Former Leeds, Doncaster and Jersey hooker and recently appointed Doncaster head coach Steve Boden talks to NEALE HARVEY about life under Covid-19 and how Championship players and coaches deserve greater recognition.
How’s life at Doncaster with no rugby?
For a lot of people, the club is their life – coming down on a weekend and mixing – so the lack of senior rugby is very frustrating because so much of what is happening is out of our control. But we’re a big community club as well as a professional team so one of the positives is that we’ve had more time to start rebuilding a bridge between the professional side of the club and the minis and juniors and our pathway links. That’s been really good in giving us a solid foundation.
How have you kept your senior players engaged?
That’s been tough because it seems like we’ve been saying ‘We’ll know more in a couple of weeks’ since April, but the players, staff, supporters and board have been fantastic and they’ve shown why Doncaster is such a strong club. In adversity you do see the true colours of people and we’re showing some good character traits. Coaching-wise, we’re connecting quite a bit and the playing squad have been connecting through Zoom. Something I’ve asked myself a lot is whether we need to connect with guys more, but financially we decided it wouldn’t be feasible to bring them in until we get a proper start date for the Championship, so we’ve allowed them to stay at home with their families. From a mental health perspective, it seems more sensible to give them that stability and while we’re making plenty of phone calls to check they’re all okay, it’s sometimes better for people to crack on with their own training programmes and do other things outside rugby. It’s possibly the only chance they’ll ever get to have six or eight months away from the game and maybe have a look at other avenues for when they eventually finish, so that’s the view we’ve taken.
You recently loaned prop Robin Hislop to Saracens, how good an experience was that for him?
Brilliant! The way Saracens handled the situation of wanting Robin on loan showed you why they’re such a good club. They approached us in a very open manner and it’s just been a great experience for him. To have been scrummaging in training against Vincent Koch, one of the best tightheads in the world, has been magnificent and he managed to play in some high-profile Premiership games. He’s a 100mph sort of guy is Robin and that’s what makes him such a good player, so he’d rather have been in the thick of things than sat at home and he really enjoyed it and has come back a better player. Hopefully, he’ll bring that to Doncaster now and add to what we’re doing.
There are so many ex-Championship front rows in the Premiership now, there must be a moral in the story somewhere?
Yep, it shows you what the Championship is doing. It’s creating Premiership players who can push on to international teams and that’s credit to us as a league. There’s a lot of bad Press and negative stuff around how the Championship’s supported, but what I do know is it’s creating some very good rugby players and some exceptional coaches as well. Look at the Wasps coaching staff who reached the Premiership final: Lee Blackett, Ian Costello and Matt Everard have all worked for long periods in the Championship and Nottingham head coach Neil Fowkes is helping with their scrum at the moment as well.
Player-wise, you’ve seen Hislop, Alec Clarey and Richard Barrington at Saracens, Christian Judge at Bath, Simon Kerrod at Quins and Jake Woolmore and Jake Armstrong at Bristol. There are too many to mention really but last weekend you had Jack Yeandle, Tomas Francis and Harry Williams – all guys who I played with and/or coached at Doncaster or Jersey – winning the European Cup with Exeter. I’ve had texts from some of those guys asking why people can’t see the value in the Championship?
On a personal level, how proud were you to see Francis, Yeandle and Williams achieving that success with Chiefs?
It’s fantastic and they’re real salt of the earth guys who’ve done the hard yards in the Championship and taken their opportunities. That’s what sport is all about – one, getting opportunities, and two, having the ability and attitude to take them. To see those three win a European Cup, knowing what they’ve done in a lot of areas to improve their own games, is brilliant for them. A lot of people talk about Southern Hemisphere rugby but I’d watch Exeter all day long over that because the way they play the game is fast and it’s an attacking brand of rugby, but they’ve also got that balance where they can get into an arm-wrestle and enjoy winning that way, too. That’s probably why they’re European champions because they’ve got that string to their bow.
Is the Exeter template a good one for clubs like Doncaster to follow?
Playing-wise, we’ll always want to be Doncaster because the moment you start copying somebody too much you can just become a pale imitation. But Exeter’s business model is very, very good and that’s something Doncaster have always looked closely at. Our off-field facilities are very good and we’re very ambitious as well. Would we love to see Premiership rugby at Doncaster? Yes, but at the moment a lot of that is out of our control, like funding. At the moment it doesn’t make any sense for us to push for the Premiership because the funding discrepancy is massive – it’s just not fair. It’s such a big gulf for a Championship side to bridge in finance so until that changes it’s just a pipedream.
The facilities we’ve got at Doncaster could easily meet the top-flight criteria and Yorkshire’s the biggest rugby county in the country, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before we can get to that level. It’s not been an overnight thing for Exeter over the last 20-odd years, though, so there’s hope for us all.
Does the constant talk of ring-fencing annoy you?
Yes, it does. I can see all aspects of the arguments from Premiership clubs saying they can’t plan or recruit properly, but the bugbear I’ve got is when they do come down they have £3m-plus more than anyone else in the Championship so if you can’t recruit properly or back yourself to beat somebody in a two-legged final, then there’s probably something wrong with your organisation or rugby programme. I also thought play-offs in the Championship were absolutely fantastic for the competition and the excitement they generated was brilliant, but that was scrapped. It’s only my opinion but if you ring-fence the Premiership, I think you’ll see a lot more one-sided games like we’ve seen over the last couple of months.
I’m a rugby nause and normally I’ll watch every game going, but when you’re seeing teams lose by 40-50 points, I can’t watch that. I think you’d get a lot more games like that where results didn’t really matter because with no relegation teams can put out whatever side they like. You’ll simply see more mismatches and there’ll be no spectacle at all. They say more young lads will be getting games, but you can achieve that just as well by being more stringent on the EQP situation – that would definitely promote young English guys.
For me, ring-fencing would kill English rugby and it’ll eventually kill the talent pool as well because it will be hard to maintain credibility and viability in the Championship. Every club should be able to dream and people need to remember that the two teams who’ve won in Europe this year – Exeter and Bristol – spent a lot of time in the Championship.
It’s only 13 years since Leeds, Rotherham and Doncaster all finished above Exeter in the old First Division. As a proud Yorkshireman, does the demise of Leeds and Rotherham pain you?
It’s such a shame what’s happened with Yorkshire rugby. There’s been a lot of mismanagement at Carnegie (Leeds) from the board level down and I just can’t see them recovering – too much damage has been done with trust in the community. They had enough competition in the city anyway with the Rhinos and Leeds United, but opportunities have been wasted. As for Rotherham, I’d love to see them back in the Championship at some stage because it’s a proper, old-school rugby club with good people involved and I absolutely loved going there as a Doncaster player. Let’s face it, the ground was a dump, but with 1,500-2,000 packed into Clifton Lane and most of them baying for your blood, it was just fantastic. Sadly, Nottingham and Coventry are our ‘local’ derbies now and it’s just a shame to see where top-level rugby in the county is. What it does do, though, is highlight the job (owners) Steve Lloyd and Tony de Mulder are doing at Doncaster and we’re the shining light now. They’ve created stability that will hopefully see us through the situation we’re in now.
At 38 and having succeeded Clive Griffiths as top dog at Castle Park, how good an opportunity is this for you?
It’s great. I was head coach before at Leeds when we reached the Championship final in 2017, but this is the first opportunity where I’ve been head of the rugby department and making all of the decisions on the recruitment side, player pathway etc. It’s a fantastic opportunity to learn and make an impact because Doncaster have been at the wrong end of the table for the last three or four years. I’ve had a good chance to press the reset button and while we might not get instant success, we’ve got 19 new signings and we’ve realigned the club’s rugby departments and pathways. Results will hopefully flow off the back of that.
Have you brought down the average age of the squad?
Massively! The average age of the squad last year was 31, but now we’re down to 24 and that was important to me. My recruitment model is to go with people who are young, hungry and ambitious – similar to myself really. My ambition is to coach at the highest level and that’s the same with my fellow coaches, Joe Ford (backs) and Nathan Smith (forwards). If we’re doing the right things, we know we’ll lose people because they’ll kick-on, but we want to be ambitious otherwise you just end up with mediocrity. We’ve gone with guys we feel can aspire to play Premiership Rugby and then after that the next step is up to them, and if we get two or three lads who can do that every year it will show that Doncaster is in a good place. As much as we can within our finances, we want to be as professional an organisation as possible.
You started as a player in the Leeds academy under Stuart Lancaster, so do you stay in touch?
Very much so. About 18 months ago I spent time with Stuart at Leinster and he’s always been fantastic with me. I can phone him whenever I need to and he’s very passionate about the development of players and coaches. The stuff he’s doing online now and the learning those people are getting from him is invaluable. His session planning and delivery is brilliant and while a fair few people have criticised him for his spell with England, he probably got dragged away from the core coaching side of things a bit there. If you listen to someone like Johnny Sexton, he can’t speak highly enough of Stuart and his passion and success at Leinster is there for all to see.
Any other coaching mentors?
Chris Stirling was great for me when we were at Yorkshire Carnegie. He’d worked at Cornish Pirates and the Hurricanes and wasn’t a huge name here as such, but culturally and communication-wise he probably taught me the most, especially for the position I’m in now. While I consider the rugby side and actual coaching to be a strength of mine, the area in which I could potentially let myself down at times would have been dealing with people, but over the last two or three years I’ve taken a huge step forward there and Chris deserves a lot of credit for that.
Guys like Lancaster and Rob Baxter (Exeter) never had stellar playing careers but became brilliant coaches. Is that something you’d love to emulate?
Of course. I played a lot of Championship games for Doncaster and Jersey but was always realistic about never being quite big enough to make it in the Premiership. But I considered myself quite a smart player and you see that in Lanny, who has coached England and Leinster and is now being talked about as a Lions coach next year. Rob Baxter was another good player who never quite made it to the highest level, but he knew the game and was passionate about it – and that’s how I am. Lee Blackett’s another one and the best thing he’s proving is that there is a pathway from the Championship and people should look more at the English game rather than recruiting overseas coaches. I’m not speaking about myself here, but there are some great coaches in the Championship who don’t seem to get looked at – Mike Rayer at Bedford, Alan Paver and Gavin Cattle at Pirates, for example. These people are not just rugby coaches, they manage everything and there are many others out there. There are fantastic coaches in the league who deserve a shot and even in National One and Two, you’ll see guys working and think these guys are bloody good.
From an outside perspective, the Championship appears moribund. What’s your view of it?
I think it’s a little bit lost. It’s a hell of a competition but it just needs a bit of direction. I’d love to see the play-offs back because it gives a real buzz and creates excitement throughout the league knowing that if you’re sixth or seventh going into the last weekend, you can potentially still make the top four and have a crack at winning it. We know the situation around funding but the Championship does need to be funded better because there are some fantastic coaches and players who, if the Premiership clubs start seeing it, could make the step up more often than they do.
How about binning the Championship Cup and reverting to 14 or 16 teams in tier two?
That’s a really good idea. You’ve got Rosslyn Park, Blackheath, Rams, Darlington, Plymouth and Moseley – fantastic clubs with good infrastructures. I played in the old First Division when there were 16 teams and that was a good competition. I’d definitely be open to doing that and encouraging those ambitious sides.
