Neil Doak is surely as ready to be Ulster coach as he'll ever be. He has been a coach for two decades now, having landed his first coaching job as a development officer with the IRFU in 1994. He's been coaching under-age and professional rugby in some shape or form ever since. Even so, as Ulster's new head coach, he's stepping into the frontline.
No more Mr Nice Guy either. For years he’s been an assistant coach, a position in which it is far easier to play the good cop alongside the bad cop that is the head coach. “If you speak to a few of the players they’’ll probably say he won’t have too much difficulty playing the bad cop,” quips Doak, nonetheless revealing that, as with Joe Schmidt, he may not be entirely what he seems on the outside.
Things are also about to become much more testing, for as he says with typical understatement: “There are some big weeks coming up.” After Pro12 leaders Glasgow come a calling today, Ulster take the well-worn path to Welford Road next weekend, followed by the visit of European and French champions Toulon the following week, with the Dragons, Ospreys and Munster to come in November, then the back-to-back European games with Scarlets, the Ospreys, Connacht, Leinster and Treviso in the league, before the concluding Euro pool games against Toulon and Leicester.
“It’s not easy,” says Doak, matter-of-factly. “This is the big time when you need to make sure you get a nice wee roll of games. Every game is big. We’ve just got to make sure we ‘prep’ well and if we’re lucky with injuries we’ve got a few selection quandaries and hopefully we get a little luck along the way.”
Scrutiny
As the ‘prep’ and selections come under his watch like never before, so too the scrutiny on him will mount. After last Saturday’s win Anthony Foley, with whom Doak worked on the successful North American tour of 2013, spoke of the difficulties for an indigenous coach, in that the local supporters “know our wrinkles”, something no doubt Eric Elwood would testify to.
“You take your kids to school and you’re speaking to teachers, or other parents, and they see you on tv, and there is a responsibility. I understand that. But the players know that as well. It’s not just coaches. The players are in there to deliver as well.
“As Axel has said, when you win at the weekends, it’s definitely a different atmosphere around the province. The game has grown for the better, and the profile of the European Cup and our League, the game is bigger now, and a knock-on effect of playing well at the weekend is that does reverberate around the place. We’re in a professional game and it’s all about wins, and that’s what we’re keyed up to do every week.”
First and foremost therefore, and more than ever, a coach wants his team to win and Doak is no different, but as someone who cut his coaching teeth primarily with regard to backs, skills and attacking play, he likes to be entertained as well.
“We’ve got to try and push the boundaries, and challenge the players,” says Doak by way of agreement. “If we can challenge the players and they can grasp certain concepts, and the position they’re in, and grasp those as well, there’s always a happy medium. If you ask me ‘do you want to win 3-0 every week?’, agghhh I’d say yes,” he says with palpable regret, “but I do feel we’ve got to try and produce a product that entertains as well.”
Born in Lisburn, Doak took up rugby at Wallace High School, where he was coached by Brian McLaughlin, although he admits he didn’t begin to take the game seriously until he was 16, as soccer had been his first sporting love.
Doak played mainly as a centre half, though sometimes as a striker, with Lisburn Youths. “Neil Masters and myself would have played together quite regularly. He went on to play for Wolves. Keith Rowlands as well went on to play for West Ham and Northern Ireland. We came up through the ranks at Lisburn. A good few of my mates support Liverpool, and I support Man United, so it’s a nice rivalry between us. But in the early stages football was what I was looking at. Then it was cricket and rugby.”
Two-year break
He played for Ulster at 18, but at 19 decided to take a two-year break from the game to go to South Africa and play and coach cricket for Belville Cricket Club in Cape Town. “When I first arrived there it was: ‘You’re from Ireland? Do Ireland even have a cricket team?’ And I was quite lucky, I got ten wickets in my first game, so I was able to integrate quite quickly. It was a great experience, to see South Africa, and the sporting prowess and the facilities that they had were outstanding.”
He admits being a dual sportsman, at rugby and cricket, was a difficult balancing act at times, but maintains: “I’ve travelled the world in both sports and been involved in a few World Cups, so I’ve been very fortunate.”
He came desperately close to being Ireland’s first cricket and rugby dual international since Raymond Hunter in the 1960s. In 1995 he sat on the bench for Ireland against Fiji and was the unused third scrumhalf in the 2003 World Cup. He had dislocated his shoulder before that tournament, thus missing out on the tour to Australia, Tonga and Samoa. “Maybe if I hadn’t dislocated my shoulder, I would have gone on that tour and maybe got a cap.”
Guy Easterby and Brian O’Meara went on that tour, with the latter coming on as a replacement in the Samoan tour finale, before Doak returned to accompany Peter Stringer and Easterby to the World Cup. “But look that’s the nature of life. There are always missed opportunities and although I didn’t get on that tour, I recovered and went to the World Cup, and it was a great experience.”
In between those two near misses, Doak was also injured for five seasons, from 1996 to 2001, with a broken leg and broken ankle. “It sort of, maybe, wasn’t identified early enough,” he says, very deliberately. “So I was back rehabbing and running, but I would fall over the odd time. I’d torn ligaments than needed to get repaired.”
Three operations
“I had three operations on my ankle. I still remember Alan Solomons, who was (Ulster coach) at the time while I was out coaching in South Africa for six weeks, he phoned me and said: ‘I want you to train with the squad when you get back.’ And I hadn’t been involved for five seasons.”
“It’s quite funny when I look back. I played golf, I played tennis, I played quite a lot of sports, and I always hoped one day I’d make a career out of one of them, and I had a bit of a career playing cricket and played rugby as well, and now it’s the coaching side of things, so I know how lucky I am. I’ve worked pretty hard at it, and I suppose my family has given me opportunities, so this is payback for them.”
Doak and his sister Leanne were reared by his dad Stanley, a retired textile engineer who had his own business, Stanley Doak textiles,played a little bit of football and cricket, and mum Betty. Doak and his wife Liz have three kids, Amee (14), Nathan (12) and Cameron (10). The two boys were born on the same date, December 17th, two years apart, and have been ball boys for Ulster, while Liz and Amee are also regulars at games along with Doak’s mum and dad.
“They love the banter with the players,” he says of his kids. “The difficulty for them is that they think it’s an easy transition into the professional game and real life will hit them soon.”
Every week, he says, Doak reminds his players ‘you’ll be a long time not playing this game’. He marvels at the growth of the game, not least in Ireland. He cites the expanded 18,000 capacity Ravenhill, or Kingspan Stadium, how every game is a big game, and how Irish rugby has four professional teams competing at the sharp end of the European game.
McLaughlin and Solomons were big influences, and so too former team-mates David Humphreys, Jonny Bell and Allen Clarke, his departed Director of Rugby, current defence coach and forwards’ coach respectively. With that 90s/Noughties generation now running the show, Ulster seem in a healthier place than had seemed possible during the summer in the fall out from Humphreys’ departure to Gloucester and Mark Anscombe’s departure as coach, with new signings blending in well and a relatively seamless takeover at head coach.
Admittedly, the employment of Les Kiss as an interim Director of Rugby until next week, and now Doak as a permanent head coach, with Kiss to return to Ireland duties for a year before then resuming as full-time Director of Rugby is a little curious. For starters, Kiss is much more of a hands-on coaching type of Director of Rugby than Humphreys would have been.
Controlled manner
But throughout the whole process, Doak’s calm, controlled manner has been striking. “We were quietly confident that the new signings coming in were quality payers. We also knew it was going to take a little time for them to bed in to things but we’ve been growing our squad over the last number of years. It (the trophies) just hasn’t happened.”
Indeed, during the week Foley also spoke of the journey Munster had to undertake before reaching their Holy Grail in 2006, and similarly after the final defeat two seasons ago, and then successive quarter-final defeats in the Heineken Cup, along with knock-out heartache in the League, Ulster’s journey is far from complete yet.
“It definitely isn’t. You’re always evolving, every year. There’s always a changeover in players. But at the top end of the games we want to get a little bit more consistency in those big games. We were unfortunate in that a number of things didn’t go our way towards the end of last year. You’ve got to make sure you have those foundations in place to springboard you on to the next levels and once you get to those next levels they are small margins, and we’ve got to try and make sure we take those opportunities.”
Ulster are still hungry, and have a new hungry young coach of their own in charge too.
