SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTS

Telfer hits out at Hadden's selection policy
RICHARD BATH ([email protected])
WHEN it comes to rugby, Jim Telfer is more like a New Zealander than most Kiwis. Ruggedly no-nonsense when it comes to playing the game, entirely without sentiment when it comes to analysing it, the man is a self-confessed obsessive who holds the relentless All Black credo in awe.

Scotland's greatest coach happily admits that he has devoted almost half a century to trying to beat the men in black, all to no avail - unless the aim was to amass a greater understanding than anyone else in the Northern Hemisphere of why the men from the Land of the Long White Cloud are so consistently outstanding. And none more so than the class of 2007.

"This is as good a New Zealand team as has ever represented their country," he says. "They don't have a Lomu or a Cullen, and in 1987 they had some better individual players, but collectively they're better and have more strength in depth. There are no weaknesses and the only team that can beat them is South Africa, although they [New Zealand] will pressurise Steyn and Pietersen and will know that Butch James is the Springboks' weak point. The All Blacks front five is far more mobile than the South Africans. That will be the difference."

One thing you can rely on with Telfer - and this is a very Kiwi thing - is that if you ask him a straight question, he will give you a straight answer.

He's talking as if the All Blacks are already in the final: does that mean that Scotland have no chance, that they should give up the ghost even before the match starts, as the naming of a second-string team suggests they already have?

"I would have put out a full team to try and get some momentum, to build up a head of steam. There's not a great difference between most of the first-choice team and the second-choice side, but psychologically it will make all the difference to be seen as a second team by the press and spectators. This is a Test match, and one against the All Blacks, a match in which you are representing your country, so yes I would have played our best players. They've made a great play of wanting the crowd to get behind the team, but how can that happen if they concede before kick-off?

"The mindset that says we can't beat the All Blacks has come in over the last 20 years, but they're still flesh and blood, men like you and me. I happen to think Scotland's first-choice front five would have gone well against the All Blacks, which will give them a platform to work from. I've been really impressed by [Jim] Hamilton's appetite for work, even if, like Nathan Hines, he's not an athlete and won't be found outside the 10-metre channel. Nor, for that matter, will Euan Murray. Compare Hamilton and Hines to Robinson, Williams and Jack, who are all very mobile, or [Euan] Murray to their front row, who can all give and take a pass and take on a man if they have to. The All Blacks have the best front five in the tournament.

"The thing about teams like the All Blacks is knocking them out of their stride, and if they have a weakness then it is at the lineout. One thing about this team is that Scott Murray and Scott MacLeod may be able to exploit that weakness. If the All Black lineout goes well, so does the team, but neither Melamu nor Oliver are great throwers-in.

"Scotland have to target them in all areas: at the scrums, around the fringes, by double-teaming and isolating McCaw, by competing really hard at the lineouts. We have to look to pressurise them in all facets of the game. We also have to try and play our own game and play with a bit of confidence.

"I think we're good enough to go through the forwards, and we've got a lot of experience so we shouldn't be overawed. We need to mix it up and try and give our wings a run. We've got a big presence in our back three, so we've got to give them room and time to work.

"We've also got to look to our creative players to make things happen because the All Blacks will always put points on the board. Ally Hogg is the best rugby player we have in the forwards. He and Mike Blair usually make us tick; both have phenomenal workrates and link play, so Scotland will need to think how they play without them."

And he's off. Few facts or memories escape Telfer's steel trap of a mind.

Now 67, he's still coaching at Melrose and from his Borders bunker he has clearly given the matter of how to beat this All Blacks side a great deal of thought.

What follows is a meshing together of masses of contemporary detail with the instinctive knowledge gleaned from 54 years of Kiwi-watching. Telfer first came across the All Blacks when he was a 13-year-old shepherd's son in thrall to the game. Telfer remembers it like it was yesterday.

"It's fair to say that I've had a lifelong fascination with New Zealand rugby. It started in 1953 when they toured here and won easily against the Borders. They didn't come back for ten years, and then I played them twice, once when the Borders lost 8-0 to them and then for Scotland in February 1964 when they could field household names like Wilson Whineray, Colin Meads, Kel Tremain, Brian Lochore, Ken Gray and Don Clarke. I was only 23 and had no real ideas on how rugby should be coached, so I soaked it all up like a sponge."

Telfer didn't know it, but by the time he played for the Scotland team that gained an unexpected 0-0 draw against the touring Kiwis in 1964 he had already been heavily influenced by New Zealand rugby. Hawick prop Hugh McLeod had toured down under with the Lions in 1959 and had come back with ideas that would revolutionise Scottish rugby. McLeod became a teetotal fitness fanatic and, in tandem with Derrick Grant, inculcated the Green Machine with the hard-rucking, forward-oriented style of play he encountered in New Zealand. With Hawick utterly dominant, every club in the country followed their lead.

It was, however, the 1966 Lions tour of New Zealand that was to be Telfer's epiphany. It forged his rugby mindset, and in doing so dictated the path rugby north of the Border would take until Telfer finally stopped coaching Scotland four years ago. That "harrowing" 4-0 whitewash tour left an indelible imprint on the young No.8.

"What I experienced in 1966 made a real impression on me. It shaped how I thought the game should be played, especially their passion for the game. I was coaching by the age of 24 and by 1967 I was taking squad sessions for Scotland and by then I was consciously modelling myself on forwards like Meads, Tremain and Lochore because I was so impressed by their speed to the ball, by their cohesion, by their tight-knit driving. Meads was the best rugby player I've ever seen. He revolutionised forward play, running with the ball, passing out of one hand, handing off players. But they all played simple, effective rugby and lived by the motto 'go forward'. I just copied them in every way I could.

"I played 23 of the 35 games on that tour and the rugby was relentlessly physical, with the country teams all softening us up for the All Blacks. Some games were just plain dirty. Canterbury was one, and against Auckland there were running fights all game, one involving 30 players. There was so much intimidation. They thought we were soft and they were right."

Telfer has had too varied a rugby career for it to be defined by the All Blacks, yet there is a palpable sense that this is how he himself defines it. As he says with a sigh: "I've long had a very conscious desire to beat New Zealand, and not just for the Lions, but for Scotland."

The search for that catharsis has been a long, occasionally painful and always frustrating odyssey. At times it has seemed that it is his destiny to be denied. Scotland could have beaten the All Blacks in Telfer's second cap in 1964, for instance, but had to settle for a 0-0 draw. When Barry John's Lions destroyed the Blacks in 1971 it was the year after a series of injuries had finally forced Telfer to hang up his boots.

For the Melrose man, frustration was piled on frustration. In 1972 a stray pass gave the All Blacks a last-minute interception try and a 14-9 win against a side coached by Telfer; in Dunedin in 1981 wing Steve Munro was so weak from a virus that he couldn't stagger over the line to score what could have been the winning try and Scotland lost 11-4. After coaching the Lions to another 4-0 whitewash, this one even worse than 1966, Scotland took on a depleted All Blacks side at Murrayfield and after wing Jim Pollock's injury-time try drew them level at 25-25, the otherwise faultless Peter Dods' conversion missed by the width of a cigarette paper. It would have been little wonder had coach Telfer keeled over there and then.

Eden Park, Auckland, was the scene of the cruellest cut in 1990 when, after playing exceptionally well in the first Test, Scotland were denied in the second by a mind-numbingly poor decision from referee Derek Bevan after leading Grant Fox's men 18-6 before half-time.

For Telfer, his last real chance to lay the bogey came at Murrayfield two World Cups ago. "In 1999 I thought we could have beaten the All Blacks. We'd just won the Five Nations and had come very close to beating South Africa in the pool stages, and it was pissing wet on the night of the match, which I thought would help us. But John Leslie had hurt his leg and Mehrtens was outstanding. They scored three tries in the opening quarter, and although we played magnificently after that, the game was over by half-time."

After 40 years and countless near misses, Telfer is happy that he's given his all, given it a lash every time he's faced down the men with the silver ferns. This afternoon he'll just be hoping Hadden's men can say the same.

This article was posted on 23-Sep-2007, 06:57 by Hugh Barrow.