League: Brian McClennan can't stop jumping

Brian McClennan knows how to build a good team: you create a family. Picture / Brett Phibbs

On the phone he's just as friendly as you'd imagine. But he's been blabbing on, says Brian "Bluey" McClennan, and he'd like to beg off doing any more. Anyway, "I'm just an excitable, fat, little chap." Could he think about it overnight?

I really want to talk to him because who wouldn't after seeing him jumping for joy after the Kiwis thrashed the Aussies? So bugger that, I think, and call the New Zealand Rugby League chairman, Sel Pearson, and say, "Can I tell him you said he had to talk to me?" "He'll talk to you, petal," says Pearson.

This is what they're like, these hard men of league. They say "petal" and show emotion in public.

We meet McClennan at a cafe in Orewa because he lives at Gulf Harbour. "I'll meet you halfway," he says. Which pretty much sums up his style. I apologise again for sicking Pearson on to him. He agrees that this was a low blow. We both know that getting Pearson to heavy somebody is like threatening them with a daisy.

He had sounded genuinely worried about more talking. He says now that, "Yeah, it feels like I am blabbing on. It does. I prefer really to be doing talking just with the players and team and management."

Well, he's not going to get away with that, is he? "I guess not. But, like, I'm only learning all this. I'm really trying to learn it. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing even now, you know. With all the media stuff."

What he's worried about is this: "I don't want to come across as a big head". He'd be mortified. "Oh, when I see people with big egos it's just like, oh God, you know."

He could be forgiven for having at least a temporarily swollen head because he's achieved that amazing victory over the Aussies and been named league Coach of the Year and Personality of the Year.

"They must have been desperate for personality," he says. Oh, come on. "They must have been. Hell, there's plenty of boys in the team who are characters." He must have won it, then, for the Best Display of Jumping Up and Down on the Telly. "Must have. I won that hands down."

He can't help himself. His legs go all twitchy on the inside and there he is: bounce, bounce, bouncing. "Oh, I just start jumping. I don't want to, but I do. It's pathetic. I've always been like that, eh."

He doesn't just do it at the big ones. When he trained "up here at Hibiscus, when we've won a second division final, there would have been probably about 500 people at the game and, I don't know, about 5000 that actually cared, I was jumping around just as much then, you know".

To people outside league it seems as though he came from nowhere, but his rise to Kiwi coach is no huge surprise, really.

When he was little he used to go to bed cuddling a football. "How sick's that?"

He was at Carlaw Park from the age of one to watch his dad Mike and the other league heroes. His parents both coached and his dad played a test for the Kiwis. Under McClennan Mt Albert won successive Bartercard Cup titles, in 2004 and 2005. "That was pretty good. I got the jumps going there."

Now he's a hero. "Oh," he says, sounding so horrified I have to laugh. "I don't know." Everyone wants to talk to him, to have him at events; the cafe owner rushes over to give him a bottle of wine. It's a funny, fleeting thing. "Yeah, it is. I've had success with a lot of teams, but never at this level. What I do know is that it'll pass pretty quickly and I'm actually looking forward to that."

What he dreamed of being when he grew up was the bloke who decided whether the league would be cancelled on Saturdays. When McClennan was that bloke, the league would never be cancelled. The idea still makes him beam.

He is "a pretty emotional kind of guy. Things mean a lot to me." Which means that he takes things hard, too. "Oh, yeah. I'm the worst, mate. I'm shocking when we lose. I won't be a sad sack around the players but I'll go back to my hotel room and I'm devastated. You know, I just want to win so much."

When you ask what makes a good coach, he says, "I don't really know ". What he means is that he doesn't want to say - that might look as though he's bragging.

Going to extremes to be impartial might be one thing. I know how fair he strives to be because I ask about his promise to the team that he'd drink them under the table if they won the grand final. "Nah, they killed me." But this, he hastens to add, was because "I was doing beer and kava 'cos there's a group that just sticks with kava, and there's a group that'll drink beer".

He does know how to build a good team: you create a family. Many coaches don't make friends with the players; McClennan does. It's difficult when he doesn't pick them for the team but "you know, one day I won't be there as well. So I'm just the same as the players". He's an only child so "I guess that's why I love being around a footy team. Because they're like my brothers".

He's a hard man of league all right. He believes in love. "Yeah, I do. I've got a philosophy in playing that you've got to love winning more than you hate losing ... And desire will beat fear every time." He believes in "compassion and tolerance". He selects "character" over ability. "If we have someone in camp and I think they're destructive, a bad egg, I'll get rid of them." This is because "they're potentially hazardous to the harmony".

This sounds like some hippy version of coaching. "A hippy with no hair. Yeah, well I've got too much time on my hands, I think."

"I've always been a bit of a dreamer," he says. That he can be as rowdy we know from watching him in jumping mode. But he also likes lots of quiet, thinking time. Perhaps partly as a result of having lost 50 per cent of his hearing as a 2-year-old from chicken pox and German measles.

Any baubles he's collected along the way live in the attic. He's had tougher battles. He and wife Julie, who was seriously ill last year with a brain tumour, have twins. "And you try the first 12 weeks doing twins when you've got a 2 1/2-year-old climbing up curtains as well. And, you know, with Julie getting sick ... " She was with him at the final "with a big smile on her dial".

He likes catchphrases and themes and word play. He's introduced a Japanese concept called Kaizen, which involves working on the little things that need improving. He's a philosopher, isn't he? "Oh," he says, and gives a good impression of considering this seriously for a moment. "I don't think so. I try and learn. I like looking at things like that and just rephrasing things all the time and juggling words." Then he laughs and says that actually it's "just so that you can say the same thing again without it being boring".

God forbid. That would be tantamount to blabbing on.