Connacht Team Talk Thread VI - Some like it TOH

Interesting read on the premiership salary cap and player incomes.

https://media-cdn.cortextech.io/b64ee24f-dd74-4648-a7a2-47ea3f4c3559.pdf

No surprise that all the nasty little mouthy hobbits get paid the least 🙂

From RugbyPass today.

Former Ireland centre and Lions tourist Jared Payne, who is an assistant coach with URC rivals the Scarlets, has emerged as the new favourite to take over as Connacht boss.

New Zealand-born Payne, 39, moved into coaching with Ulster in 2018 after being forced into retirement when he failed to recover from an injury suffered on the 2017 Lions tour to his homeland.

He spent a year working in France for Clermont Auvergne after leaving Ulster in 2022 and was placed in interim charge when Jono Gibbes left, and he is known to be highly thought of by IRFU performance director David Humphreys.

I really like the Scarlets attack and I think he's by all accounts a very good coach and well regarded by the players. Had we not signed Rod Seib and we were signing Jared as our backs coach id be 100% happy no actually id be ecstatic.

My main issue around the head Coach roles is that it appears we are unable to meet the financial demands of guys who have the necessary experience so we then have to take a small gamble on guys on the way up ( hopefully).

I would prefer that type of appointment than a guy looking for a coaching life raft.

Still think Dan Mc would be a good fit but I'd happily get on board with Jared.

We don't really know the extent of the hiring process and are unlikely to ever know. But to assume it's a botched process because we don't know is a little tin hat imo.

I believe that there are a lot of highly committed people working for both the irfu and Connacht who have far more skin in the game than any of us fans. I think they will do the very best they can to get the best candidate they can afford.

Well Scarlets are doing well with a reduced squad and budget. Payne is part of that coaching team. It just might be a good fit.

"Theres highly committed people working in every job it doesn't mean they are best placed to make important decisions."

Who do you suggest should make the decision so if not the highly committed people who work for the organizations involved?

There's no guarantee of success in a hiring process. Anyone who has ever hired through any process knows it's a lottery.

Has Humphreys got an input in who we take on now? It would be ridiculous if he did.

Why? That's his job.

A lot of those appointments are going back over a decade. McFarland is gone for over a decade. There was lots of success stories around then coaching wise but of late we have at best a mixed record in recruitment and a terrible record in retention of coaches.

We undoubtedly made some good appointments in more recent times too like Senekal and we brought through coaches from the academy like Mossie Lawlor but they didn't wait around long.

Some of our coaches are promising given the right setup as shown by Ulster being willing to snap up Mark Sexton but it seems that promising coaches don't feel they can realise their potential at Connacht which is a problem.

Yet again this summer is a revolving door of coaches as has become the norm of late.

Teams with continuity within their setup are invariably the teams that are most successful but we enter next season once again in transition hoping that we hit the ground running rather than having any confidence we will.

Like you say every appointment is a gamble and every team gets some wrong but with every gamble you make you want to reduce the risk of it being a failure as much as you can.

When the ordinary supporter knows that an appointment is going to be a failure and you give that head coach a 3 year deal, it would be foolish to think that the current recruitment process doesn't needs to be reviewed.

The IRFU 100% decided the Cullen would be Leinsters head coach

I would be confident that Leinster decided who the head coach was going to be. If you want to believe otherwise you are also entitled to your opinion.

So if we end up with another crap coach us fans demand that Humphreys loses his job?

That's fine we obviously just fundamentally disagree on this which is fair enough. Not trying to be hostile.

In terms of continuity the point I was making (probably badly) is that we are churning through coaches like there's no tomorrow and we aren't building strong fundamentals as a result as we are tearing up the script every other season. When you look at the 22/23 coaching team if you exclude Eric in the academy all that remains in Tucker. Its a long list of different voices the players have been listening to over the last few seasons but with no real continuity in any area.

We've been through a world of different coaches since the 5 you listed and that needs to be our focus. 3 of those 5 weren't head coaches.

What has happened in the short-medium term past is what's relevant to the current team and it's decline / stagnation. The point you make about successes does make sense though. Those coaches were with Connacht for an extended period and we got the benefits of that but I doubt anyone who was involved in upgrading Dan McFarland to assistant is still in a decision making role on the Connacht side of things. Carolan was in coaching in Connacht for years almost since the academy began I think and is a good example of how that continuity helped also. Probably Gerry Kelly and the board at the time brought them in and that's ancient history at this stage.

There's a world of difference between building continuity as to what we are trying to do as a province like in the examples above and making a decision to hire an unsuitable head coach on a long term deal just because he's cheap and he's in the building already. Even doing that it was clear that to have any chance of even keeping us ticking over that Wilkins needed someone above him who knew the game. This is where I hope in time Millard will begin to put some structure to the chaos and we'll have a long term coaching strategy and a coaching team with defined roles again rather than the piece meal patchwork approach of recent times.

Aside from Wilkins, Keane was obviously a very knowledgeable rugby man and had a good CV but if his job interview was anything like the interviews he gave as Connacht coach in particular post Cardiff 2017 you'd have to question who was doing that interview.

Friend was generally positive but hardly an unqualified success either. Undoubtedly a nice man with great charm who has a good philosophy on the game and indeed life but if we are being pragmatic we definitely didn't have a hard edge under him and that has continued into Wilkins tenure. As examples, the lack of structure from a defensive perspective, the feeling that the players didn't want to have to do the dirty side of the game, the mid game meltdowns etc. are all recurring trends.

I hope that Millard coming in is an admission from the Connacht hierarchy that what we have been doing hasn't been working and that we need someone with a suitable background overseeing the playing side of things. He'll need time to put a structure to that. In the meantime lets see what the next few weeks throws up.

Decided would be a no. They can make a recommendation but as its an IRFU funded position, the final call rests with them.

There would be very little point in the IRFU having a High Performance Director who has "ultimate responsibility for the delivery of integrated high-performance systems for the benefit of Irish Rugby, with world-class elite player development pathways, world-class coaching, world-class support, all delivering consistent and sustained performance by the National Teams through excellence and innovation" if he doesn't have a say in who is coaching the playing pool for the Men's XV who are keeping the lights on in the IRFU.

I do think that a new coach will be announced for Connacht sooner rather than later.

With the IRFU having appointed McMillan in the past couple of months, they know exactly what coaches are out there and are available