IT WAS THIS day last year that Kieran Hallett had the most unique matchday of his life in rugby.
The Ireland U19s head coach, whose team face France this Wednesday afternoon in Belfast, has been working with Leinster’s academy since 2019 but he spent much of last year on loan to the Melbourne Rebels in Australia.
Hallett, a former Ireland U21 out-half, worked as the Rebels’ backs and skills coach for the 2023 Super Rugby Pacific season, including an unforgettable trip to play the Fijian Drua in their capital city.
The Crusaders had been beaten in Lautoka just a few weeks before, so the Rebels knew an onslaught was coming but they too went down on an emotional occasion in Fiji.
“It was the first-ever Super Rugby game in Suva,” says Hallett of that experience.
“It was incredible. There must have been around 20,000 Fijians there going crazy.
“30-degree heat, 99% humidity. We needed a police escort just to get to the ground, it was like a World Cup final.”
The placement in Melbourne was another step in a journey Hallett hopes will soon lead to a full-time role as a senior assistant coach, perhaps with Leinster as current attack coach Andrew Goodman gets set to join Ireland this summer.
Leo Cullen invited Hallett to temporarily step up as Leinster’s attack coach for their recent friendly games against Harlequins and Bath during the Six Nations period, Goodman making way for Hallett to gain crucial experience.
“Running a Leinster senior team was awesome,” says Hallett, who has also coached with the Ireland Combined Academies and Ireland Women teams.
“It’s what I want to do. I don’t know what the plan will be for our South Africa tour [in the URC later this month], but maybe there will be another chance there.”
Leinster have yet to announce Goodman’s successor as attack coach next season but Hallett would love to take on the role.
“Whether the timing is right now or not, I don’t know,” he says. “That’s up to Leo to decide.”
Hallett is a native of England, born and bred just outside Northampton. His rugby-playing days started in earnest with the Northampton academy, yet he was always aware of his Irish eligibility.
One of his grandfathers hailed from Fermoy in Cork and moved to the UK at the age of just 14, working in the Midlands mines before going into shoemaking.
Kieran was always reminded that he could play for Ireland and when a fellow academy player at Northampton arrived to training in Irish Exiles gear one day, Hallet figured out how he could make it happen.
He was soon in the Exiles system himself and having made a move to Bedford Blues to play senior pro rugby, he earned a place in the Ireland U21 squad in 2006. Though he didn’t feature in the Six Nations campaign, Hallett started at out-half in that summer’s World Cup ahead of Jonathan Sexton.
Though their roads diverged from there, it was funny for Hallett to bump into Sexton at Leinster all those years later when he joined in 2019.
“The first day I walked into Leinster, Johnny was there on a day off from the 2019 World Cup and he saw me and it was sort of, ‘What are you doing here?!’” says Hallett with a laugh.
“Johnny was great back then, we were both competing for the same spot but we were just young kids. We shared a room in France for three weeks at the World Cup.”
Sean O’Brien, Devin Toner, Sean Cronin, Darren Cave, Fergus McFadden, and Billy Holland were also part of that Ireland squad and Hallett reckons they underachieved given the scale of their talent, finishing sixth at the World Cup.
It went well for Hallett but rather than being integrated into the Irish provincial system, he went back to Bedford to play in the second tier of English rugby. It was only a year later that he got a call from Ulster with the offer of a development contract. Paddy Wallace was going to the World Cup with Ireland and David Humphreys was injured, so Hallett arrived with high hopes of making a dent.
“I went in, was due to start the first pre-season game, and tore my hamstring the Thursday before we played,” says Hallett.
“It was six to eight weeks and by the time I was fit, Paddy was back and Niall O’Connor had come in and done well. That was it, my opportunity was gone. I played one game against the Dragons and it was a grand total of five minutes.”
He was back in England after one season, hoping to earn a Premiership contract. Nearly a decade of Championship rugby followed with Plymouth, Nottingham, and the Cornish Pirates but though there were chats with Ulster again at one stage, Hallett never got a chance to go back to Ireland or up a level in England.
He loved his time in the Championship and has no regrets but feels that his experiences as a player have fed into his coaching.
“I felt I slipped through the cracks a little bit,” says Hallett. “That happens. Part of the reason I like development coaching is because I think I have a better appreciation that it’s not just talent that gets you the opportunity.
“You need luck and timing and chances, it’s a bigger picture. I wanted to help talented players to fulfil their potential and that partly comes from my own journey and feeling I didn’t do that myself.
“I had a decent career, I was a professional for 10 years and had a great time doing it. But the system now in Ireland, the young guys here are very lucky to have it around them.”
He was coaching from his early 20s and landed his first big role in his early 30s as a development officer for the Exeter Chiefs, combining that role with being the head coach for Plymouth.
Hallett gained valuable experience in three years with Exeter, meaning he felt primed to take on the ‘elite player development officer’ position that opened up in Leinster in 2019.
Leinster’s production line is lauded across the world and Hallett has delighted in working with some of the country’s biggest talents, as well as getting to know the intricacies of a system that features many players coming through the Leinster schools.
“The Schools Cup exposes players to a high-pressure environment,” says Hallett. “They’re used to taking on board and understanding a lot of detail. It’s highly tactical, it’s knock-out rugby. They exit well, manage games well, don’t overplay.
“Whereas if you wanted to create players who were individually brilliant, you’d maybe focus more on high-risk, high-reward rugby where the jeopardy of making a mistake isn’t quite as high.
“The fun part of our job when they leave school and come into the pre-academy where Griggsy [Adam Griggs] and Trev [Hogan] are doing a great job at the moment, we get to push the needle to the other end.
“We know they understand detail and game plans, but how expressive, creative and skilful can you be? You end up with a happy medium. When the lads go into the Irish 20s, they have lots of those moments of brilliance but they also know how to win a game tactically. It’s a nice combination of those environments.”
Hallett loves working as a development coach but after nearly 10 years in that area, he is keen to kick on into senior professional rugby next.
That’s partly why he ended up in Melbourne. Hallett had been talking to Cullen and the IRFU’s Peter Smyth about how he could be ready if senior roles came up. It was late summer 2022 when IRFU head honcho David Ducifora sent word that there was an opening with the Rebels.
So off went Hallet, his wife Josie, and their kids, Hector and Cecily, for the adventure of a lifetime. Hector is only five now and still talks about Australia every day, while his dad learned plenty on the rugby front.
“I think learning how to be an assistant coach was the big thing,” says Hallett. “So learning what it’s like in a coaches meeting on a Monday, putting session plans together, what selection looks like.
“The Rebels even involved me in bigger-picture contracting stuff. You’re learning to fight your corner on certain things, knowing which battles to pick and which not to.
“Seeing the other side of it as well – Leinster don’t lose many games and no disrespect to the Rebels but they won’t win every week. So you’re learning what that pressure is like and how to deal with that as it builds.”
He returned to Leinster a better coach with a broader perspective, with his ambition to rise through the coaching ranks only strengthened.
The hope is to make a step up unto the senior coaching staff but Hallett continues to enjoy his work with the academy too.
“I’ve learned loads and I’m still learning loads,” he says. “Simon [Broughton, the academy manager] and I go down rabbit holes of how we can tweak a good system and refine it.
“That’s one of the best things about working in Leinster – we’re always trying to make it better. We know we’re producing good players, but how do we stay ahead?”
