Interview: Matt Williams, once of Leinster, has an enlightened plan for Scotland's future. Johnny Watterson is won over
Curtains up. Microphones live. Soft music. Dim the lights. Ladies and gentlemen . . . Matt Williams shares his 50-megawatt smile with the audience. An aurora of light emanates from somewhere behind his left shoulder. It's a broad smile. It brightens the collective mood in Scotland's designated corner of the interview room after an otherwise lugubrious trawl around the London building, coaxing quotes out of largely unimpressed coaches and players at the launch of the Six Nations Championship.
Lawrence Dallaglio assumes that "don't mess with me" stare, the one a lion pulls when he locks onto a soon-to-be-dead gnu. Steve Hansen, the Welsh coach, is less expressive. Not a facial muscle moves, as though he's blast-Botoxed the lot. His routine is less threatening but you can sense he's speaking into the recorders under mild duress.
The Italians? A ready-made photo shoot, they are long-haired, shrieking and splayed out from the table in various shapes. The only explanation can be that coach John Kirwan has told them, as he told another journalist, that he wants them to go into their games with the same feeling they had when they first fell in love. He doesn't mean flopping listlessly on their beds listening to Leonard Cohen. No jokers this year, they say. Italy will beat up a few teams even if they don't win. Sometimes you wish you spoke Italian.
But Williams's table is a good table, upbeat and consumer friendly. Williams is the matinée man. His swept-back grey hair and navy blue Scottish kit-suit bring him into high relief against the sponsor's hoarding. Williams has found his stage here, his comfort zone. He's a "front up" guy, whom the media follow because he easily fills white noise and white space and does so with an exotic twist of Aussie accent. He has savvy out there in front of microphones and cameras. He can tread water about the "privilege of coaching in Ireland". He can go off the high board too about "The Temple" of Murrayfield.
You get the sense that Scotland's first non-national director of coaching could be talking just as effectively about washing machines or perimeter fencing. If he asked you to pledge your pay packet now to save your soul from eternal fire, you'd gladly empty your wallet into his pressed linen pockets. Praise be to Mattie.
Matt Williams, out of Waratahs, Leinster and the now defunct Ireland A, is looking fine. After four years in Ireland, he's pulling the strings for Scotland, trying to rein in the sport . But there's no headless trumpeting. A quick fix is far from his mind.
"Scotland in this Six Nations Championship will go into every fixture wanting to win. We are where we are," he says. "We're ninth in the world. We've put our hands up and said we're not happy with that. If I said to my boys, 'this is England, we can't win', they'd walk out the door. And if they didn't walk out the door, I would because that's not the attitude I want.
"If we set wins and losses as our target, then we're setting ourselves up for failure, setting the young players up for failure. What we need to be doing is getting our basics right on the pitch, getting the nation behind us. Everyone's disappointed with being ninth. We're not coming out here to say we'll win every fixture. If we did that we'd lose the respect of the nation.
"We've put our processes in place and if we play with passion the outcomes will come. The wins will follow, maybe at the end of the next championship, a year's time when the young players coming through will have about 15 games. If we don't have those foundations, we won't get wins."
Williams's evangelical assault on the Scottish system borrows from his Irish experience. He looks to Dublin and Limerick and sees a model which he believes would fit the Scots' limited resources. He is set on bringing a new eye to look over the traditional dogma. An outside influence from Australia melded with an Irish system is a not unattractive mongrel to flog to Edinburgh. There are hurdles to straddle and some of them have been cleared already. Others need attention.
Williams lost five backs since Scotland's last romp in Australia, while 15 of the World Cup squad were playing their rugby outside the country and tied to club contracts. The Scottish landscape was denuded. There were few recognisable personalities kicking ball at weekends.
"We were the only team at the World Cup who had half our players overseas. You need to control your players. England doesn't have any overseas. Ireland has one or two. France I think has one and Wales have all their players but Colin Charvis, who is based in France. Australia have none. New Zealand have none. For us to go forward, that's not a tenable situation.
"The hardest part of my job is changing the perception that professional teams are a burden and an expense rather than a resource and an investment. Ireland have overcome that mentality. Munster and Leinster pay for themselves now. They actually generate revenue and contribute to the international side, which is where 75 per cent of our revenue comes from. That pays for the grass roots and that's the crunch."
Last month he stuck his head above the parapet and launched a "bring them home" campaign. The threat was that players wouldn't feel a blue shirt on their backs if they didn't return. Some saw that as an invitation to snipe.
"When you are coach there is always pressure," he says. "At New South Wales (NSW) I was first to come through a hole in the system to coach NSW. There was pressure there. But I find it easier being an outsider. You don't have baggage. Sometimes, it's hard to be a prophet in your own land.
"Even though I've Irish ancestry, I was very much an outsider coming to Ireland A. But you look at it afresh and that means looking at players. I use the example of Reggie Corrigan and Victor Costello, who, when I arrived at Leinster were pretty much written off. Reggie will go close to captaining his country in one of the Six Nations games. Reggie was written off but that's the sort of thing you do. You say, 'hang on, I'll look at him in a different way, at a different angle.' Another thing is it takes time to adjust. The arenas. The expectations. And after a while when they get used to it they come through. I was talking to Brian O'Driscoll . . . his first Test was in Australia when I was at Waratahs. Brian O'Driscoll in one of his first times wearing the green jersey is a different animal to the Brian O'Driscoll now."
Williams is a communicator, a disseminator. His messages are plain, easily digested. He has taken the team and given them a shape. It wasn't there before. It is now. He has told them to respect themselves first. He has explained that all he can do is prepare them but that there is more to being a good rugby side. The younger players on the squad will be his pioneers, the older will have to adapt.
To the blazers, he has sold the idea of a value-added player, systematic sports programmes, nutrition. He's looking for the extra 10 per cent, the final 20-minute flourish, a world-class product. That's Williams talking. There's more.
There are no more kick-arounds in Murrayfield. The sacred turf has been resanctified and Williams has moved the Scottish product to the Sports Institute in Stirling, to its 50-metre pool and training facilities. If you want to tog out in Murrayfield, roll on the turf, the only way is to play for Scotland. There's no free-loading in the Williams philosophy.
"Murrayfield has got to be a temple. You only walk into the Scottish changing room if you are a Scottish international for that fixture. If you don't play for Scotland you will never walk in there. That's what it's got to be. It's got to be a special place. Without doubt the players have bought into that idea."
His position in Edinburgh is as a successful former Leinster coach. That view holds in Dublin, but a fault line exists along last season's European Cup semi-final against Perpignan in Lansdowne Road. That day outhalf Nathan Spooner came on late to replace Christian Warner. Too late. The easily read team strategy reeked and Leinster perished, missing out on a European Cup final at Lansdowne Road. The outhalf curse has continued to be one of Leinster's enduring tales of fear and loathing in Europe. Ask Gary Ella. That day Williams's bright eyes lost their sparkle. But he doesn't carry the freight.
"Finished?" asks one of the chaperones. Williams's glow is undimmed. You're a believer until there's reason not to be. He could go on talking about the journey's beginning, his ideas for the Scottish canvas. It's what shapes him now. The telling of it is what he is.
