James Tedesco of the New South Wales Blues. Photo / Photosport
James Tedesco of the New South Wales Blues. Photo / Photosport
Former Kiwis coach Michael Maguire will be taking a little piece of New Zealand with him into this year’s State of Origin.
Maguire has hired former All Blacks mental skills guru Gilbert Enoka to work with New South Wales.
Enoka, who spent 24 years with the AllBlacks before standing down after last year’s World Cup, is joining Maguire’s team as a high-performance coach.
He will be with the New South Wales squad throughout the three-game series later this year.
Bringing Enoka into the New South Wales camp is partly a realisation by new coach Maguire that he’s taking over a team that has an abundance of talent but perhaps a lack of leadership and mental strength, and that these areas need to be addressed if they are to stop a two-year losing sequence.
“Every time you get a new person at the top, they tend to understand what they think they need to provide for the team to be successful,” Enoka says.
“Michael’s got a broad brush approach and brought in pretty much a new crew right across the board, including me as part of it, as an acknowledgement that there are areas of the leadership and mental performance that he wants some assistance with.
Gilbert Enoka during an All Blacks training session. Photo / Photosport
“I’ll be working alongside him and the rest of the management and the fact they have brought me right inside the tent is encouraging and we have been working together already.
“He’s going to leave no stone unturned in preparing the team and he’ll do things a bit differently compared with how they have been done in the past.
“There has certainly been no lack of talent from what I can understand. It will be just about pulling it all together I suppose.”
Enoka’s appointment to be part of rugby league’s showpiece confrontation, is perhaps, too, confirmation that the wider sporting world has come to see and value the importance of mental skills and that there is a recognition that the All Blacks have been global leaders in this territory.
For Enoka, this shift in attitudes towards respecting sport psychology has been a long time coming.
He jokes that when he first started with the Crusaders in the early days of Super Rugby, then coach Wayne Smith had to tell his bosses that Enoka was a masseuse.
“If you were having someone in my area inside the team, the higher-ups, for want of a better term, would tend to think that the coaches weren’t up to it,” Enoka says.
“It was looked on as the ugly duckling of the sciences. Fast-forward now and it is a respected piece of the puzzle and there are not many teams operating without someone contributing in this space.
“And the difference too is how they have got them contributing.”
Enoka was fully immersed with the All Blacks, travelling with the team, and working alongside both coaches and players to drive tighter, more cohesive leadership that was equipped to cope with the pressure of tests.
He helped build mental skill sets that would enable calm and controlled decision-making on the field.
While the All Blacks were famously found wanting in that area at the 2007 World Cup, their mental strength and player-led leadership model were seen as two of the key qualities that enabled them to win the 2011 and 2015 World Cups.
Having seen the All Blacks embrace their psychological approach to the game, Maguire clearly wants his New South Wales players to do the same, something Enoka says they are already doing.
“Principally I will be with Michael and the group he has identified, and we will just see how it unfolds really,” Enoka says.
“It’s similar to the All Blacks because they are playing NRL and they come out, play the first state of Origin, then they go back into the NRL and then play the second.
“There is no pre-season so it will be a matter of picking them up at that particular point. I will be relying on Michael’s wisdom – we have conversations regularly and he’s inviting contributions.
“I envisage it will be a combination of working with Michael and with some players.
“The leaders were certainly keen, and I have had conversations with a few already and they are more intrigued and interested because they know the All Blacks, the brand and the success and they want to know what goes on and I can leverage off that for credibility and then I can have impact.”
And Enoka suggests that the All Blacks were equally interested in the State of Origin.
For him personally, the opportunity to work with New South Wales in a series that benefits from everyone buying into the tribal ethos, will be an opportunity to learn as much as it will be to contribute.
“I think it is a level up from the NRL. Whenever you watch it, the referees seem to referee it a little bit differently – they allow more brutality. I quite like that.
“They don’t pick over everything with a fine tooth comb. It is a war that has a different set of rules to the NRL.
“Whenever we were on tour with the All Blacks the schedule was pretty well organised to ensure that everyone could watch it. When you have talented athletes going head-to-head in that sort of way it makes a great spectacle.”
