Can Brian McClennan take the Warriors all the way?

When we've won big games [I say] 'great stuff, we're legends for one day and that's it'. Next day, it's just carry on.' - Brian McClennan. Photo / Greg Bowker

Brian McClennan bounced — literally — into our hearts back in 2005 when he jumped for joy at the final whistle, after guiding the Kiwis to a famous league victory against Australia. Back in NZ, he tells Greg Dixon about his dream job.

Sun Tzu knew it. And so, apparently, does Brian McClennan.

The clever warrior, Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is one who "imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him".

This, I'm pretty sure, explains what I found in my email inbox the morning I was to interview McClennan. I'd arranged to be at the Warriors' Mt Smart HQ at 9am, first to watch a short training session, followed by a chat with his lordship.

Then the email. Sent in the evening (more two and half hours after I'd left work) the day before the interview, I picked it up at 7.45am that following morning. It read: "Can you come in earlier? Say 8am ... I hope this doesn't bugger you up."

When I finally arrived in McClennan's office about 8.20, sweating and feeling a bit flustered from a mad drive to the stadium, he sat behind his desk, smiled and said, "How are you, Greg?"

Tzu again: "Whoever is first in the field [of battle] and awaits the coming of the enemy will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second ... and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted."

Perhaps, I'm giving McClennan - Bluey, to give him his oh-so-cuddly nickname - too much credit. But I think not. There were other signs he might be managing me. During an earlier email exchange, he'd softened me up by responding to a request for extra time with "anything for you Greg", which was terribly funny - but ultimately untrue. Having wrong-footed me with a last minute change of time, my audience was, thanks to Bluey's bullet train schedule, done piecemeal and partly on the move. And then there was the flattery.

Very early in our first chat, he responding to a question with "that's a good question ..." and, as we parted, he said again "good questions ..." - two sure signs he remembers his media training about massaging brittle journalistic egos.

But really I didn't resent a bit of this. It's what you'd expect from a bloke who spends his days trying to out-think and outsmart the competition and who does everything he can to win.

And Bluey knows plenty about beating the other guy.

As coach of his beloved Mt Albert club here in Auckland, he won back-to-back national championships. As the coach of our national team in the mid-2000s - a job that made his name outside league circles - he led the Kiwis to their most famous victory for at least a quarter of century. And, in the wintry north of England, he guided his last team, the Leeds Rhinos, to two Super League title wins.

And now, as the new coach of the Warriors ... well, the outsmarting of the competition starts on the neatly trimmed pitch of Eden Park at 2pm sharp tomorrow.

You'd actually have to get up pretty early in the morning to get one past Bluey. I mean this literally; the guy rises at 5am, every day. And, before you ask, it's not because he's losing sleep about finally coaching an NRL side or filling the boots of the Warriors' longest-serving and most successful coach, Ivan Cleary, or about the possibility of becoming the first Warriors coach to finally win the big one, the NRL Grand Final.

"I sleep well and I start early," he says, sitting in his office, legs apart, arms crossed, Warriors cap pushed back on his big, round head.

"I've gone through periods when I first started coaching when I didn't sleep well and I learnt that the reason I wasn't was because I hadn't prepared myself. If you've prepared yourself and you've got things ticking along well with your squad, yeah, you can sleep pretty easily at night."

He's certainly had the time to prepare for this - a job he freely admits he's always wanted. It was announced way back in August that McClennan would be replacing Cleary (who has moved to Sydney's Penrith), so Bluey had time to make lists - he loves lists - and to get things ticking along.

So what's his state of mind right now, then?

"Um, just about what's coming next; you know what's coming in the next 10 minutes, the next hour, the next day. Just preparing, just getting everything ready, ticking boxes ..."

I ask - this gets the "good question" response - whether pre-season is actually the worst time, the most tense or is it the most exciting?

"There's a bit of everything there; it's exciting because all the training that we've been doing over the last three or four months is coming to fruition. It's constant analysis and constant tweaking ... So that's fun and it's working with our other coaches ... you know, how did yesterday's training go, what are we going to focus on today? We've got a game tomorrow, our last trial game (won 68-10 against non-NRL side Sunshine Coast Sea Eagles). So it's that constant looking for improvements in what we're doing everyday."

This is coach-speak, the strange language spoken by those who do this particular and peculiar work. It's a dialect of confusing, almost meaningless sentences packed with words like "systems", "journeys", "processes" and "destinations".

I wondered aloud what kind of mind you need to be able to do his job and he drops in another favourite coach-speak word, passion.

"You need to have huge passion for the game," he says, earnestly.

"You need to love it because you've got to watch it all the time. Our job consists of a lot of hours of looking at video so, yeah, you need to love that part of football. I think you need to have a little bit of a systematic mind in terms of ... processes."

Ergo he makes a lot lists?

"Yeah, a lot of lists. You need to because things are done in steps and teaching people how to do things is done in steps, you know. So that makes it easier."

You have to be obsessive, and he is. So does that reach into other parts of his life? The Sun Tzu of Mt Smart sees where this is leading.

"Not really, no. I'm not a control freakish kind of a person ..."

McClennan's office at the Warriors tells you almost nothing about what sort of coach he is. It's a blank. There's nothing on the walls - only a white board with the players' names on it - and a few coaching books on a shelf. There are no pictures of the giants he's caught in the gulf - fishing is what he does to decompress - and no snaps of the horse, Lion's Rule (in tribute to the Mt Albert Lions), he has a share in.

You can't hang the stuff that matters to Bluey on a wall, anyway. Coaching rugby league is all in his head and in his heart - and in his history.

Born 50 years ago last month, he's the son of Mike McClennan, who is every bit as famous, probably more famous, in league circles as his boy. McClennan senior played for the Kiwis - he was part of the side that famously thrashed Australia 24-3 back in 1971 - and went on to become a highly influential coach at the Mt Albert and Northcote clubs before coaching top British team St Helens for four years in the early 1990s, winning the premiership in 1993.

McC senior coached McC junior for much of the latter's playing career at the Mt Albert and Northcote clubs. The family business, league, was passed on from father to son on the playing paddock and at the dinner table.

"My dad's a very good coach ... you know I grew up in a house where it was only rugby league that mattered ... we'd have the salt and pepper shakers on the table [working out tactics].

"Dad played for the Kiwis and ... if you went to the top five rugby league coaches in the history of rugby league New Zealanders, the old man's in the top five, easy. So I've grown up on that, that's all I know."

Bluey - even the nickname is inherited from his dad - learned the winning habit with ball in hand; he helped win five grand finals as a club player and represented Auckland in the early 1990s.

In hindsight, there's an inevitability about father following son into coaching. For a while McClennan junior had an auto-glazing business, but coaching league was "all I've ever wanted to do".

His big break came in 2005, when he was handed the Kiwis coaching gig. He'd had little experience of the NRL - widely considered the world's toughest club competition - or international footy. He had assisted coach Daniel Anderson with the Warriors and Kiwis, but it was McClennan's work at club level that scored him the role. As coach he'd won New Zealand's national rugby league competition, the Barter Cup, with both the Hibiscus Coast Raiders (taking them from the third to the first division along the way) and with his beloved Mt Albert Lions.

There was concern at the time he took over the Kiwis that his experience wouldn't be enough. He proved the doubters wrong that year, when the team won the Tri-Nations series in England, crushing Australia 24-0 in the final.

The scenes following that win - which included McClennan bouncing up and down like a beaming Energizer Bunny - are unlikely to be forgotten by those who watched them. And, though the Kiwis didn't reach such heights during the next couple of years (McClennan ended his stint with a 44 per cent win-loss ratio), the Brits had clearly liked what they had seen, bouncing or no bouncing. (In fact, sadly, he claims he bounces no more: "I went through a stage of where I just couldn't stop bouncing and it was embarrassing.")

McClennan was hired by Yorkshire side Leeds to coach its top team, the Rhinos, in 2007 and he stayed until 2010. The team won the tough British Super League two years running before fading a bit in 2010. No matter. The Rhinos have been a stepping stone to the big time, they've taken him all the way to the NRL.

"I wouldn't call Leeds a stepping stone," he says. Oh.

"It was an honour to be in that club in the first place. You know, I owe a lot of gratitude to everyone that was at Leeds that they took me into their arms for three years you know, and my family.

We are humbled by the experience. We had some success in their waters and that was due to a lot of good people so I had a really great experience there and I think, 'will that help us going forward?' Yes it will, but I would never call it a stepping stone - no."

McClennan can't say enough about Leeds, club and city. His family - he and his wife Julie have three kids; a boy aged 12 and 9-year-old twins - loved the place. And it seems Kiwis and Them-Up-North can rub along. "I think Kiwis get on well in England and I think English people - well, the working class English person and the working class Kiwi, which is, well, that's me - we get on great. I think the average English bloke's pretty humble and so is the Kiwi bloke, so we all got on good, yeah."

A source in Leeds says McClennan was widely admired during his time there, though one player, Keith Senior, criticised McClennan in his autobiography and two coaching staff announced their departures just prior to Bluey announcing his.

"There was a feeling in Leeds Bluey recognised he had taken the club as far as he could ... [but] there would not be many people in Leeds who would have a bad word to say about him."

Ask if there is a difference between the Bluey who left these shores in 2007 and the one who came back last year, and he comes up with two things: he's more
experienced (natch) and he now has a taste for something he once hated, Guinness.

For the family, there were holidays in Spain, their best Christmas ever there - "It was a white Christmas and we went sledding down the local golf course" - and new friendships. And his wife Julie, who was diagnosed then treated for a brain tumour a year or so before they moved to Britain, has fought and won against her illness and its aftermath.

If anything, his wife's experience and attitude - "it just inspires me" - has helped him do his job better.

"You know, sometimes you roll along and you just take stuff for granted. We're all guilty of it and that was our wake-up call: just make sure you love every minute of every day. So my purpose here in life is to make sure my kids are good, my family's fine and, you know.

"My passions are rugby league and my feelings I have for my family.

"I want it to be like that with my teams and I want us to have a great time and journey. I say to the boys a lot, 'it's the greatest job in the world this, boys, and you just don't taken anything for granted, eh. Fate throws things up, you don't know what's coming up. You know, in a month's time things can change quickly. So get stuck in and enjoy what you're doing on the day'."

Will Bluey be the first to coach the Warriors to a NRL grand final win? Well there's no point in asking him: "Um, look, you know ..."

They might knight you, I suggest.

"I've never been one for rewards and stuff. I can remember a lot of the talk when [the Kiwis] won in '05 and I remember people ... were surprised. And they thought I wasn't taking it all onboard, but I was.

"It's just not about me, it's about all the boys, it's an experience for everyone and I've been lucky. I've had lots of successes over the years. I say it to the guys and I've said it to everyone who has had that when we've won big games: 'great stuff, we're legends for one day and that's it'. Next day, it's just carry on."

Over the years his critics have suggested the days he has been a legend have been largely due to the good luck he readily admits he's had (the only bad luck he's had, he reckons, is at the race course). There's also been some suggestion that the Sun Tzu of Mt Smart is more nice guy motivator than tactician. He admits that like most people he wants to be liked. But I wonder aloud whether the friendly face and the smile leads him to be underrated?

"Nailed it in the end there, mate," is his inscrutable response.

What do you mean?

"Yeah I'm always underestimated."

That obviously doesn't bother you ...

"No, I like it."

He smiles that big smile of his. Perhaps he's thinking of Tzu again: "There is no greater disaster than underestimating your enemy."