Guinness November Series Blog

by Brendan Cole

How important is the coach to the success or failure of a given team? The received wisdom is that the man in charge is the fundamental factor from which all success or failure flows from week to week. But there is a body of evidence that suggests, rather like an investment banker, sports coaches are at the mercy of masses of factors completely outside their control.

A related point is that, although terminal declines and astonishing runs of success are features of all sport, those predicting either that a manager will eventually succeed brilliantly or fail miserably are usually proved right. Almost inevitably.

Phenomena such as the frequently seen ‘new manager’s bounce’ is a simple function of regression to the mean; a consequence of the fact that a good team will eventually recover its form, just as a bad one will eventually be found out. The peaks and troughs of the performances of individual players can also be better understood with reference to an evening of poker.

Keggy - how would he do?

If, say, Kevin Keegan took over Liverpool Football Club next week and embarked on a run of five wins from five would that make him a better manager than Rafa Benitez?

Ireland are on a streak of six wins from six made up of the RBS Six Nations Grand Slam matches and a Test win over Argentina the previous November.

Meaning Declan Kidney is a genius? The best Irish manager ever? Possibly...

The team’s run of success has been attributed to a whole range of factors: the famous team meeting in Enfield at which Rob Kearney challenged the Munster forwards' commitment; captain Brian O’Driscoll’s embrace of the quiet life; a new coaching team and selection ethos.

The question is this: could an Eddie O’Sullivan-coached team led by a peroxide-blonde O’Driscoll who had just won ‘Heat’ magazine's Male Celebrity of the Year and in which the Munster pack had never been challenged by an upstart Leinster full-back have won the Grand Slam last year?

Maybe: we'll never know.

Kidney, to his credit, seems well aware of the cosmic unfairness of it all - the random influences that determine who wins and who loses - and he is wary of the tendency to lionise those who are ahead when the final whistle blows and demonise those who aren’t. He and his players have also been quick to emphasise that they owe a lot to O’Sullivan.

But logic refuses to dismiss the importance of such factors as the mental rejuvenation of the team that flowed from the candour they felt capable of at events such as Enfield, the fresh eyes behind the team selection, and the pragmatism of the Grand Slam game-plans.

Kidney - what is his 'mean'?

What’s the point of a manager? Over the long term the man at the top can be understood to be the man who defines what is possible and what is not; the man who sets what the ‘mean’ is. It is on that score, Kidney has made a difference.

The other side of that coin is that given a long enough period in charge, Benitez was always going to have a run like the last couple of weeks, while O’Sullivan too was virtually bound to have a Rugby World Cup-style slump at some stage.

Why? You can argue that as well as being above average coaches and somewhat inflexible ‘system’ men, the characteristic both Benitez and O’Sullivan share is that they are politically astute operators who either had or have had very long tenures in one high profile job. Both are adept at explaining away short-ish bad streaks, frequently with reference to a long term vision. Both have a larger - much larger - than average 'sample size'.

Failure breeds failure?

Inevitably, each time they escape a poor run, the chance that the next run of bad results will be the dreaded Rugby World Cup 2007 or one-win-from-nine ‘mega-slump’ increases. It can be argued that each mini-slump successfully negotiated actually increases the chance the next one will be worse. Failure does appear to breed failure, and O'Sullivan and Benitez were and are prisoners of the law of averages.

It takes a rare manager to escape it.

So what was O’Sullivan’s achievement? He can reasonably be credited with creating an entirely new framework for Anglo-Irish and Anglo-French clashes. Ireland feared both of those sides before he arrived and to a large extent that is no longer the case. Obviously, Munster, the Heineken Cup and a whole pile of other factors can also be lobbed into that debate, but O’Sullivan deserves his due.

But O’Sullivan never fully conquered the SANZAR inferiority complex and in the end, Ireland regressed in the Six Nations as well. The distinct impression that a ceiling had been reached was unavoidable.

Looking ahead, with the Grand Slam hoodoo lifted, the target for Kidney and Ireland - with Rugby World Cup 2011 on the horizon -  is to create a culture of heightened expectations against the very best. It is that job – the most difficult task of Kidney’s career - which is the underlying theme of everythying that happens this November.