irish’s ambitious director of rugby, the players insist that he take some of it back. “It’s all down to Brian Smith and Tony Stanger, the way we play and the way they’ve helped us surprise people,” says Mike Catt when you ask him why what might be his last year of Premiership rugby is as grace-filled, cleanly-cut and brimming with simple intelligence as his first.
Coming from a winner of a World Cup and countless rugby hearts, it is a compliment that sticks. Rather like Stanger’s tongue was supposedly wont to do in the many dressing rooms in which he sat in the process of gathering 52 caps and 24 international tries, spread around the centrepiece of the close-range dive against England that sealed the 1990 Five Nations championship. Actions have always been his eloquence, and nothing could speak louder on his behalf in this new sphere than the taut cohesiveness that has become Irish’s calling card.
“I’ve always been shy, but I’ve always thought and reflected a lot on everything I’ve done and experienced in rugby,” he argues. “I might not have been the one down the front shouting and talking, but those people aren’t necessarily the most useful. It’s no surprise to me that this coaching is what I’ve ended up doing.”
GRAND SLAM, grand plan. If, on the morning of March 17, 1990, you’d been asked to predict which two of the Scottish XV would be near the beating heart of the professional game some 16 years on, one pick might well have gone to the naturally ebullient Sean Lineen, now indeed head coach at Glasgow Warriors. But Stanger? He seemed too reserved, too at home with doing his own job instead of telling others how to go about theirs, too plain nice to be the boss. So there’s what we know. All the while, it seems, the coaching cogs were turning in Stanger’s mind. Spun not only by the greatness he saw from Ian McGeechan and Jim Telfer at national level, but what to him were their most manifest areas of weakness. “Too many years of thinking, ‘What the hell are we doing this for?’ ” he offers as a tracing of his vocation to its source. “As a player, I saw a lot of things I thought weren’t right; we did a lot of things that didn’t make sense. Sometimes Scots can be a little bit, ‘Oh we’ve always done it this way, so we always will,’ but, really, when you start to pick away at that, think and talk about it, does it really make sense?” “We got our successes through bloody mindedness and hard work; we just worked harder than everyone else. In the pro era, though, everyone’s got all day to work you out, so you’ve got to have more. You need imagination. I would love to have been coached by some of the modern coaches, to benefit from the thinking that goes on now. There is still a frustration looking back at some of the things we did, but you have to realise you’re only in business in a coaching sense when you can bring in some different ideas of your own.”
Or even just some different ideas. While Scottish coaches generally still turned out in gown and mortarboards as the turn of the century approached, Stanger took himself to a more productive classroom, completing a degree in sports science in the closing years of his professional career with Edinburgh Reivers, Grenoble and Leeds. It was there that information merged powerfully with intuition, as Stanger discovered confidence in both the knowledge he accrued, and that which he realised he already carried with him.
“I’ve always had my own opinions, but I’ve never liked to get in arguments or rock the boat,” he says. “University was great in that respect because it gave me a foundation to back up my opinions, adding theory to everything I had experienced in my playing days. You need both as a coach these days, because players are far more willing to question what you’re telling them. If I’m going to get people like Olivier Magne or Mike Catt onside, it can’t be half-baked. You’ve got to be able to say, ‘Let’s do x, because y will happen, and let us exploit option z’, not just ‘Oh, that’s what we did when I played, so get on with it’. You need to have properly formed core principles and philosophies.”
SO what are they? Cynics will hear Stanger’s accent move 20 miles north of his birthplace to Melrose and Telfer when he says that the All Blacks are the object of much of his professional study. In his mind, New Zealand are the incarnation of what everyone else in world rugby will want to look like in the next 10 years, their crisp, candid, brutally close-cropped game cutting a neat line between the surliness of the Premiership and the worst cosmetic excesses of Super 14. It is their relentlessly accurate execution of core skills, their preference for seeking space over contact, but most of all their instinctive selection of the right option for the dynamics of the moment that Stanger daily encourages from his players on the training pitches of the club’s spiritual home in Middlesex.
“The All Blacks are playing the way all rugby will be played in the future; it’s all basic, but done brilliantly. Perhaps their biggest thing is the way they sustain technical ability in a high-pressure setting, and that’s the hardest thing to develop as a coach. You’re having to, say, convince a forward to spend hours on this particular skill, just in case, one game in four, you need to execute a 20m spin pass off your left hand for someone in space to score the winner. But you’ve got to convince him, because that’s the only way he stands a chance in a pressurised situation. We’re still not good enough as coaches in this country at recognising what’s important. From a skills point of view, there’s a long way to go.”
By common consensus, Irish have been sharper, more compact in their chores since Stanger showed up, even though his arrival itself could only be described as haphazard. Having been wrongly informed that funding for the Leeds academy post was being withdrawn, he put a speculative call in to Conor O’Shea, then the exiles’ managing director, on the very day the former Ireland full-back had interviewed the last two original candidates for the skills coach post. Stanger cursed his timing, but later that night was delighting in it, as O’Shea rang back to offer him the job. “One day later and I would have missed out,” he smiles.
CHALLENGE. In just over an hour of interview, Stanger uses the word 19 times. He makes it clear that his current role, while hugely satisfying, is not main course material. I have to ask. Would a head coach job in Scotland be a step up? “If the right job came up, if it was challenging, then definitely,” he shrugs. “I have a plan in terms of what I want to know, and what I want to learn. I’d like to think I have the skills to take up any role. I have no qualms about failure, and I would never put limits on myself, even though I suspect a lot of people who knew me as a player might find it funny to think of me as head coach material.”
Who’s laughing? Sometimes you just know which way the wind’s blowing.
