Exclusive: Steve Borthwick can help Leicester rediscover their mojo

Few people in rugby can have applied the old adage ‘quit while you’re ahead’ to their sporting lives to the same degree as Pat Howard.

At the tender age of 32 as Leicester head coach, Howard won the league and cup double in 2007 only to pack it all in and return home to Australia.

In that sense, he is the coaching equivalent of Barry John or David Kirk in bowing out at the top while still having so much to offer.

The demolition of Gloucester in the Premiership final followed on from an equally exhilarating performance against Ospreys in the EDF Energy Cup final. But an unprecedented treble alluded Howard as Wasps gave Lawrence Dallaglio a winning farewell in the Heineken Cup.

“A few have reminded me I went out on a losing note, and I have reflected on that one game so many times,” Howard told The Rugby Paper from his home in Australia.

“I over-coached in that I gave the players too much information. You’re in the heat of the battle and in a European final you want no excuses so sometimes you try and cover the bases of every scenario.

“You want to make sure that everybody feels they are well prepared whereas you are really doing it for your own peace of mind. That’s not how you coach, you coach to get the best out of people on every given day.

“We were, I think, the better team all year but that doesn’t matter. Not only did I think they outplayed us, I think Gats (Warren Gatland) out-coached us. They did some things around the front which exposed a hole that I knew we had, so fair play to them.”

It was a different story against Gloucester though, as Alesana Tuilagi steamrollered the Cherry & Whites, and flyhalf Ryan Lamb, in particular.

Tigers won 44-16 in one of the most dominant displays in English rugby’s end-of-season showpiece. Howard remains to this day the youngest-ever coach to win the Premiership.

“That was hilarious,” Howard chuckled, recalling the way the match unfolded. “We had a plan to put a big bloke into No.10 hoping that should condense the defence and create space out wide but no one condensed the defence, they just left him (Lamb) on his own, we were like ‘great’. We had planned for A and B and Alesana decided, ‘well I am going to see what happens here’, and it worked better than we expected.”

While still involved with rugby as a member of the Queensland RU board, Howard has spent the past 13 years away from elite-level rugby coaching. Now that his children, two of whom were born in Leicester, are growing up fast – the youngest recently turned 13 – the former fly-half could be tempted back into the most cut-throat of environments.

“Life is about experiences and I consider my experience at Leicester as a player and a coach as amazing; I loved it, but I don’t regret other experiences in life either,” he said.

“I said to my wife, as soon as the last one is out of school, I’m looking for a Third Division Italian club. I love winning and losing and the challenge of turning teams around.”

After Howard left Tigers, Richard Cockerill stepped in as interim boss, and after a short and unsuccessful dalliance with two overseas coaches in Marcelo Loffreda and Heyneke Meyer, the hooker became the head man in his own right.

Three more Premiership titles were delivered under Cockerill but after he was controversially sacked during the 2016/17 season, Tigers have lurched from one disaster to another.

Howard’s experience in high performance sport – he spent seven years in a senior role with Cricket Australia, from 2011-2018 – and his affinity with Leicester led to the Tigers board inviting him to Welford Road last year to conduct a forensic review of their faltering operation.

Stability and continuity in coaching was one of his key messages but Tigers ignored that advice and pulled the trigger on his good friend Geordan Murphy.

“To a certain extent, because I was so young, they’ve thought ‘it worked then, it can work again’,” he observed. “Even though I had a group of five or six world-class players who all retired in 2004/05, the culture of winning was very strong. Geordy didn’t have that benefit. Instead the club were chasing wins and bringing people in rather than building a culture progressively and steadily.

“Geordy inherited a squad that was very different. You don’t get to have a clean slate, you have to get the best out of what you have got, and he had a mix of blokes that Matt O’Connor and Aaron Mauger had brought in, and even some players when Cockers was here, and it becomes a very difficult thing to mould.”

Recruitment and the relationship between the academy and the first team was an area that Howard felt needed a major overhaul. To him, Leicester had lost their soul and needed to rediscover their DNA.

“When I left, the Oval Park training facility was a very inspiring place to be and it has become less so,” the 47-year-old said. “It was clear what the succession plan was back then, we were very clear on the players coming through, whereas the sense I got when I went back was that it had all become a bit transactional, and they were trying to discover people.

“Don’t get me wrong, I brought in players from the outside. I replaced Martin Johnson with Leo Cullen and Neil Back with Shane Jennings. But there was a strategy behind it. It was about having four great second rowers around; it was about having Lewis Moody and Shane competing at seven; it was about having 30 players who could play in a European Cup final and then you had gold, silver and bronze players after that. They went away from that strategy and as a consequence of that and a couple of different coaches and strategies, they lost their direction a bit.”

Howard’s advice to the Tigers board was to ride out the rough times – Leicester finished 11th in both of Murphy’s two full seasons in charge – and keep faith with the genial Irishman. Now that Murphy has become a casualty of the hiring and firing nature of the pro game, Howard has backed him to bounce back.

“I’ve known Geordy since 1998 and I can’t speak highly enough about him; he is a brilliant bloke and human being,” he said. “I’m sure Geordy, whatever he decides to do, whether that’s coaching or not, will do a great job because his people skills are amazing. If he decides to do what Cockers has done and go elsewhere, I am sure he will find a great space.”

The responsibility of reviving the sleeping giants of English rugby now rests on the shoulders of Steve Borthwick.

“I am sure Steve will do a good job. He is a real analyst of the game and they need to stick with him for a while to give him a chance,” Howard said.

JON NEWCOMBE