How Steve Borthwick rebuilt Leicester’s dynasty with prayer meetings, saunas and chocolate
Alex Lowe says the former England captain has restored arguably the biggest name in club rugby to their former heights
Halfway up the stairs to the gym at the Leicester Tigers training ground is a television screen that has been playing clips of Saracens players on a loop all week. There are others placed strategically around the building doing the same, supplying reminders of key opposition threats to reinforce the game plan for Saturday’s Gallagher Premiership final. “It’s subconscious learning,” one player said, and it has been this way all season; symbolic of the attention to detail that Steve Borthwick has used to lift the club off its knees.
Borthwick, who cut his coaching teeth under Eddie Jones with Japan and England, took charge of the ten-times champions in 2020. The fallen giants had virtually hit rock-bottom. Leicester finished 11th in 2018-19, above only Newcastle Falcons, and would have been relegated the next season had Saracens not been deducted 105 points for salary-cap offences.
“I was excited about coming here because it’s rare you get the opportunity to try to lift the biggest club from where it was and try to do something special,” Borthwick told The Times. “Being brutally honest, I didn’t expect what I found. Maybe I was naive.”
Borthwick and Andrea Pinchen, the chief executive, have guided the club through a turbulent 21 months, dealing with contract wrangles, the departure of leading players such as Manu Tuilagi and a salary-cap inquiry. Based on the pair’s three-year plan, Leicester are ahead of schedule. Borthwick has recruited a team of outstanding coaches and promoted a new generation of exciting players. Tigers became the first team to spend an entire season top of the Premiership. This will be their first final since 2013.
Collapse of a dynasty
During their record run of nine consecutive appearances in the Twickenham final between 2005-13, Leicester fell into the habit of booking the team’s travel, their preferred hotel in southwest London and a corporate hospitality tent early in the season. Fans would do the same, snapping up early tickets to the big dance, certain their team would always be there. But no dynasty lasts for ever.
Leicester have not been back to the final since winning their tenth title — and their eighth in 15 years — against Northampton Saints in 2013. Tigers lost four consecutive Premiership play-off games as their dominance began to crumble and then, in 2018, failed to make the play-offs at all, triggering a collapse.
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Richard Cockerill, who had delivered three titles, was succeeded by Aaron Mauger, Matt O’Connor and then Geordan Murphy as Leicester rattled through four different head coaches/directors of rugby in less than two years. All had close ties with the club, but none were able to arrest the slide.
For Dan Cole, a 14-year veteran who has played more than 200 Premiership games and won three titles, the lowest moment came towards the end of that 2018-19 season, when Tigers were locked in a relegation battle with Newcastle. The campaign had begun with O’Connor being sacked after one game.
“About two or three weeks before we played Newcastle away in a relegation clash, we played Northampton at home on a Friday night and got beaten,” Cole said.
“I remember sitting in the changing room and thinking, ‘We are stuffed. Everyone has thrown everything into it, we are trying as hard as we can and we are not getting the results. And it’s been the case for several weeks.’”
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Tigers managed to scrape a 27-22 win against Newcastle. “That result kept us up,” Cole said. “But since then we have built back up.”
They have done so by using the pandemic to reset the whole club. It was a painful process at times, but a necessary one. Leicester were too wedded to the past, clinging to a belief that what built their success once would work again. “The mistake was always turning to ex-Tigers [as head coach or director of rugby]. We needed new outside voices,” a club source said.
The rebuild
It was an open secret during the 2019 World Cup in Japan that Borthwick, the England forwards coach, was bound for Leicester. By the time he eventually started work, in July 2020, the country was in lockdown. Borthwick walked right into a contract storm, with 25 per cent pay cuts being implemented across the league and the salary cap dropping from £6.4 million to £5 million.
Tuilagi and Kyle Eastmond were among five players who refused new deals and were released. Ellis Genge and George Ford held out until the last moment. The loss of Tuilagi was hugely emotional, given his close family ties with the club, but it was the best thing for Leicester.
Tuilagi is a world-class player but he was expensive and so often absent with England or through injury. His departure allowed Leicester to move on — cutting another link to the past — and rebalance their squad.
Jordan Taufua, signed as a marquee player, and Tomas Lavanini, the underperforming Argentina lock, were believed to have cost £1 million a year between them. Both found new clubs in France.
Twelve of the team Borthwick selected for his first game in charge, against Exeter Chiefs in August 2020, are no longer at Leicester. It was a turbulent, intense time but vital in Borthwick’s bid to construct a squad of committed players, epitomised by individuals such as Julian Montoya, Jasper Wiese, Guy Porter, Harry Potter and Richard Wigglesworth.
Burns’s return, as well as providing high quality cover, restored an element of laughter and levity to the dressing room
“When I joined I showed the players a Kubler Ross change curve and said to them, ‘I don’t know where the team is on here,’ ” Borthwick said. “I didn’t know whether we were still on the way down, at the bottom or whether we’d started on the way up.
“Very simply, I wanted to lay out a direction of how we were going to play and how we were going to train — and let’s work unbelievably hard to try to get up this curve as quickly as we can. That was our responsibility.”
Borthwick lived up to his message by turning down an opportunity to be on the British & Irish Lions coaching team last year because he would have missed too much of pre-season. If he was demanding dedication, he had to show it.
Then came the salary-cap investigation, which resulted in a fine of £309,841.06 but had the potential to undermine a project built on trust and integrity. Even though the transgressions predated the Borthwick-Pinchen regime, he was worried. “I would be lying if I said there weren’t moments when you had dark thoughts about what the ramifications were going to be.”
Although the pandemic forced the club to make 30 people redundant as they sought to stay afloat, some have been rehired and the process triggered a desire to become a more people-first club. All staff members, from club shop workers to the chief executive, are welcome to join team meetings and will be introduced. A weekly prayer group has been set up for players; parents have been invited in to watch training; children have been welcomed into the changing room for chocolate after matches.
When Leicester put together their bid for a government loan during the pandemic, the local MP was surprised to discover how much the club invested in the local community; in hospitals and in helping schools in deprived areas.
“For us, lockdown gave us the opportunity to really stop and have a look at everything that we were doing — to do more of what was good and reset a whole lot that wasn’t good,” Pinchen said.
Borthwick was shocked by the state of the training base when he arrived. Gym equipment was broken and the facility was not set up as he felt it should be.
Money was tight — even scraping pennies together to bring in more gym mats and apparatus was tough — but improving the medical and recovery facilities was a priority, including the installation of a sauna.
The players were based in a different building to the coaches, which created an unhealthy divide and discouraged communication. Borthwick changed the layout of the building to bring everyone together, scrapping designated car-parking spaces and clamping down hard on every element of what he felt was disrespectful or unprofessional behaviour. “You are the standards you walk past,” he would say.
The white boards in the corridor, which were liable to feature crude jokes, are now used for more constructive purposes. Everything about the environment — from the screens showing clips to installations celebrating in-game achievements — is designed to drive performance and generate a unity of purpose. Freddie Burns was brought back to Leicester, not only because he offered useful cover for Ford and Freddie Steward but because he was an engaging personality; he has brought levity and laughter to the group. Leicester has a reputation for being a serious and earnest, as does Borthwick. But more than anything, he wants energy givers. “When he walked into the place two years ago, it was full of energy takers,” a source said. “He will not take them back there.”
Montoya is another giver. The Argentina hooker, voted player of the year by the fans and the squad, was given a week off before an away game at Harlequins, and he was furious. He came into training every day. He did not take part but he was there, on the sidelines, involved, supportive. Porter has been offered a more lucrative contract to return to Australia, potentially opening the door to international rugby, but wants to stay.
Those characters were bolstered by a richly promising class of academy talent in Steward, Dan Kelly, Jack van Poortvliet, James Whitcombe and George Martin, all of whom have flourished in the environment. Steward is close to being the best full back in the world. Van Poortvliet is on a trajectory that could take him to the World Cup with England.
The coaching
Borthwick is the oldest coach at the club, at just 42. He has built around him a young, respected management team, with Kevin Sinfield, Richard Wigglesworth, Aled Walters, Brett Deacon, Matt Smith and Tom Harrison. Wigglesworth, 39, is particularly impressive, contributing fully as both a coach and a player without missing a beat. He holds the group’s attention when he speaks, delivering his message with clarity and a flick of humour. Harrison, 31, has done wonders with the scrum. Walters won the World Cup with South Africa and is the high-energy head of physical performance. He is also a mean darts player.
“I’m not afraid to surround myself with people who have more knowledge in areas than I do,” Borthwick said. The atmosphere he creates in the coaching room is collaborative, handing the other coaches a freedom to challenge, to test his ideas and suggest their own.
“He’s one of the best leaders I’ve worked with, if not the best,” Sinfield, 41, said, which is quite some compliment from the former Great Britain rugby league international. “He’s driven, he’s smart and probably the biggest compliment I can pay him is that he cares a lot.”
Borthwick has a voracious appetite for improvement and is not a great sleeper. Every car journey is an opportunity for analysis, whether of an opponent or looking for trends in the French ProD2. He has engaged Scott Simon, a former marine who works as a consultant with England, to improve his leadership and that of his senior players.
The crux of Borthwick’s coaching style is detail, as it was when he played. Nothing is wasted. Clarity and purpose have been the two buzz words attached to his regime.
When Borthwick says that his mind has already ticked over to the next game within minutes of the final whistle, it is no exaggeration. By the time the players come back in on a Monday, the messaging and the plan for the next week is already set, with the detail thrashed out in 7.30am meetings with his coaches.
There is a clarity and a simplicity to the way Leicester play that is underpinned by information from the data analytics consultancy Oval Insights. It may not be pretty to everyone — they kicked 75 per cent of possession in the semi-final against Northampton — but it is effective because everyone is operating on the same page. “There are tiny details from Steve, down to foot position in a maul. Everything we do has a purpose that relates to the game,” Cole said. “There were times when you would do a warm-up because it was what had been done in the past, or the schedule was the schedule because it has been for the past 15 years.
“Steve was not beholden to that. One of the great things about Steve is that he understands how Leicester play, how it connects the fans, how it connects the city, how it connects the county. But he has also come in with an immense knowledge and he has blended the two. Steve does a great job of making the game simple for us.”
The big dance
It has been nine long years but Leicester are finally going back to the ball. For a player such as Cole, and the thousands of long suffering fans, Saturday could be a redemption story. But Steward was only 12 when Tigers won that 2013 final; he is the fresh face of a new Leicester generation.
Borthwick was captain of Bath and of Saracens, where he was instrumental in helping the London club carve out their Premiership dynasty as the third great English club powerhouse of the professional era. His mission now is to take the first back to No 1.
“I have played at two other clubs and the size of this place dwarfs them; the passion the supporters have,” Borthwick said.
“There is obviously excitement around the group and that is natural and brilliant. I am so happy for our supporters and the people who saw the club through very difficult circumstances. And I am really happy for the players - but quite clearly we still have a job to do. I am not bothered about what happened in the past. I am not bothered about the months ahead. Let’s be the best version of ourselves today.”
Always a Wasp
Topic: Times article on Borthwick and the Tigers revival - well worth a read (Read 480 times)