Former All Blacks scrum and lineout coach Mike Cron integrated techniques from ballet and sumo wrestling into All Blacks forward pack. NZ Herald composite photo.
Scrum guru Mike Cron has opened up on his 16-season tenure coaching the All Blacks forward pack in his new book. Before its release, he talked to Neil Reid about his life in rugby - and some creative techniques.
Mike Cron has looked far and wide to make his forward packs better – including adopting techniques from slender, tights-wearing ballet dancers and borderline-obese sumo wrestlers.
Regarded by many as the rugby world’s leading scrum and forwards coach, the former police detective has never been afraid to look in less traditional places to get the best out of his players – and himself.
In his upcoming autobiography - Coach - Lessons from an All Blacks Legend – the 70-year-old opens up on his 210-test tenure with the All Blacks, including Rugby World Cup triumphs in 2011 and 2015 - and his current role with the Wallabies.
He writes about the All Blacks pack benefiting from techniques he observed in dancers at the Royal New Zealand Ballet and at a sumo wrestling gym in Japan.
Cron spent time with both during a period when a variety of All Blacks – most notably front rowers – were battling a condition dubbed ‘turf toe’ involving pain at the base of the big toe when bent.
Jumping, landing or pushing off when running could all exacerbate the sometimes career-ending ligament injury.
In an interview with the Herald before his book’s release on Wednesday, Cron said his first travels in search of ways to prevent turf toe saw him visit NFL franchise the New York Giants.
NFL athletes are susceptible to the condition from hard artificial turf surfaces.
He was then allowed access to the Royal New Zealand Ballet as it prepared for a performance of The Mikado; including a meeting with the group’s Italian artistic director and talking to the dancers.
“At the end of training, we were invited up on stage,” Cron told the Herald. “And I had two questions, one was about turf toe.”
Cron was told ballet dancers were able to limit the risk of turf toe because of their landings. They had ways of landing that put less impact on the big toe.
It was something Cron passed on to the All Blacks medical team and their lineout jumpers.
Cron’s other question was to the Kiwi male lead of The Mikado production after he had watched him doing “a s***load of lifting above the head” of his dance partner.
Cron likened it to the process of forwards lifting a teammate in the air to snare an opposition kickoff.
“I said, ‘What have you learned in your career that allows you to make that look so bloody easy? You’re so balanced when you’re holding the lady up above your head.’”
“He tells me about how you lock out and how you breathe, how you fill your belly up with the air and push your guts out and down, and I go, ‘Oh s***, same as powerlifters, same as what [then All Black prop] Owen Franks does [with his training].”
Cron – who prides himself on still being able to pack down against international front rowers at training – says the ballet session provided him “two bits of gold” that he was able to transfer into the All Blacks environment.
Another nugget of knowledge was learned from spending time observing a sumo wrestling school in Japan.
Cron spent several days there before returning to his base in Canterbury still contemplating what he’d seen, and wondering whether any of the lessons could be applied to rugby.
Three months later, he reviewed video footage, and it clicked.
“The last thing they do before they explode, these big guys, is with their toes . . . they hold the ground to get power and then release the power through into [their] opponent,” Cron said.
“I came back and started teaching that. With the sprigs in our boots, we push into the ground and hold the ground like a parrot in a bird cage.
“You get far more grip, far more purchase because power comes from the ground through your feet and through your body, into that other prick [the opposition]. That’s gold.”
Cron said while top rugby players, ballet dancers and sumo wrestlers excel in very different arenas, they were all still athletes - who had insights others could learn from.
“If you go and see Cirque Soleil train, you will pick something up.”
Cron is one of the most respected specialist skills coaches in the professional rugby arena.
The quotes on the back cover of Coach include Sir Graham Henry describing him as “an exceptional coach”, fellow ex-All Black mentor Wayne Smith saying he is “the best coach in world rugby”, and ex-All Black captain Sam Cane saying he felt “lucky to have been coached by him for so long”.
Cron was seen as much more than just a coach by some of the forwards he coached; he was also a mate.
And he writes honestly about how one of those friendships saw him let someone down.
During a tour of the Northern Hemisphere, hooker Andrew Hore asked him on a night out why he was more often being used off the reserves bench rather than starting in the No 2 jersey.
Cron initially told Hore it wasn’t the “time or place to talk about it”, he said, before eventually revealing he didn’t think Hore “was technically good enough yet to scrummage at the top level”.
An aggrieved Hore asked how long Cron had thought that.
“I said I’d known for a while. Then he said, ‘So when the f*** were you going to tell me?’”
Cron responded: “I’ve let you down. By not wanting to confront our friendship, or deal with a tough situation head on . . .”
Talking to the Herald, Cron said it was probably the biggest lesson he learned in his early years with the All Blacks.
“They actually deserve your very best and sometimes it has to be 100% honesty with it . . . sometimes it’s brutal honesty.”
The next day, Hore and Cron met with the All Blacks physio and strength and conditioning coach to work on technique.
Three weeks later, Hore was a starting All Black.
Cron says he never again allowed a friendship to cloud much-needed honesty with a player.
“It’s easy to put something under the bloody carpet,” Cron told the Herald from the Wallabies camp as they prepare to take on the British & Irish Lions in a three-test series in Australia.
In Coach, Cron wrote how he loved the All Blacks rule book “because it was probably the smallest book in the world”.
“I think if you have to have a lot of rules, then you’ve probably not got your environment quite right,” he wrote.
Cron says it contained just three rules: be on time, wear the right kit and act like an All Black.
“The last one, of course, is all-encompassing,” he wrote.
“We didn’t write anything down to add to that because the players knew what was right and what was wrong, and what acting like a dickhead looked like. So just act like an All Black. It’s pretty simple.”
Cron’s home gym has reminders – a series of hung jerseys and medals - of the four Rugby World Cup campaigns he shared with the All Blacks.
In 2011 and 2015, two ended in absolute joy and gold medals after the All Blacks secured the William Webb Ellis Cup.
There’s also a bronze medal from the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
And there’s no silverware from his first tournament in 2007 - when the Henry-coached team went in as hot favourites.
Despite the hype around the team – and rampant pool-play wins over Italy, Portugal, Scotland and Romania - they succumbed to their worst tournament finish, controversially losing to France 20-18 in a quarter-final in Cardiff.
Cron’s ongoing frustration about the match officiating – including referee Wayne Barnes and mistakes by his assistant referees - is clear.
He said the work of the officials was “very poor” yet had the All Blacks played to “our best ability, we would have won the game; that’s reality”.
In Coach, Cron likened the feeling in the dressing room that day to “a death of a close family member”.
“Next to the day I lost my mother, it was the hardest day of my life,” he wrote.
But out of that pain came a speech he says he was blessed to have witnessed; Henry’s address to his emotionally broken players, when he blamed no one for the loss and spoke of his pride in them.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is unbelievable’. The full support that he had for the players and their effort; I just thought he was an absolute champion leader that night.”
Cron believes his honesty – and care – saw key players spurn contracts to head overseas after the 2007 tournament.
“I think a lot of them may just have changed their minds that night,” Cron said.
Henry’s words may have lit the fuse that saw the All Blacks win the World Cup on home soil four years later.
>> Coach - Lessons from an All Blacks Legend is published by HarperCollins Publishers on Wednesday, with a RRP of $39.99.
Neil Reid is a Napier-based senior reporter who covers general news, features and sport. He joined the Herald in 2014 and has 33 years of newsroom experience.
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Steven Payne, 37, died after the great white shark attack in Western Australia in March.