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Under other circumstances, Robbie Deans would be in a Dublin hotel now rather than one in Kensington, West London. He would be preparing the New Zealand team, his country's team, to play Ireland rather than the Australia side that meet England at Twickenham tomorrow, in his role as the first overseas coach to hold the Wallabies job.
You will hear no complaints from him. He grinned as Peter McGrath, the Australia Rugby Union chairman, leant across and said: “Once you cross the Tasman, you don't go back.” Yet the general expectation last year, after the All Blacks' worst showing in a World Cup, was that Deans, 49, would take over from Graham Henry. After all, every other New Zealand coach who has failed to recover the Webb Ellis Cup has fallen on his sword.
But for all Deans's remarkable record in Super 12 and Super 14 rugby with the Canterbury-based Crusaders, (seven finals, five titles), Henry survived. “I'm not disappointed,” Deans said with the phlegmatic air of one who comes from a long line of farmers. “In applying for the job, you line up, give it your best shot and all you're looking for is an answer. The answer was no and I was lucky enough that the Australia job was still open. I was aware of the dynamic, the politics, so it didn't surprise me.”
There is a thoughtful addition. “I believe you should be somewhere you are wanted,” he said. “I was ready for a fresh challenge, I had done my time at Super 14 level, the time was right to move. The next generation of players and coaches [in Canterbury] had been exposed and I didn't want to impede their progress.”
Deans, who played five internationals for New Zealand at full back from 1983 to 1985 and served as assistant coach to John Mitchell from 2001 to 2003, has a predisposition towards Australia. Early in his playing career he was injured in a game in Ballymore, Brisbane, and received an unexpected visit from the opposition coach, Bob Templeton, one of the legendary names of Australian rugby.
“I saw the game as 'them' and 'us', I had never experienced that kind of sincerity from an opponent and it made a huge impression on me, what the game was all about,” Deans said. “That was my first experience of the potential to be gained from coaching. It broadened my outlook, [made me realise] that the game was not so much about the individual and the opportunity to win or lose, that there was much more to it than that.”
The decision to coach Australia was still one of the most difficult he has made, not from a rugby perspective but from a personal point of view: how it would affect his family (he has three teenage children), how it would be received by his friends and the wider rugby community, in both countries.
He sought advice from John Wright, the New Zealand cricketer who was coaching India at the time. “His insight was it's like playing your brother on the back lawn,” Deans said. In the event, he was humbled by the positive reception, most aptly illustrated at the first Bledisloe Cup game between Australia and New Zealand in Sydney in July, when a number of New Zealanders, including his sister, turned up wearing Wallaby gold.
No one doubted his pedigree, stretching back as it does to the most famous disputed score in the game's history, the disallowed try by Bob Deans in the 3-0 defeat by Wales in 1905. Bob Deans was his great uncle and, during his own upbringing at the tiny Glenmark club - who are in the top 20 of sporting achievements for producing more All Blacks per capita than any other club - he was influenced by Alex Wyllie, who played for and coached New Zealand.
Now, though, he must operate in a country accustomed to sporting success, which has proved elusive in rugby terms over recent years. “Australia's game had become a bit prescriptive,” Deans said. “It is also susceptible to injury and loss of form. I want to encourage players to be themselves, to bring forward what they have as opposed to being inhibited or anxious in the way they play.”
Already he sees a group of younger men, exemplified by David Pocock, the Western Force flanker, putting pressure on their seniors, taking their chance, as did Quade Cooper, the fly half whose run broke Italian hearts in Padua last week. “It doesn't matter whether guys have been here a minute or a decade,” he said. “The fact is, they are Wallabies. It's how they function as a group on Saturday that counts, and the moment you start looking beyond that is fraught with danger.”
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