Rugby: Dual roles could help lure players home

Daryl Gibson. Photo / Christchurch Star

It's a well-worn concept in football but the idea of a player-coach is new to rugby. It could become more common, however, if Tana Umaga can make it work at Counties Manukau.

This is a model of some interest to the New Zealand Rugby Union, who see the player-coach route as a means to ease the transition of senior players looking to return home.

Coaching jobs are not plentiful in New Zealand, certainly not in comparison with Europe, where there is a multitude of entry points.

The depth of the game over there means an aspiring coach can find paid employment in the lower divisions while there is an increasing trend for recently retired players to be offered assistant and specialist roles at big clubs.

As a prime example, Aaron Mauger has already been offered an assistant coaching position at Leicester should he be forced to retire from playing due to chronic back and groin problems.

The jump from playing to coaching is not so easy in New Zealand where there is more competition for fewer roles that pay comparatively much less.

The player-coach role provides the opportunity for someone close to retirement to make a contribution on the field while also gaining experience to embark upon a coaching career. It also circumvents the financial issue.

A player in the winter of his career can still earn $250,000 in Europe while he'd be lucky to be offered half that in New Zealand as there would be a reluctance to believe he could still cut it in the faster, more expansive world of Super 14. A dual role comes with better pay as well as providing vital experience.

Former All Black and Crusaders assistant coach Daryl Gibson is one of the few to have worked as a player-coach - a role he fulfilled at Glasgow in 2007-08.

"It's a difficult dynamic to manage," he says of the dual responsibilities. "You are neither one thing nor the other. There are conflicts all over the place. The most obvious is selection but I had an out there as I wasn't involved in that.

"The thing Tana has to his advantage is experience. This is something he has done successfully in France and he will have worked out how to handle the dynamic. I'd also imagine his responsibilities will have been clearly set out in his contract."

Gibson took plenty from his experience in Glasgow and feels the exercise did much to grow him as player and coach.

Having escaped responsibility for selecting the team, Gibson felt the two toughest tasks were understanding how he fitted in to the team culture and living up to the playing standards he had set as coach.

The former was maybe the toughest because, in every team culture, there needs to be separation between the players and management. Gibson was both so, after a defeat, he sat in the sheds with the players but then returned to being a manager to feed his input into the post-match debrief.

The second challenge was more straightforward in terms of finding a solution. "You had to be whiter than white as a player," says Gibson.

"You had to be both do as I say and do as I do. I didn't expect to play as much as I did and the key lesson for me was that my body was not the same as it had been a few years earlier. It took me longer to recover and while I'm sure Tana can handle himself at this level, I'd be surprised if he played every week."

Since returning to New Zealand in 2008, he has talked to All Black assistant Wayne Smith, who also spent the latter part of his playing career in a hybrid capacity. Both men think there is scope for more players to go down this route.

If given his time again, Gibson says he would do it again. By having a year's coaching experience in Scotland, he was able to secure a job with the Crusaders.

It's that transition from playing to coaching that is hard to bridge in New Zealand.

"When I played for Leicester, I spoke to the big-name English guys like Martin Johnson and Neil Back and they all said the reason so many players over there jump straight into coaching is that the clubs are desperate," says Gibson.

"They don't have the same number of guys coming through as we do."