“I’ll live or die by the results”

Fabrice Landreau

“I had a very good relationship with Fabrice but when you’re only the head coach working under a director of rugby, it’s not your project. Now it is mine, and it’s important for me now I have full control that I do it my way. I’m enjoying it, it’s a huge extra workload, and I’ll live or die by the results at the end of the day. But I am enjoying it.”

Only three new players

“I’m in my fifth season here and historically we have gone out and got ten to twelve players, and I don’t see any long-term plan with that. We targeted guys who really fitted in with what we needed.”

Sisa Waqa

“Someone like Sisa Waqa – we had a guy called Alapati Ratini who blossomed under us but unfortunately had lifestyle issues so we had to sack him. We hadn’t replaced him with an X-factor finisher out wide. Waqa, who I’ve been tracking for a few years and tried to sign a few years ago but we couldn’t get him out of his contract with the Storm, has played a lot of rugby union before he crossed codes, so it’s not like a Sam Burgess situation. He knows the game and is finding his feet pretty quickly, and he’ll give us something different to last year.”

Aly Muldowney

“We signed Aly Muldowney from Connacht and again while he might not be that well-known, he was probably the form second row in the PRO12 last year. We have a similar attacking system to Connacht where our locks are prominent in the middle of the field and he was a guy recruited to fit into the structure.”

David Mélé

“And the last guy was David Mélé, arriving via Perpignan, Leicester and Toulouse. He didn’t play a lot last year but I remember him from his time at Leicester and speaking to Geordie Murphy, they gave him big raps in terms of his professionalism and his character. Because we play a very structured game, having someone like him who has been to an English club and worked in that environment, he gives us a different profile to our other high-quality scrum-half in Charl McLeod. With David and Charl, we can now alter our structure in the middle of the game whereas last year we didn’t have the capacity to do that. I’d be surprised if all three of those guys didn’t play a whole load of minutes for us. We feel there’s more potential in our group and our prerogative is to get that out of him.”

Top 14

“The league is getting a lot more professional. In my first couple of years it was easier for the smaller clubs to win at home. The big clubs didn’t have the same depth as they do now, so they were really strong, but they would send weaker teams away and it was easier to win. Now with the big squads at the Toulons, Montpelliers, the Racings… I spoke to Ronan O’Gara yesterday and his second-string backline is phenomenal! That’s the way the league has gone.” 

“Those clubs are tooled up now to play Champions Cup and Top 14, which is a longer league than the PRO12 and Premiership, and they’ve really gone out and bought in depth. French clubs have started to do a lot better in Europe than they historically did, compared to when the Irish teams were dominating.”

Young players

“While it was horrible – I know they’re better players now. What it did for those younger players was make them realise the difference between Espoirs rugby and the Top 14. I’ve noticed they are different animals now in pre-season, with a better work ethic. I wouldn’t want to re-live that period ever, but the advantage was that the guys who played at the end of the season are still with us and the younger guys have had a taste of what it takes.”

Stade Français

“They struggled to deal with that Top 14 success and to get back into the same frame of mind, but they’re still a good side. The hard thing for me is they’ve only played one friendly, losing heavily to Toulon, making it hard for us to predict where they are going to be. They had a pretty horrendous season given the quality they have. But you would imagine they will be a lot better.”

Target of the season

“In Midi Olympique all the coaches have a go at predicting who will finish where, and they opted for us to go down. I know our group work a lot harder and smarter than we did last year, and that when they majority of our squad are fit and ready to go we can beat anybody. We won’t set any targets, but I’m hopeful if we can improve and get everything right we can be around the top six, but there’s a lot of rugby to play first.”