IT DIDN’T TAKE long for the Scarlets squad to learn Simon Easterby liked to coach the way he played. Right in the thick of it.
“I can remember one time we were doing some contact drill and he wasn’t happy, so he jumped in,” explains former Scarlets flanker Rob McCusker.
“This is like on a Tuesday afternoon, and he’s just so outraged with our inability to do what he wanted that he jumped in to show us and ended up banging heads with one of the boys and needing stitches.
“The physio taped him up, so then he jumped back in again before getting stitched up later in the afternoon!
“I think his coaching philosophy stemmed from the way he played the game. He always loved to be on the edge and at the coalface and being an absolute nuisance, so he saw the value in that and coached us in a similar way.”
*********
Simon Easterby’s rugby life has been shaped by three places: Yorkshire, Wales and Ireland.
Yorkshire was where he learned the game. Born in Harrogate to an English father and Irish mother, sport was a central part of Easterby’s upbringing. His father, Henry, was a farmer from a family with horse racing in the blood. His mother, Katherine, had grown up in Blackrock, south Dublin and represented Ireland in hockey, and so family holidays back to Ireland were a formative part of the Easterby children’s upbringing.
So too Ampleforth College, viewed as one the most prestigious Catholic boarding schools in Britain.
“For someone who enjoyed sport it was fantastic,” Easterby told The Irish Independent in 2005.
“The facilities were far and beyond anything we had experienced. It had 20-odd rugby pitches; six or seven cricket pitches; it had indoor training facilities. Everything you could imagine for a top school and we benefited from that.”
Easterby had a love for cricket but gravitated increasingly towards rugby across his school years. When the time came to leave Ampleforth he packed his bags and spent a season with Sydney University before returning to play for Harrowgate. Leeds Carnegie offered a contract and a career was falling into place. One year later Easterby was heading down the road to Wales, where he would forge himself into a stalwart of a competitive Scarlets side.
McCusker remembers walking into that set-up as a teenager. In Eastery he saw a pro ahead of his time.
“When I got there in 2003, Chris Wyatt and a few of the boys still smoked openly in between training sessions when we were having food,” McCusker laughs.
“So I joined this professional rugby environment but I was like, ‘What is this?’
“It was still quite amateurish in a lot of ways. And then Easters was totally the polar opposite. I don’t know whether he had a different experience at Leeds coming down but he just seemed to have that edge and that professionalism even back then. Some of the boys… Well, they were not as professional.”
Easterby played over 200 games for the Scarlets. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
It was an interesting time for Welsh rugby. The Celtic League was in its infancy and Leinster and Munster were the only names on the trophy. Yet the newly-minted Scarlets were ambitious, with Easterby a quietly intense figure in the squad. McCusker was at the other end of the scale – a young flanker hoping to one day bump Easterby out of the team. At that point he was just soaking it all in.
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“I was 17 and coming into an established group of international players, but you could see who the drivers of the team were and Easters was definitely one of them.
“He was very serious, not in a bad way, just that he drove the standards and wanted everyone to be at that standard, which unfortunately some people were not, and he would have no qualms about telling you if you weren’t at the right level.
“He did have a funny edge to him at the right times, but he was definitely a presence. I would say intimidating, but not in a bad way, he just wanted the team to be better.”
On the pitch Easterby was tough and uncompromising. Those traits had brought him to the attention of the Irish Exiles programme some years earlier. Easterby was clear in his mind that he wanted to represent Ireland and as an emerging talent he earned caps for the U21s and Ireland A.
It didn’t stop Clive Woodward making a call in 2000 to see if Easterby could be tempted toward the English jersey. Easterby was comfortable with his decision to wear green and that year he would win his first Test cap – thrown in as one of five debutants alongside Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer, Shane Horgan and John Hayes for Ireland’s Six Nations round two meeting with Scotland.
At 24, Easterby came into an Irish back row alongside Munster’s Anthony Foley and Kieron Dawson, the County Down man who was on the books at London Irish.
“When he came in you could just tell the intelligence of him as a player, and he was a physical specimen,” says Dawson.
The flanker broke into the Ireland team in 2000. Billy Stickland / INPHO
Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
Warren Gatland’s reshuffle paid off as Ireland recovered from a 50-18 thumping at Twickenham to beat Scotland 44-22 in Dublin. Easterby continued in the back row for the subsequent games against Italy (60-13 win), France (25-27 win) and Wales (19-23 loss) as Ireland battled to a third place finish. A promising international career was up and running.
“He did things that I couldn’t do, and probably vice versa,” says Dawson.
“You always felt secure when he was playing. You didn’t need to check in on him or worry about anything, you knew he was going to do his job to a very high standard.
“He was good in the lineout, a good ball-carrier and tackler. And back in those days the seven was almost like a link player, so he was a great complement with Foley in between, who was also an abrasive tackler able to carry the ball.
“It was a nice combination when getting balance in the back row seemed to be the thing. I’m not sure how relevant it is nowadays because the scrum-half can steal the ball or a 15 stone winger can carry the ball harder than a six! Rugby has evolved, but he was an intelligent player and you could probably tell at that stage he would go on to be a good coach.
“All those little micro decisions in the game, he rarely made a mistake. For someone so new to international rugby he certainly had that aura about him very quickly that you knew he would make the right decision at the right time. An old head on young shoulders.”
McCusker saw the same characteristics week-in, week-out with Scarlets.
“I always loved the edge about him,” McCusker says.
He took no shit. Every time you came across him at a breakdown or if he was carrying the ball, he’d always come out the top.”
“When he stopped playing he slimmed right down, but as a player he was a big, muscley man, without being the heaviest. So sometimes people would clean him out of rucks, but then his relentlessness, he would just be back up and he’d get back in and he’d win it somehow. Even if he came off second best to start with he ultimately would make sure he came out on top and just had that determination to always finish in a better position and win the exchanges.”
Easterby, a Lions tourist in 2005, went on to win 65 caps for Ireland and retired as Ireland’s most-capped back row forward. He clocked up over 200 games between Llanelli RFC and the Scarlets – where he spent five consecutive seasons as captain – before a knee injury suffered on St Stephen’s Day in 2009 ended his playing career. By that point he was already getting a taste for coaching, staying behind after training to run extra drills with his Scarlets teammates.
Those same teammates were not surprised to see Easterby sign up as Scarlets’ new defence coach later that season. Two years later he was promoted to head coach after Nigel Davies swapped Scarlets for Gloucester.
As Easterby moved into the main office he made McCusker his captain. The Welsh flanker initially found the transition to a coach-player relationship slightly awkward – particularly when the two men roomed together on some early away days – but enjoyed life under Easterby the coach.
He was demanding, but he was probably one of the first coaches that put a lot of the onus back on us as players.
“He would give us his outline but then almost leave the how we got there up to us, and as a player group he empowered us to commit to our own standards. He would say, ‘Look, this is what I want, you come and tell me how we’re going to get there’, and then would help facilitate that.
“For me, he was the first coach to put the pressure back on us as a playing group in terms of us giving feedback to each other, reviewing to each other. It wouldn’t just be him shouting ‘This is shit’ or ‘This is no good’, it would be us boys putting pressure on each other and saying “Look, you fucked up’ or ‘You’re out of position’, and then that kind of fabricated that intrinsic pressure on us as a team.
“So on the pitch it gave us that power to solve things on the hoof rather than turn to him wondering what do we do next.”
Easterby married that shared ownership approach with an insightful view on the game which his players found invigorating.
“Some of the things we used to do at the breakdown and a lot of the contact area work was ahead of its time,” McCusker continues.
“I felt some of the law changes around it were because of the problems Easters made us create at the breakdowns and stuff, that his influence in that area ended up changing the rules in terms of where you can be in the contact, exiting the contact, what is offside. I don’t know, but I just felt Easters was ahead of that curve.”
There was another side to the competitive fire which fuelled Easterby. Having played the game for so long, he came to coaching with an understanding that sometimes a softer touch is required.
“A lot of coaches quickly forget what it was like to play, but he definitely didn’t take his finger off the pulse of what it was like to be a player,” says McCusker.
Easterby is stepping in for Andy Farrell as Ireland's interim head coach. Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
“He was happy to make us beat the shit out of each other, but then would not forget how tough that is on your body, or if we’d had a decent result or played particularly hard on the weekend, he’d be first to say, ‘Look, come in a bit later’ or scrap a session on a certain day because the boys are feeling a certain way.
“And he was quite a wind-up. He’d play on this seriousness and make you think he was really fucking angry and pissed off, so you go down this rabbit hole… I’d be telling the boys ‘Easters is fuming’, but he’d be just winding us up.”
Dawson looks at that side of his personality and draws a comparison to Andy Farrell, the man Easterby will step in for as Ireland’s interim head coach for this year’s Six Nations and summer tour. Easterby is now over 10 years in the Ireland set-up, having left Scarlets in 2014 to join Joe Schmidt’s backroom team.
Having become a central part of Ireland’s success as a forwards coach and defence coach, while also leading Emerging Ireland on two tours to South Africa, now he steps into the top job tasked with leading an Ireland team who are aiming to become the first side to win three Six Nations in a row.
“I think he would understand the players who are playing today will have a vast knowledge of everything that’s going on in the game, and it’s important to listen to them as much as it is to tell them what to do,” Dawson says.
“You’ve got ex-players in Farrell, and Mike Catt when he was there, and Simon. With Paul O’Connell also in the setup, I think it’s really, really important that it’s the players’ team, not the coaches, and the more the coaches can impart that onto the team and let them lead the way, as Simon did and certainly as Paul O’Connell did as players, that’s when you you get your most success because the team take ownership of it.
“On the flipside of that you can see where that dictatorial coach, Eddie Jones comes to mind, ‘My way or the highway’ is no longer successful in a professional environment because players don’t take it anymore.
“It’s important you know when to have fun, but also when to work hard. I think that’s a great ethos and a great starting point for any team or any environment for the players to flourish.
“And Simon was always good fun off the pitch, so maybe in the mold of Andy Farrell. They seem to be cut from the same cloth in that way.”
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'His coaching philosophy stemmed from the way he played. He loved to be on the edge'
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for the Scarlets squad to learn Simon Easterby liked to coach the way he played. Right in the thick of it.
“I can remember one time we were doing some contact drill and he wasn’t happy, so he jumped in,” explains former Scarlets flanker Rob McCusker.
“This is like on a Tuesday afternoon, and he’s just so outraged with our inability to do what he wanted that he jumped in to show us and ended up banging heads with one of the boys and needing stitches.
“The physio taped him up, so then he jumped back in again before getting stitched up later in the afternoon!
“I think his coaching philosophy stemmed from the way he played the game. He always loved to be on the edge and at the coalface and being an absolute nuisance, so he saw the value in that and coached us in a similar way.”
*********
Simon Easterby’s rugby life has been shaped by three places: Yorkshire, Wales and Ireland.
Yorkshire was where he learned the game. Born in Harrogate to an English father and Irish mother, sport was a central part of Easterby’s upbringing. His father, Henry, was a farmer from a family with horse racing in the blood. His mother, Katherine, had grown up in Blackrock, south Dublin and represented Ireland in hockey, and so family holidays back to Ireland were a formative part of the Easterby children’s upbringing.
So too Ampleforth College, viewed as one the most prestigious Catholic boarding schools in Britain.
“For someone who enjoyed sport it was fantastic,” Easterby told The Irish Independent in 2005.
“The facilities were far and beyond anything we had experienced. It had 20-odd rugby pitches; six or seven cricket pitches; it had indoor training facilities. Everything you could imagine for a top school and we benefited from that.”
Easterby had a love for cricket but gravitated increasingly towards rugby across his school years. When the time came to leave Ampleforth he packed his bags and spent a season with Sydney University before returning to play for Harrowgate. Leeds Carnegie offered a contract and a career was falling into place. One year later Easterby was heading down the road to Wales, where he would forge himself into a stalwart of a competitive Scarlets side.
McCusker remembers walking into that set-up as a teenager. In Eastery he saw a pro ahead of his time.
“When I got there in 2003, Chris Wyatt and a few of the boys still smoked openly in between training sessions when we were having food,” McCusker laughs.
“So I joined this professional rugby environment but I was like, ‘What is this?’
“It was still quite amateurish in a lot of ways. And then Easters was totally the polar opposite. I don’t know whether he had a different experience at Leeds coming down but he just seemed to have that edge and that professionalism even back then. Some of the boys… Well, they were not as professional.”
It was an interesting time for Welsh rugby. The Celtic League was in its infancy and Leinster and Munster were the only names on the trophy. Yet the newly-minted Scarlets were ambitious, with Easterby a quietly intense figure in the squad. McCusker was at the other end of the scale – a young flanker hoping to one day bump Easterby out of the team. At that point he was just soaking it all in.
“I was 17 and coming into an established group of international players, but you could see who the drivers of the team were and Easters was definitely one of them.
“He was very serious, not in a bad way, just that he drove the standards and wanted everyone to be at that standard, which unfortunately some people were not, and he would have no qualms about telling you if you weren’t at the right level.
“He did have a funny edge to him at the right times, but he was definitely a presence. I would say intimidating, but not in a bad way, he just wanted the team to be better.”
On the pitch Easterby was tough and uncompromising. Those traits had brought him to the attention of the Irish Exiles programme some years earlier. Easterby was clear in his mind that he wanted to represent Ireland and as an emerging talent he earned caps for the U21s and Ireland A.
It didn’t stop Clive Woodward making a call in 2000 to see if Easterby could be tempted toward the English jersey. Easterby was comfortable with his decision to wear green and that year he would win his first Test cap – thrown in as one of five debutants alongside Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer, Shane Horgan and John Hayes for Ireland’s Six Nations round two meeting with Scotland.
At 24, Easterby came into an Irish back row alongside Munster’s Anthony Foley and Kieron Dawson, the County Down man who was on the books at London Irish.
“When he came in you could just tell the intelligence of him as a player, and he was a physical specimen,” says Dawson.
Warren Gatland’s reshuffle paid off as Ireland recovered from a 50-18 thumping at Twickenham to beat Scotland 44-22 in Dublin. Easterby continued in the back row for the subsequent games against Italy (60-13 win), France (25-27 win) and Wales (19-23 loss) as Ireland battled to a third place finish. A promising international career was up and running.
“He did things that I couldn’t do, and probably vice versa,” says Dawson.
“You always felt secure when he was playing. You didn’t need to check in on him or worry about anything, you knew he was going to do his job to a very high standard.
“He was good in the lineout, a good ball-carrier and tackler. And back in those days the seven was almost like a link player, so he was a great complement with Foley in between, who was also an abrasive tackler able to carry the ball.
“It was a nice combination when getting balance in the back row seemed to be the thing. I’m not sure how relevant it is nowadays because the scrum-half can steal the ball or a 15 stone winger can carry the ball harder than a six! Rugby has evolved, but he was an intelligent player and you could probably tell at that stage he would go on to be a good coach.
“All those little micro decisions in the game, he rarely made a mistake. For someone so new to international rugby he certainly had that aura about him very quickly that you knew he would make the right decision at the right time. An old head on young shoulders.”
McCusker saw the same characteristics week-in, week-out with Scarlets.
“I always loved the edge about him,” McCusker says.
“When he stopped playing he slimmed right down, but as a player he was a big, muscley man, without being the heaviest. So sometimes people would clean him out of rucks, but then his relentlessness, he would just be back up and he’d get back in and he’d win it somehow. Even if he came off second best to start with he ultimately would make sure he came out on top and just had that determination to always finish in a better position and win the exchanges.”
Easterby, a Lions tourist in 2005, went on to win 65 caps for Ireland and retired as Ireland’s most-capped back row forward. He clocked up over 200 games between Llanelli RFC and the Scarlets – where he spent five consecutive seasons as captain – before a knee injury suffered on St Stephen’s Day in 2009 ended his playing career. By that point he was already getting a taste for coaching, staying behind after training to run extra drills with his Scarlets teammates.
Those same teammates were not surprised to see Easterby sign up as Scarlets’ new defence coach later that season. Two years later he was promoted to head coach after Nigel Davies swapped Scarlets for Gloucester.
As Easterby moved into the main office he made McCusker his captain. The Welsh flanker initially found the transition to a coach-player relationship slightly awkward – particularly when the two men roomed together on some early away days – but enjoyed life under Easterby the coach.
“He would give us his outline but then almost leave the how we got there up to us, and as a player group he empowered us to commit to our own standards. He would say, ‘Look, this is what I want, you come and tell me how we’re going to get there’, and then would help facilitate that.
“For me, he was the first coach to put the pressure back on us as a playing group in terms of us giving feedback to each other, reviewing to each other. It wouldn’t just be him shouting ‘This is shit’ or ‘This is no good’, it would be us boys putting pressure on each other and saying “Look, you fucked up’ or ‘You’re out of position’, and then that kind of fabricated that intrinsic pressure on us as a team.
“So on the pitch it gave us that power to solve things on the hoof rather than turn to him wondering what do we do next.”
Easterby married that shared ownership approach with an insightful view on the game which his players found invigorating.
“Some of the things we used to do at the breakdown and a lot of the contact area work was ahead of its time,” McCusker continues.
“I felt some of the law changes around it were because of the problems Easters made us create at the breakdowns and stuff, that his influence in that area ended up changing the rules in terms of where you can be in the contact, exiting the contact, what is offside. I don’t know, but I just felt Easters was ahead of that curve.”
There was another side to the competitive fire which fuelled Easterby. Having played the game for so long, he came to coaching with an understanding that sometimes a softer touch is required.
“A lot of coaches quickly forget what it was like to play, but he definitely didn’t take his finger off the pulse of what it was like to be a player,” says McCusker.
“He was happy to make us beat the shit out of each other, but then would not forget how tough that is on your body, or if we’d had a decent result or played particularly hard on the weekend, he’d be first to say, ‘Look, come in a bit later’ or scrap a session on a certain day because the boys are feeling a certain way.
“And he was quite a wind-up. He’d play on this seriousness and make you think he was really fucking angry and pissed off, so you go down this rabbit hole… I’d be telling the boys ‘Easters is fuming’, but he’d be just winding us up.”
Dawson looks at that side of his personality and draws a comparison to Andy Farrell, the man Easterby will step in for as Ireland’s interim head coach for this year’s Six Nations and summer tour. Easterby is now over 10 years in the Ireland set-up, having left Scarlets in 2014 to join Joe Schmidt’s backroom team.
Having become a central part of Ireland’s success as a forwards coach and defence coach, while also leading Emerging Ireland on two tours to South Africa, now he steps into the top job tasked with leading an Ireland team who are aiming to become the first side to win three Six Nations in a row.
“I think he would understand the players who are playing today will have a vast knowledge of everything that’s going on in the game, and it’s important to listen to them as much as it is to tell them what to do,” Dawson says.
“You’ve got ex-players in Farrell, and Mike Catt when he was there, and Simon. With Paul O’Connell also in the setup, I think it’s really, really important that it’s the players’ team, not the coaches, and the more the coaches can impart that onto the team and let them lead the way, as Simon did and certainly as Paul O’Connell did as players, that’s when you you get your most success because the team take ownership of it.
“On the flipside of that you can see where that dictatorial coach, Eddie Jones comes to mind, ‘My way or the highway’ is no longer successful in a professional environment because players don’t take it anymore.
“It’s important you know when to have fun, but also when to work hard. I think that’s a great ethos and a great starting point for any team or any environment for the players to flourish.
“And Simon was always good fun off the pitch, so maybe in the mold of Andy Farrell. They seem to be cut from the same cloth in that way.”
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