The Times - UK - 04.12.2021

18 1GS Saturday December 4 2021 | the times

Sport Rugby union

D

anny Care, a giant André

Esterhuizen and the rest of the

Harlequins backs shuffle into a

meeting room. “Hi, I’m Marcus,” the

new superstar of English rugby says

with a firm handshake, even though Marcus

Smith is fast heading past the point of needing

to make introductions.

For the next 20 minutes they run through the

attacking strategies that will be needed to

overcome Leicester Tigers tomorrow. The

players throw around different ideas, and code

words, as they look at video clips.

Nick “Snap” Evans, the attack coach, points

out that Quins converted only 17 per cent of line

breaks in losing 19-22 to London Irish at the

weekend; falling short of the penetrative heights

that have made Quins the league’s great

entertainers. “We will get chances on Sunday,”

he says. “We’ll have to take them.”

If it seems bold to invite a journalist inside the

camp in a week when they have just stumbled at

home and face a tough trip to the league

leaders, it also speaks of a confidence that goes

beyond the trophy they won in June.

You may think Harlequins had already

written the best possible story when they

transformed a listless campaign to win the

Gallagher Premiership in astonishing

circumstances but perhaps the next question is

even more intriguing: how do you follow that

epic finale?

How did the same players, coaches and staff

who were struggling so unhappily this time last

year become such thrilling champions? And

what do they do next?

“We know what we did to change it all, so we

know it wasn’t a fluke,” Adam “Bomb” Jones, the

mighty former Wales prop who is now Quins’

scrum coach, says. But how to prove it?

It is in striving to answer those questions that

I spent a couple of days talking about

microchips and fish and chips; watching Joe

Marler prove surprisingly adept at head tennis;

and staring at the messages on the wall at the

training ground in Guildford.

“Vision — to be the most admired

rugby club in Europe.

“Purpose — to entertain, excel and

inspire by being true to the Quins way.”

And underneath: “Tempo, Relate,

Unconventional, Enjoyment.”

Words on a wall, but what do they

mean?

training

The week starts on Tuesday with football.

By the time the session finishes 50 minutes

later there has been ball-handling, shadow

play, forwards walking through lineout

moves as if in a slow-motion Strictly Come

Dancing — and not a tackle to be seen.

Training will increase in physicality but

there are only two more sessions before the

game. Quins train only three days a week.

Scrapping practice on the day before a

match was one of the first moves after the

sacking of Paul Gustard as head coach in

January. No one wants to dump on “Gussy” but,

equally, no one disputes that the change was

transformative. Suddenly the shackles were off.

Hour-long meetings became 20 minutes,

maximum. A stifled game became liberated. The

players were given a voice and one of the first

things they asked was why they would come in

24 hours before a match, spending perhaps

three hours in a car, to go through some

stretches and to rehearse the moves they had

been working on all week. So that was it, an end

to the “captain’s run”, as it had been called for

decades.

No training the day before a match? You

could see it as unconventional or perhaps just

common sense.

science

As well as the fewest training days, Quins

believe they have, quite significantly, the least

contact in practice of any leading club owing to

the mouthguards that contain a microchip that

provides live monitoring of linear force, G-force

and rotational force felt by each player in every

collision. The more they talk about the Protecht

system — which has reduced training contact

by as much as 70 per cent — the more

astonishing it seems that the mouthguards have

not already been mandated across the league.

A sport belatedly waking up to a crisis around

brain damage and player welfare needs to act,

especially as it is explained that this is not only

about big hits to the head but the ability to

measure the sub-concussive blows to the body

that, looking at the graphs from the microchips,

are very much felt in the skull.

“I played with a lot of the guys who are now

suing the game because of signs of dementia

which is awful, so I have to be pleased that we

are using this technology and trusting it,” Care,

the former England scrum half, says.

To the medical staff at Quins, it seems beyond

coincidence that they have enjoyed the best

player availability that anyone can remember,

though it may take another couple of years to

compile reliable data. The technology

would not

Each would have final word on any issue related

to their own department.

“Maybe [because of] our naivety as young

coaches, and less pressure given where we were,

we felt we could try things out,” Evans says of

the liberation he felt as a skilful former Quins

back suddenly given freedom to explore an

attacking game.

“Danny, Marcus, [Alex] Dombrandt, you can’t

put those guys in a box,” Evans adds. “We are

not a hammer team who smashes down walls.

We are a scalpel. We have to cut teams.”

Matson says he came in with a remit not to

shake up this system but to ask the “ignorant

questions” that would force everyone to re-

examine last season’s success, and to unearth

any anomalies.

If this was the healthiest roster ever, could

that be replicated? Success comes at a price

when players are promoted to international

rugby, so what would be the impact of losing

Smith, Marler, Dombrandt and Joe Marchant to

England and, potentially, for nine out of 22

league games?

Matson also counted that in the past two

seasons Quins had played nine and seven

fixtures in the rain. Last year it was zero in an

unprecedented campaign that ran into late

summer, suiting the Quins style.

“You arrive and think, ‘I hope they don’t have

the victory disease,’ ” Matson says. With

opposition much more alert this season to the

Quins style, and better prepared defensively,

they know they will have to keep adapting.

Less training, more

fish and microchips:

the radical Quins way

be effective without the willingness of the

coaches to listen to Mike Lancaster, head of

medical services, when he says that, for

example, there can be only five live scrums in a

week or that certain players need placing in one

of the white bibs that signals they are not to

engage in any contact. The previous regime still

needed some persuading.

“Every club has players who say they are fine

even if they are in pieces, a warrior like Will

Evans,” Lancaster says. “Now we can measure

the incredible hits and intensity. We can put in a

recovery strategy, using the hyperbaric chamber

but also an individual training schedule light on

contact.”

Gareth “Gaz” Tong, head of strength and

conditioning, explains that with much less

contact and an extra day off he can do more

explosive speed work that suits Quins’

style.

Weekly “Bozo” sessions — no one can

explain the name — involve three teams

rotating in a nine-minute hyperintense

block of running rugby. Rather than

smash themselves as preparation for the

inevitable physical battle with the Tigers,

Quins take the opposite approach.

“I feel better than I did when I was 25,”

Care says. He believes that this system

helps to explain the freshness behind

remarkable title-winning comebacks to

beat Bristol Bears and Exeter Chiefs.

The mouthguards have also revealed

the dangers of poor tackling technique,

and forces felt by players who get it wrong,

so Quins hire the Gymnastics Factory, a

purpose-built centre in Guildford with a

sprung floor, for specialist training.

“Being unconventional is not about

wearing a jester’s hat,” Tabai Matson, the

senior coach, says. “It’s trying to be smart.”

coaching

Matson, the former New Zealand and Fiji

international, has worked all around the world

as a rugby coach. When it comes to

unconventional, you could start with his

appointment at Quins and the offer of a

permanent position rather than the usual fixed-

term contract.

“You can’t say to someone, ‘We want you

to build a long-term future and establish the

strongest academy pathway into the first

team’ and then offer a two-year deal as if the

clock is already ticking,” Laurie Dalrymple,

the chief executive, explains.

No less unconventional is that the fourth

of Matson’s interviews before he secured the

job was with the four coaches already

running the team — in effect interviewing

their future boss. “It’s the first job I’ve taken

where they already knew where they were

going,” Matson says.

Have you heard the one about the Kiwi,

Welshman, Irishman and Englishman? It

could be the start of a joke except it ended

up with the Premiership title.

After the axing of Gustard, Evans

(attack coach), Jones (scrum), Jerry

Flannery (defence and lineout) and

Charlie Mulchrone (kicking) became a

committee sharing out responsibility. It

was an experiment and a challenge to

sport’s preoccupation with one big alpha boss.

“Weird,” Jones says of the arrangement, “but we

trusted each other. And we made a pact that

when the shit hit the fan we wouldn’t panic.”

Dispensing with conventional wisdom turned the also-rans into

Premiership champions in June. Matt Dickinson spends two

eye-opening days at their training base to uncover their secrets

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Care, loomed over by the England prop Marler,

says the renewed sense of joy at Harlequins has

encouraged him to prolong his playing career

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