The head coach never played at the highest level but has instilled confidence into the Premiership high-flyers
Owen Slot in today's Times:
The road less travelled is the one that Wasps elected to follow and it has taken them to a point where they are now considered genuine Premiership title contenders. The fork in the road is fascinating.
Back in mid-February they were tenth in the table and low on confidence; then came the change of coach. They immediately beat Saracens by 50 points and they have won all but one of their six games thereafter, the biggest statement being the kind of titanic, backs-against-the-wall, comeback victory against Bath on Monday which shouts out loud that something here is now going very right.
The coach switch was the fascinating bit. Out went Dai Young, a long-term director of rugby who had put years and loyalty and love into the club. Results were poor but not cataclysmic; it felt a bit early to make the call.
Into the head coach role came Young’s assistant coach, Lee Blackett — the man from the road less travelled. Blackett, 37, is not a former player of note; he did not play for England and did not come close. As a wing or centre he played four seasons of Premiership rugby with Leeds and was relegated in three of them.
What he has swiftly reminded us is that a good coach doesn’t have to have been a world-class player. The role model here is Rob Baxter, the Exeter Chiefs director of rugby, who never played in the Premiership. Yet Blackett happily acknowledges that a comparative lack of playing credentials had to be dealt with from the start.
“You are doing it the harder way,” he says. “You are not someone that’s played international rugby and has that natural respect, so you have to come in and earn it. I wasn’t afraid to do that.”
The hardest part in all this was not taking over at Wasps, it came seven years ago when he was 30 and was made head coach at Rotherham. He had long wanted to be a coach: when he was 18, in his last year at King Edward VII school in Lytham, he coached the under-12 B team; when he was a player at Leeds he would drive back to his old university, Sheffield Hallam, three times a week to coach the team there. But head coach at 30?
“I didn’t quite expect everything to happen so quickly,” he says.
He had joined Rotherham, in the Championship, as a player but on the promise that he could coach too. A few months in, though, the head coach resigned and he was asked to hold the reins. Alex Codling was then recruited to see out the season but because this was only a short-term appointment, Blackett was asked to oversee recruitment.
“So,” he says, “I was sitting in the dressing room next to a player having already told him he’s not staying. It was tough.”
When Blackett was then given the top job again he stopped playing. How did he transfer from being a team-mate to being their boss?
“Honesty was the biggest thing,” he says. “I asked people in the set-up before I started and the big feedback was everyone needs to know that you are the boss. I had some really good friends in that group; they needed to understand there were boundaries at times.
“You set high standards. You didn’t have to be fake. If anyone fell below those standards, I’d pick them up instantly and be relentless with it. I’d still have coffee with them, they just knew that if they stepped out of line, I’d be on them. They were grown adults, there didn’t need to be a hierarchy.”
Whatever he did, it worked. With a budget in the bottom two in the league he led Rotherham to consecutive fourth-place finishes.
That was enough to persuade Wasps to recruit him. He had never coached in the Premiership so — again — he had to win over a new audience. “Getting the leaders on your side was key,” he says. Jimmy Gopperth and Elliot Daly were a “massive help”.
What is he actually like as a coach? “I’ve asked for feedback on that,” he says — of course he has — and it is that “you make people feel confident”.
A lot of what he does has been influenced by Stuart Lancaster, the former England head coach who coached him for two season at Leeds. “He taught me the most culturally,” he says. They are still in close contact. “We speak a lot about the talent-less stuff. Stuart would want us to be the best at the work rate, the desire, and being as professional as we can.”
He also namechecks Neil Back, another Leeds coach, for “his competitive edge; he wasn’t afraid to show emotion. I am probably a bit the same”.
All of that learning and experience was put to the test back in February when Wasps decided to explore the road less travelled. When Blackett took over he identified “fear” as the biggest problem he needed to address. “The players wanted a result so badly, they put a lot of pressure on themselves and it probably affected them,” he says. “They were starting to see crowds falling; we weren’t winning at home.
“We spoke about it before the Saracens games, about not worrying about the result, thinking in the moment and enjoying it.” And with that, they won 60-10.
The return fixture today will be a further examination of Blackett’s abilities. In February, Saracens were without their international players; this time Wasps have rested a lot of first-choice players while Saracens are fully loaded.
On paper, today, Saracens look some way ahead, yet at the same time, the confidence that Blackett so values is surging. The victory over Bath, he says, was “definitely one of the best victories I’ve had as a coach”. You feel there are more to come.
Topic: How Lee Blackett got Wasps believing in themselves again (Read 1432 times)
Always a Wasp