If a dog bites a man it’s not a story. If a man bites a dog it’s a story. If that man is Brian O’Driscoll and he bites hard on an Irish province the marks will stay long enough that people will sit up and take notice.
O’Driscoll caused a storm last week when he referred to Ulster as a ‘basket case’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong.
It’s undoubtedly been a tough season for the northern province as they’ve dealt with the fallout of a high profile rape trial, the loss of a coach, the loss of another coach, the loss of Champions Cup rugby, the loss to Zebre, the loss of a PRO14 quarter-finals place on Saturday and the loss of one of their best players in Charles Piutau next season. That’s a lot of losses to endure.
It’s far from an ideal situation to walk into for new head coach Dan McFarland but it’s still a job that is attractive to those that are looking to make a name for themselves as a head coach.
Joe Schmidt was only ever an assistant coach before he took Leinster to two Heineken Cup wins.
Johann van Graan was a video analyst and then a forwards coach before he took Munster to a Champions Cup semi-final in his first season in Limerick.
McFarland has spent a lot of the last 12 years working as an assistant with Connacht, Glasgow and Scotland but now he will take the reins of Ulster in what will be his first head coaching role.
Who knows how he will fare as Ulster’s new head coach, but what we do know is this; Ulster have gone through nine coaches in the last 17 years.
They have not qualified for the Champions Cup knockout stages since 2014.
They have not won a PRO rugby title since 2006.
They lost three consecutive PRO12 semi-finals in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
They have faltered, stumbled and imploded at so many points over the last decade that they’re almost impossible to trust in big games but what they do have is players. They have some good players.
They have a British and Irish Lions second row in Iain Henderson. They have possibly one last season left in Ireland captain Rory Best.
They have one of the best young prospects in world rugby in Jacob Stockdale. They have Jordi Murphy and Marty Moore coming in next season. They had nine players in the Ireland U20’s squad for the Six Nations.
They have tools there that they can work with but McFarland needs to echo stability instead of further chaos in what is a critical juncture for the club.
The former Connacht assistant will inherit a squad that has banded together through one of the most high profile cases in Irish sporting history.
The Ulster players rallied through a storm of attention. Darren Cave and John Cooney were both quite vocal in their defence of the province while Stockdale labeled O’Driscoll’s ‘basket case’ comments as ridiculous.
There’s some fight left in the playing group but a lot of Ulster’s problems this season – at least the issues that have nothing to do with maul defence or a malfunctioning line-out – have come from organisational decisions.
The banning of news journalists from their press conferences was not a rugby decision but it helped keep a non-rugby story alive that desperately needed to be addressed by the organisation.
The revocation of Paddy Jackson’s and Stuart Olding’s contracts was not a rugby decision but a choice made by Ulster and the IRFU. However, their statement as to why the players were let go by the club was vague and left a lot to the imagination when the reasoning should have been clear and concrete from the beginning.
Similarly, Ulster’s decision to let Shane Logan address the criticism surrounding his tenure as the province’s CEO – via the club’s own social media channel – was one bad idea that was then compounded by another bad idea when they released that video just 49 minutes after Ireland defeated Scotland to set up a Grand Slam decider with England.
Jacob Stockdale took O’Driscoll’s ‘basket case’ comments personally but when you fail to address criticism on an open platform, when you ban journalists from press conferences, when you release videos less than an hour after the national team sets up a Grand Slam decider and when two coaches leave in the one season… you can forgive O’Driscoll for not viewing the club as a beacon of stability.
McFarland has to somehow find a way of getting the province back to competing for PRO14 and Champions Cup titles again.
Mark Anscombe, Neil Doak, Les Kiss and Jono Gibbes couldn’t find a way to get Ulster there and McFarland will be judged on if the club can start to win those games and not lose them, but the rest of the issues have to be dealt with by management.
With Moore and Murphy arriving next season, and Marcell Coetzee potentially returning from injury, Ulster should have some better players at their disposal but they’ll still be viewed as a ‘basket case’ by some until they start making better decisions.
