WHEN LONDON IRISH take to the field at the Madejski Stadium to take on Leicester this weekend (Sunday at 15.15), it will be a formal unveiling of plan almost two years in the making.
The Exiles go in to the new Premiership campaign brimming with expectation and excitement. The old has been torn up and restructured. The new is an ambitious, well-funded, forward-thinking outfit fronted by the excellent former Waikato Chiefs head coach, Tom Coventry.
Even so, after Mick Crossan’s December 2013 takeover and former second row stalwart Bob Casey stepping up to CEO, last season’s Premiership strugglers are not about to forget the history represented by the second half of their name.
“We would love more Irish players and we think it’s a great environment for Irish players,” Casey tells The42.
“With the new coaching structure and training facility, they will be better players for coming to us because they’ll get game time.”
Gorey’s Eoin Sherriff is the newest Irish arrival to join Eoin Griffin, Conor Gilsenan and Tom Court under the shamrock-laden crest. Yet Casey’s Irish are looking further afield too. He speaks proudly of his club’s marquee signing Ben Franks (who will be their exemption from the £5.5 million salary cap), but he’s not the only lump of steel forged in the land of the long white cloud that will help shore up the stadium in Reading. Lock Matt Symons returns to his native England after impressing with the Chiefs while Scotland international Sean Maitland is an exciting addition to the back-line.
“This squad is a long time in the making,” Casey explains with a certain element of weariness at the memory of putting the pieces together one by one.
“We made the decision last season that the takeover happened too late in the day to impact the squad for last season. So we decided to get the squad ready for this season. We moved on 11 players this summer, brought in 11 who we feel are better players.”
It’s not just the playing staff that is coming through a long planning pipeline. Coventry is the fruit of an exhaustive process consisting of whittling down suitable names from a lengthy list. Names of people who were not only capable of emblazoning their culture on a new club, but also the kind of man who fancied a challenge and was willing to fit the cloth cut by a club who are unproven as serious title contenders.
‘Key people’
“We were coming from a position of being 11th in the table and the three previous seasons were very disappointing. We were down in that bottom three. For us it was very challenging to get a top coach.
“As a rugby committee we did a study of successful teams’ coaching staff. We wrote down the names and then slowly but surely went through them all. We put a line through some and then we ended up with a short list. We spoke to some key people who we know and respect… and Tom Coventry was the man.
“Then you go, meet him. Meet him again and you talk to him a few times… it’s a big, big appointment. You’ve got to make sure that not only from a rugby point of view, but from a character point of view, he’s right for our organisation.”
We did a big research piece around what most successful teams are doing and we decided to move away from the director of rugby model to a head coach model which is very much hands-on. It’s all about performance, all about team and rugby.
“That’s Tom Coventry and we’re absolutely delighted with him. He really has come prepared in terms of how he’s going to build this culture in this club and how he’s going to play.”
Coventry’s first step in attempting to turn Irish in the right direction was to offer two more top class coaches a job on the other side of the world. So with Clark Laidlaw, latterly the assistant coach at Super Rugby runners-up Hurricanes, and the Auckland Blues’ Grant Doorey the Exiles have one of the most impressive coaching tickets north-east of Clermont.
At 37, Casey has been fast-tracked in to the big chair in the boardroom, but there has been a reassuringly slow and deliberate process about everything else London Irish have done recently.
With the English rugby public craving something other than their international team, now’s the time Irish must pick up the pace.
