The early season ramblings of shocked and stunned Director of Senior Rugby
08/09/06
I suppose it was my own fault for muttering into my beer all last season, actually I didn’t buy any beer, well not at the Club anyway, not you understand because I am a mean Scot, but because I was so mad at the way we played all season, that if I’d taken drink, then I might have said some things I could have regretted.
Anyway if I had allowed things to drift, I could have been a happy spectator this season, enjoying the President’s lunches, having no responsibility, except now having to live down not only being the least successful coach in the history of West Norfolk RUFC, but also missing Gerald Davies at Murrayfield in 1971!! I tried very hard to blame Darren, then Cookie, then the weather, the wind, the pitches, the dog poo at Wanstead, the pack, the back division, the injuries, my being overweight, the fact we had to play in Essex all the time, you name it I tried it!!
No they said, West Norfolk needs a Director of Senior Rugby, Darren very sensibly and after fantastic service to the club, decided to “Quit while he was ahead”, a sentence that confused me a bit at the time!! As a result I thought to myself, Director of Senior Rugby will look good on my CV. I’m not quite sure what a 62 year old dentist needs a CV for, a Viagra yes, that would make far more sense!
Anyway I discovered that after the AGM, I had this really imposing Title of ‘Director of Senior Rugby’, but absolutely zero clue about what to do next. So I asked my predecessor Darren, and he didn’t know but it looked good enough on his CV to get him promotion as a teacher, and he suggested I asked Steve Worrell. So I asked Steve, and he said he only did it to impress North Walsham so they would give him a job coaching their Senior side, and it worked because they did, and he said he was pleased to go!!. Well I don’t want to teach, and I doubt my rugby credentials would impress anyone enough to let me loose as a coach again after season 05-06!!
When I asked what the job spec was they kind of mumbled into their beer, and went away to talk to someone else, and then they kept looking at me, and grinning inanely, and talking behind their hands like they didn’t want me to hear.
When you get a lot of back slapping from ex players, you begin to realise how pleased they are not to be doing this job. It does however have advantages………….. I’m still looking for them; they must be out there somewhere.
For some unaccountable reason my wife Julie and I found ourselves trying to get sponsorship for the club, because someone, I think it was the Chairman came up with this no brainer. He said why don’t we get a proper coach, and some sponsorship, and become more professional in our attitude. How dull is that, West have not spent the last twenty years going up and down the leagues like a proverbial yo-yo, trying hard to enjoy ourselves whilst Diss, Cambridge, Shelford, North Walsham, and Norwich, teams we could beat on a regular basis in the 70’s, did daft things like train together twice a week, and take the game seriously, for an ex player to make us change the habits of almost a lifetime.
He was very insistent, and when I turned up to watch the opening training session of the season in early June. I mean early June for goodness sake, lets get real, that’s when serious rugby clubs start training. The penny then dropped with me, but not as quick as it dropped with the multitude of players who had turned up for a bit of touch rugby, and a few beers, that we were about to become part of a serious professional rugby club.
Chris Bird, and Keith Ware used a devilish selection of mini hurdles, horizontal rope ladders, and fiendishly placed poles, and kept calling the whole thing SAQ’s. Frankly I thought they were mad, after all a couple of runs around the ground, a few burpees, and pyramids were good enough when I was a player, why on earth do we need all this paraphernalia? Well the players ran round the poles, passed the ball whilst hurdling, delicately placed their feet between the rope ladders, for about an hour and a half, and generally looked as if they were rehearsing for a new West End Musical!!
SAQ I quickly discovered stands for ’Sick Again Quickly’, but to add insult to injury, Keith then insisted on measuring the players fitness levels, and then embarrassing everyone, except Alex Turner the new skipper, who had cheated and started training on the first of May, by placing the results in the clubhouse for all to see. It was less than a coincidence that those players who looked a bit green after the unaccustomed exercise found their results in the red, and red means not acceptable, but at least we now had a fitness level baseline to improve from.
That’s it for this week, more news and comment coming soon from a bemused and shell shocked Director of Senior Rugby.
