Last Saturday as the Springboks were destroying the Wallabies the phone rang. It was an old mate from our days together at Leinster who gave me the heartbreaking news that our great friend and coaching guru, Roly Meates, had passed away, aged 85.
My mind wandered from the Test match, back 23 years, to when I first met Roly, sipping tea in his livingroom and talking rugby.
I was there in a type of interview to see whether the man I knew by reputation was the right person to become the scrum coach that the Leinster team of 2000 so desperately needed.
It soon became clear that our meeting was not going the way I had planned. It was Roly who was doing the interviewing and it was me who was being examined.
We talked for several hours as Roly asked probing questions regarding tactics and options. He even provided some false leads as a trap for the unwary.
I don’t recall how that day ended, but I must have passed Roly’s entrance examination because he came out of retirement and returned to the Leinster team to become our scrum coach.
Much later in our relationship, I asked him about how he had turned the tables on me that day. He replied with a poker face and a twinkle in his eye: “Matthew, I have my standards. I was not going to work with some Antipodean halfwit”. After which he broke into a split watermelon of a grin and added with a deep chuckle. “You passed . . . just.”
As the Test match played out on my TV screen my phone was continuously buzzing with messages of sadness, regret and deep thanks from the huge cross-section of players Roly had helped along his astonishingly long and productive coaching career.
Across the 1970s, ’80s and ‘90s to the present day, a staggering number of Ireland’s elite FRU (Front Rowers Union) had learned the skills of their dark arts from Roly.
As a player and coach, Roly had a decades-long relationships with both Trinity College and Wanderers rugby clubs. At different times he had been head coach and selector for both Ireland and Leinster.
Across these many years, he often fell foul of the “Blazerati”. He simply did not suffer fools, especially any administrator who, in his eyes, did not understand the game. He was far more comfortable in a tracksuit, standing in the mud and rain with his players than dealing with the egos of a committee room.
Guiding the scrum’s “engine room” was his unique talent. Here he was the Zen master. Both a teacher and a seeker of excellence in his craft.
Gifted with a generous spirit, he was constantly staying late after practice to work through a tactic with a senior prop for the upcoming match or helping a rookie navigate the huge jump in standards that he demanded.
A dentist by profession, he would often tell the self-deprecating joke that he could fix a tooth and a scrum but not much else, when in reality Roly was a mentor to all who asked for his help. Including me. I often sought his counsel, which was always measured, wise and highly accurate.
As my attention came back to the Test match, the Springboks’ scrum was driving the Australian pack into the turf, with absolutely no intention of getting the ball to their backline. In the brain-dead fashion of our times, they were then awarded another in a long string of scrum penalties and I thought of how this would have disgusted Roly.
The foundation of Roly’s philosophy was to create a superior scrum for its true purpose, which is to be a platform of excellence from which backlines and backrowers could launch their attack or defence.
Roly had devised a playbook of meticulously-designed scrum tactics that could provide high-quality possession for attacking raids from any position on the pitch. The mention of his favourite attacking scrum set-up will bring smiles to the faces of all his former players.
Channel one ball.
That is when the scrumhalf feeds the ball onto the hooker’s heel which connects with the ball as sweetly as a drop kick. The foot position of the loosehead prop and second rower are so perfectly placed that they form a tunnel so that the ball rolls under them and out of the scrum, between the openside flanker and the number eight, untouched and unimpeded.
Done at Roly’s highest standards, from feeding the ball into the scrum to being passed by the scrumhalf took under 1.5 seconds. So fast that the defending scrumhalf and backrow are totally removed from the defensive system.
In the early 2000s, when Leinster’s then scrumhalf, Brian O’Mara fed a backline from a Roly Meates-coached scrum to the huge talents of Shane Horgan, Brian O’Driscoll, Gordon D’Arcy, Denis Hickie, Christian Warner and Girvan Dempsey, opposition defences were devastated.
Currently, we are living through a dark epoch where the beautiful art of scrummaging has been warped by perverse tactics and unjust laws that have turned scrums into a slow, brutal and dangerous street fight that seeks only penalties. Which is the antithesis of Roly’s coaching.
I hope the philosophy that Roly dedicated his coaching life to will not be lost or forgotten. One day and soon, the game can reclaim the true purpose of the art of scrummaging. That is for scrums to return to the beautifully complex contests that they once were and produce high-quality possession for uplifting, creative attacking rugby.
Roly was a pioneer whose coaching of superior scrum technique is a major factor in why we have specialist scrum coaches today. Irish rugby owes him a debt that it can never repay.
They say rugby is the game they play in heaven and the Front Rowers Union believes that God is a prop. Well, the Boss is about to get coached.
We, his rugby comrades, understand that we shall never see his likes again.
