JUST SIX WEEKS into life with Leinster, Jacques Nienaber isn’t quite feeling like a local in Dublin 4 just yet but he is slowly getting to grips with his new home.
He proudly says he doesn’t need the GPS to get to the RDS, Dun Laoghaire, Blackrock, or Dundrum, with his navigational knowledge growing by the day. He has scoped out a few local pubs too, reporting that The Dropping Well of Milltown, and Ashton’s and Farmer Brown’s in Clonskeagh “have all got good pints.”
Nienaber has hopped on the number 11 bus into Dublin city centre to go for coffee and his family are settling in well into their second stint in Ireland having previously spent 18 months in Limerick when Nienaber worked with Munster.
He reckons the Leinster players have been a bit shocked by how much he curses when he’s talking about rugby, even if Nienaber admits to being impressed with how expressive Irish people themselves can be through cursing.
“Everybody has got their things they do wrong and swearing is mine,” says Nienaber. “I do swear a lot.”
He’s not even missing his great friend and long-time coaching partner Rassie Erasmus too much. Leo Cullen is filling that void.
“Leo is Rassie,” says Nienaber. “He is a great sounding board, he is very experienced. and not just him, all the other coaches.”
Listening to Nienaber in Leinster’s training base in UCD yesterday, it was impossible not to be struck by how confident and authoritative a speaker he is now.
This wasn’t always the case. He admits that he struggled with speaking to the media in the past and when you compare his ease yesterday with how much edgier he could be back in 2016 with Munster, it’s like two different people.
Plenty has happened between then and now. Nienaber has helped the Springboks to two World Cup trophies, for starters. He has every reason to speak with total confidence about his area of expertise – defence. He’s now Leinster’s ‘senior coach’ and will undoubtedly influence many things but his main job is to make the province’s defence a weapon that helps them to end their two-season run without a trophy.
The Leinster defence wasn’t exactly seen as a glaring weakness in recent years when it was run by previous senior coach Stuart Lancaster, who also coached the attack, but there was room for improvement. Conceding three tries in each of the two Champions Cup final defeats to La Rochelle has been damaging.
South Africa conceded just four tries in seven games at the 2019 World Cup, just only one in their three knock-out games, and then eight in seven on their run to the 2023 title. Anyone who watched the Boks knows how crucial their aggressive defence was to their success and Nienaber is the mastermind behind it.
He says there “wasn’t a lot wrong with the defence” under Lancaster but he is now making major changes to their system.
“Everything is different,” says Nienaber.
“If you think a drift defence and big linespeed defence, it’s the polar opposite. They [the Leinster players] have to rewire their brains and it will take time but they’re grasping it.”
The challenge is greater because Nienaber joined so late in the season due to his commitments at the World Cup and with SA Rugby after the tournament.
“Obviously it’s not like in a pre-season where you present your manual and you’ve got time and you can present everything and then you start layering it in pre-season,” says Nienaber.
“Now you’ve got to perform, you’ve got to win, win your set-pieces, your scrum, your lineout, restarts, your kicking game, your attack and you must layer in a new defence system, so I think that’s a challenge for the group but they were mad keen to start and hats off to them for being so adventurous.”
Leinster have already had some big defensive performances, keeping La Rochelle and Munster tryless in heavy rain.
But the teething issues have been obvious too. Sale’s second-string side cut Leinster apart a few times last month and then Ulster scored three excellent tries thanks to Billy Burns’ smart attacking kicking on New Year’s Day.
Nienaber comes across as calm about those three Burns assists in Leinster’s defeat.
“His kicks were spot on,” he says. “It was a good tactic.
“Look, it’s not something… if you think there is space there, Richie Mo’unga [of New Zealand] would have attacked it against the Boks, without a doubt. Finn Russell [of Scotland], well he attacked that space without a doubt.
“So, it’s not a space that teams don’t go after. It’s just, listen, we have to get better at dealing with it.”
Nienaber has an exact timeline for Leinster’s defence fully clicking.
By his calculations, it will take until April before they hit their defensive straps. Leinster plan to be in the Champions Cup quarter-finals and then heading on a URC tour of South Africa to face the Lions and the Stormers when everything falls into place.
“It will be 14 weeks,” says Nienaber in a matter-of-fact fashion.
“It took 14 weeks with Munster, it took 14 games with the Boks when we took over in 2018.
“In 2018 we won 50% of our Test matches and the majority we lost because of our defence but in 2019 we only lost one so it takes time.
“Unfortunately, the players will have to pay their school fees and will have to learn.”
Nienaber says that one of the added challenges in Leinster is the amount of change they can have in their personnel from game to game and block to block.
Leinster have to get results but also give everyone in their squad chances, which is not ideal for a new defence coach trying to nail down a new system.
Nienaber says, “Please, don’t think I’m looking for excuses” as he uses the Ulster game as an example, Leo Cullen having made 14 changes to his team after the win over Munster.
He outlines how there was a new outside centre in Liam Turner, a new wing in Tommy O’Brien, then fullback Jimmy O’Brien dropped out during the captain’s run the day before the game, meaning Ciarán Frawley went from spending the week running Ulster plays against Leinster’s starters to being catapulted into the number 15 shirt.
Naturally enough, the changes didn’t help with defensive cohesion.
“I think that was a bold selection decision, to do that, but I think the right one,” insists Nienaber.
Interestingly, he explains that he is tweaking his coaching style and communication from what they were like with the Springboks because Leinster’s players are different.
“I walked back with Caelan [Doris] from the training field, and there’s probably two or three players within the South African group that has studied further [beyond secondary school],” says Nienaber.
“Over here, everybody is used to tertiary education so your delivery and how they consume information is different to the players that we have in South Africa.”
He wants Leinster’s defence to be as “player-driven” as possible but right now, he’s in the thick of everything on the training pitch as he tries to bed the new system in. He says he’s a teacher at the moment but wants to be a facilitator as soon as possible.
In terms of rating the success of a defence, Nienaber says his metrics are simple.
“Points and tries conceded, it’s all that counts. Simple as that.”
Unsurprisingly for someone who asks his players to go all-out with their linespeed, therefore making themselves vulnerable to being stepped or making occasional misreads, he doesn’t care about the oft-cited tackle success rate.
“You can have 100% tackle completion and you can be 28-0 down with four maul tries,” says Nienaber.
“If you go, ‘Yes, our defence was good guys, we got 100% tackle completion, we didn’t miss one tackle’ but we were so narrow that it was literally a 7-on-2 overlap and they just pass, pass, pass, you don’t miss a tackle but they score four tries like that.
“In the three tries we conceded against Ulster, the second one there was no missed tackle, they just ran in. Is that good or bad? They scored, that’s bad. It’s not good. So points conceded is the main thing.
“As long as the attitude is good and the technique is good and you miss a tackle, you’re going to miss a million in your career. You must get over it and it’s onto the next battle. Because of your quality as a rugby player, you will win more tackle battles than you will lose if you’re in this environment.”
Reports from the training ground are that Leinster’s players are enjoying Nienaber’s sheer enthusiasm for the defensive side of the game.
Even their most experienced international players are being pushed out of their comfort zones and asked to learn new things.
“Especially in our system, the players must get comfortable with pushing themselves to the limit,” says Nienaber.
“Only when they push over the limit, that’s when you know where your limit is and where you must push your skillset to go past that limit, to develop your skillset. Because it’s completely different to what they were used to.
“I would say it’s like riding a bike. You only get good at riding a bike if you fall a couple of times off the bike. Then you get over-confident on a bike, you start wheelieing and doing all kind of tricks, then you fall again.
“So us as a group will probably go through a phase where we’ve started, we will make errors and then we will get a grip of the skillset and then we will get over-confident and then we will get a little bit… I don’t know if arrogant is the right word but we will start pushing the boundaries too far, which is normal.
“That was the normal flow in the previous teams that I’ve coached. It worked like that and then you almost go too far and then you realise that ‘maybe I don’t have the skillset to put myself in that position’. So then you pull it back again and then you develop and your skillset improves and then you can push it harder again.
“So that’s a constant learning and that will happen, and it’s good. It must happen.
“You’ll never know where your limit is if you’re not willing to push yourself to that edge and sometimes fall a little bit off.”
