The coach-player relationship is coming under increasing scrutiny in the cut-throat world of elite sport. By Paul Thomas.
We tend to lump sports coaches into one of two categories: winners or losers, maestros or muppets, catalysts or cone people.
Before an England-India game at Lord's in 2002, former New Zealand cricket captain John Wright, the first foreigner to coach the Indian men's team, ran into celebrated lyricist Sir Tim Rice, then MCC president, and his secretary. The latter asked what Wright actually did. Rice provided an answer: "He's the man who puts the [fielding drills] cones out, then brings them in just before play starts."
This binary view stems from seemingly contradictory phenomena. There's the seldom-resisted urge to mythologise successful coaches, to portray them as chess masters and their players as mere pawns. And, paradoxically, there's the fact that coaches are always being sacked.
Sacking the coach of a non-performing team is often the easy option, but it's also the practical one: if the pressure is on team bosses to "do something", dumping the coach is far more straightforward and less contentious than getting rid of half the team. The effect, though, is to reinforce the perception that it's all about the coach. If it's not, why would owners and administrators keep changing them?
Those who believe it really is all about the coach should consider the response of Rocky Marciano, the only world heavy-weight boxing champion to retire undefeated, when asked about the propensity of his manager, Al Weill, for using the royal "we" – as in, "We're going to jab in the first round, then we're going to work the body." Said Marciano, "All I know is that, when the bell rings, the last thing I see is Al Weill's fat ass going through the ropes."
Of course, elite professional sport is all about results, but the lack of context in much of the discussion of coaches' records makes such evaluations largely empty exercises. Furthermore, the fixation with outcomes means scant attention is paid to the complex relationship between coaches and athletes in both team and individual sport.
That tends to come into focus only when relationships fray. Last month, Black Ferns hooker Te Kura Ngata-Aerengamate declared, via Instagram, that she'd suffered a mental breakdown on the end-of-year tour of England and France as a result of coach Glenn Moore's bullying and disparagement. Ngata-Aerengamate claimed Moore swore at her, asked what her students would think of her – she teaches at Kaitāia College – and told her she was picked just to play the guitar.
New Zealand Rugby (NZR) has set up an independent inquiry to run alongside an in-house review of the tour that, as a build-up to the World Cup to be played in Auckland and Whangārei in October and November, was an unmitigated disaster – the four tests produced the four heaviest defeats in Black Ferns' history. As reported by Stuff, NZR chief executive Mark Robinson indicated the inquiry would extend to establishing exactly how ill Ngata-Aerengamate became.
(NZR had previously expressed concern that Ngata-Aerengamate went public via social media rather than using the players' support network; the Black Ferns' support staff on tour included a full-time mental skills coach.)
Rugby was thus added to the list of New Zealand sports recently convulsed by player-coach friction: it includes cycling, netball, rowing and football. Across the Tasman, the men's national cricket coach, Justin Langer, has been under pressure after multiple reports of player discontent with his hyper-intense approach. Langer's control-freakery extended to administering an "elephant stamp" – as the victim characterised it – to a debutant who took the field in St Lucia wearing a Casio watch. (Wearing watches when fielding is relatively common practice but Langer apparently disapproves of "jewellery" on the field.) The incident gave rise to two obvious questions: what business was it of Langer's and since when did a black Casio watch qualify as jewellery?
In these situations, the public is naturally inclined to take the player's side, especially when their complaint is "distressing to read", as an NZR manager described Ngata-Aerengamate's post.
Former Football Ferns coach Andreas Heraf shouldn't have expected squad or public support after telling the media, following a 1-3 loss to Japan in 2018, that "we will never have that quality to compete with Japan … the gap is that big." Apart from undercutting our cherished self-image of the little nation that can and our tradition of punching above our weight in international sport, this statement hardly encouraged the players to see him as someone who could help them narrow the gap, individually and collectively.
Heraf's comments were obviously the last straw: cue protest retirements and 13 players complaining of bullying and intimidation. Heraf didn't wait around for the subsequent investigation to run its course. From the safety of his native Austria, he accused the Ferns of being more invested in making fan videos than meeting his "European-style" standards and the New Zealand media of comparing him to his compatriot Adolf Hitler.
On the face of it, the departure of the Black Sticks women's Australian coach, Mark Hager, followed a similar script. Hager was appointed after the 2008 Beijing Olympics at which the Black Sticks finished last, dropped to 13th in the world and, as a result, lost funding. They finished 4th at the next two Olympics and in 2018 became our first women's hockey team to win a Commonwealth Games gold medal.
However, at the 2018 World Cup in London, Hager hit "reply all" on an email intended for support staff and containing specific criticism of several players and general criticism of the squad's attitude. The 4th-ranked Black Sticks promptly lost to 12th-ranked Japan and failed to make the quarter-finals.
A former Black Stick then claimed there was a problem with the team culture and environment, and New Zealand Hockey launched an independent review. Seven former Black Sticks with 854 caps between them sprang to Hager's defence. Whether Hager was looking for an excuse to exit or was outraged that his employers seemed to be attaching equal weight to a decade of achievement and a comparative storm in a teacup, he promptly jumped ship to become coach of Great Britain. Black Sticks captain Stacey Michelsen said Hager had "provided me with the environment and guidance to develop into the player I am today. I'm very sad to see Mark go."
In team sport, the coach is generally also the selector and the exercise of that power has affected many a coach-player relationship, such as when a coach decides his duty to the team overrides his loyalty to a long-serving individual. But it's not an absolute power: being spoilt for choice selection-wise gives the coach the upper hand but he or she must still tread carefully around superstars. It would, for instance, be a brave Black Caps coach who binned Kane Williamson because they weren't getting along.
During his 27 years at lavishly resourced Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson could afford to take the attitude that no player was bigger than the club – or the manager – because the world was his oyster when it came to recruitment. If push came to shove, Ferguson had the comfort of knowing he could sack a world-class player today and find a like-for-like replacement in Sweden or Croatia or Uruguay tomorrow. The All Blacks coach, by contrast, is restricted to New Zealand-qualified players currently contracted to NZR.
And in individual sports, the coach serves at the athlete's pleasure, as renowned golf instructor David Leadbetter discovered to his surprise and dismay when he was terminated by Lydia Ko in 2016 even though she'd won 12 LPGA tournaments during their three years together.
One suspects that player-coach relationships will become more rather than less problematic in years to come as the core imperative of elite sport runs up against societal change. Professional sport at the highest level is no place for faint hearts. It's not hard to make the argument that a certain amount of robust give and take goes with the territory and the remuneration and it's up to athletes to develop resilience and a thick skin. As a rule, Kiwi rugby coaches abide by the principle that you shouldn't publicly criticise your players, but apparently there's no hiding place in the Monday morning reviews.
On the other hand, the times they are a-changin' and today's young adults are less prepared to cop the verbal sprays – or silent treatment – and dismissive body language that were once the autocrat coach's stock in trade. This particularly applies to Pacific athletes, a large and growing influence in a number of our sports, whose cultural background and religious faith make them averse to confrontation, especially if it involves profane language.
And as women’s sport grows in profile and importance, the behaviour of male coaches will inevitably be closely scrutinised. While the falling-out between coach Janine Southby and the Silver Ferns in 2018 was a reminder that disharmony isn’t always or necessarily the by-product of men behaving badly, gender and age difference further complicate an already complicated relationship.
