SUNDAY TIMES REPORTS
MARK PALMER

Glasgow’s coach Sean Lineen remains upbeat despite the uncertainty that is surrounding the team’s very existence


It won’t have escaped the more desperate among the Warriors support that Sean Lineen, the latest individual to cast himself as the club’s redeemer, was born on Christmas Day. While it is tempting to suggest he might struggle to find three wise men in a playing sense around him at Firhill, Lineen at least appreciates that after the revelation must come the miracle, and thinks he knows how to provide it. His first task is to deliver Glasgow from temptation, that which
SRU chief executive Gordon McKie’s trigger finger must feel with every passing loss of points and purpose in Maryhill.



When the 44-year-old agreed to replace Hugh Campbell six weeks ago, he was not made aware that Scotland’s professional tier was about to be drilled under quite so violently, with McKie’s admission that one of the sides, quite possibly Glasgow, might not see next season. You could say he didn’t sign up for this, but defeatism is never something Lineen would put his name to either.

“The speculation about the team’s survival makes this job (Glasgow) an even bigger ask than it was already. But the challenge is to get it right, and I’m confident that I can; why else would I have taken the job?,” he shrugs. “I trust Gordon and what he’s doing. He’s had to make the sort of hard decisions that people before him just didn’t make. I’m confident that we’ll attract the sort of backing to still have three pro teams next year, and I genuinely think this is the start of a long climb back for the game.”

The sentiment behind those words is that this is a situation where everyone could yet be a winner, something of a novelty for most of the Glasgow squad. Lineen has taken charge of a team seriously on the slide, both down the league table and, crucially, in the Murrayfield boardroom’s respect. Last season they finished sixth in the Celtic League, ahead of their Scottish siblings and at least three better-resourced sides. This year, they will surely miss out on Heineken Cup qualification and could finish bottom of the table, with a trip to fellow strugglers Connacht still to come after this evening’s home game against second-placed Leinster and the visit of Llanelli Scarlets on Friday.

More perturbing than these material losses has been the visible caving in of confidence and charisma, attitude and ardour that were the stamp of the side on all of its better days last year. “The place has gone completely flat,” reports Lineen, to whose driven persona such stupor is anathema. “We need to look at the players and the excuses that we give them for failure. Pride and passion aren’t everything, but you’ve seen with the national team that they play a huge part in the Scottish psyche. You’ve got to have that as a minimum, and we haven’t this year. That’s why the prospect of cuts is a real one. There has obviously been a lot of chat around the squad this week about what might happen; it’s the not knowing that is the hardest thing.”

Tentative talk of outside investment means that Glasgow may yet be called back from their current position halfway down the plank. It would be an act of mercy, not a statement of belief; the Warriors have already disappointed enough people and expectations. Yet while players must take responsibility for themselves, they also need the stimulus of knowing that those notionally in charge are following that same line. At Glasgow this year, that has never been unequivocally the case. In private, team members tell anecdotes that combine to point more than a handful of fingers at Campbell in terms of organisation, motivation and preparation.

“The culture in here is so poor, there is no accountability,” says Lineen, who has at least seen his men convulse into sporadic fits of fight and flair in the defeats to Ospreys, Ulster and the Dragons this past month. If his capable charisma isn’t enough to save the club in either sense, you daresay that nobody else will manage.

Grander things have been envisaged for him ever since his first tilt at serious management, an imaginative team-up with Iain Paxton at Boroughmuir, hoisted the Meggetland club out of the second division and into the winners’ enclosure of both Premiership 1 and the BT Cup. Lineen is already esteemed highly enough at Murrayfield to have been proposed as a candidate for the Scotland job during last summer’s interregnum, and would have taken over at Edinburgh next month had a need to steady the ship at Glasgow not become an outright salvage mission. All this despite his experience of professional coaching being confined to a short, now “definitely over” time as one of Frank Hadden’s deputies at national level, two-and-a-half years spent corralling the Warriors’ backline, and, occasionally, reuniting Campbell with his marbles. Expectation has wrapped itself around the 1990 grand slammer’s shoulders, a flutter of anticipation about the coach he could become. If Lineen seems almost too pleasant to have Glasgow wished upon him, it could be argued that he needs the Warriors as much as they need him. For this is the opportunity to fulfil what people have long imagined for him.

His influence is already being felt across the Glasgow operation, from the bootroom to the boardroom, where McKie has been picketed to not only keep the club afloat, but to conjure up the sort of funds required to carry out the “half dozen” signings Lineen wants to make this summer. Six players will definitely be heading in the other direction.

“It’s a real selling job trying to get people to come here, especially when they hear last Friday’s news, but I’m persistent,” smiles Lineen. “Why do players change clubs? The league, the teammates, the great facilities, the money? Glasgow doesn’t tick many boxes in there, but it’s my job to get round that. We cannot compete financially with the Welsh and Irish provinces, but it can make you look a very good coach if you can get it right without the money.”

Lineen, whose roles in the “real world” have ranged from salesman to magazine publisher via the Wellington police, would be far more at ease switching between the many hats a Scottish pro-team head coach must juggle than was Campbell, always at his most comfortable in amongst the nuts and bolts of technical coaching. “I have a lot of energy and I want to pour myself into every corner of this job,” confirms Lineen.

His vitality alone will not, however, be sufficient to make a success of a job that has already seen off four apparently well-qualified coaches. He needs others, be they the players or those Murrayfield powerbrokers hunting for coppers around the tables of the President’s Suite, to show themselves equally roused.

This article was posted on 7-May-2006, 19:22 by Hugh Barrow.