MTC7: Selection Issues

By Prof
July 28 2006

It has been a long time since the Quinssa Meet The Coaches Evening on 17th November 2005 but the answers to the questions might still be interesting to people who weren't there so here it is.

Q: When you’ve got a Director of Rugby, a Head Coach, a Forwards Coach and a Team Manager how do you make team selection decisions?

Andy Friend (AF): The way it works is the three of us sit down and decide on how the week will work, I normally write a plan and give a draft copy to Dean and to John and they have their input, Dave Bell will have his input, the medical team and Scotty will have their input and then collectively we decide what the plan is. Dean attends all team meetings and certainly plays a major role in running the sports psych. stuff we talked about earlier. Dean’s obviously the key to that, he’s got a marvellous was of picking the mood of a group, and adjusting the mood of a group if it needs to be. When we get down to the rugby side of things we’ve discussed it at length and Dean’s been involved with that, but when it comes to the delivery Dean lets John and me get on with that on the field. Dean has his major input off the field in terms of looking at recruitment for the coming year, he’s forever picking up phones and talking to agents – wheeling and dealing if you like. He’s always very busy and he has the wonderful  ability to have control but remove himself from it.

John Kingston (JK): I think one of the things I’d say to you regarding Dean as well – you can never turn round and say your opinion isn’t asked for or sought or counselled, if  you ever go quiet occasionally he’s very good at forcing out of you your view even if he takes a contrary position he will always ask your views. He’s continually challenging the group and cajoling us and keeping people on their mettle. As Andy said he has a very, very good reading of players too, I’m incredibly impressed with him when he does his appraisals with players, when he’s happy with someone he makes it clear and if he’s not happy with someone he also makes it very clear. He’s a good man to work for because you can never say that you’re not being able to work in the environment and give your views on things and he gets pretty cheesed off if there isn’t almost a disagreement between us. We have to get through and thrash out a discussion before he is happy,  you get the impression that he’s not really happy if there is a consensus arrived at quietly.

 

Q: Who has the last word in team selection?  

JK: Dean does, he will pick the team. Just to give you an example of that the team is not announced for Sunday but we discussed it on Wednesday morning and probably got to 90% of it and it got left for a bit because we were not going to announce it until Friday, I left him a message this morning because we were going to drop everybody after training yesterday afternoon! We decided that we would sleep on it so I called him and told him what my selection was and Andy did the same – so he asked our views and he will tell us the final selection in the morning. To be honest even before he announced it he says ‘I’ve done A, B, C’ and he lets everybody know.

 

Q: Do you consciously pick the best 15 or do you pick the best 22 or do you pick some of your best players on the bench knowing they’ll come on towards the end of the game?

AF: We’ll pick the best 15. There are some players we know who play well off the bench and after we’ve picked the best 15 we might choose some of those for the bench. One of the things we thought worked well for us at the beginning of the season was keeping changing the team because it kept players not too sure whether they’ll be in or out and at the moment we get the feeling within the players that they are thinking ‘I think I’m in now’ and as John was saying before Dean’s pretty keen to adjust that thinking so we’ll see what happens tomorrow.  

 

Q: How much do you pick a team based on your opposition’s strengths and weaknesses?

AF: We’ve been trying things within our own squad more than looking at the opposition, we’ve been looking at some combinations  - obviously some centre combinations and some back row combinations – the halfbacks, the back three. So we’ve been looking at different things and trying to get set in our own heads what is the best XV. In terms of the way we play the opposition that will come into our thinking, for example we may want a back row that can scavenge ball. Our thinking for the next game is that we want some more senior heads on the pitch. So we don’t disregard who the opposition are but we select more on our squad and trying to get our combinations right.

 

A: What will happen if Andrew Mehrtens gets injured, we don’t seem to have much strength in depth at 10?

Q: Adrian Jarvis is obviously the key man, but we’ve also been playing Tommy Williams there in some A games, Tommy has the ability to play some 10, he does have great flair  - looking at Australian players he’s a bit like Matt Rogers, when he’s got his hands on the ball he’s fantastic to watch because he can do anything (the people outside him may not know what’s happening), but he offers something there that could be a bit special. So at the moment they are the two boys that we’ve got within the club. Ian Vass has played some 10 before and we did trial him at 10 in one of the A games so there are some options for us.