SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTED
Book review: Lion man
Published Date: 18 October 2009
By IAIN MORRISON
LION MAN ***

Ian McGeechan

Simon & Schuster, £18.99
HISTORY is written by the winners. Whoever coined that phrase might have had Ian McGeechan's new biography Lion Man in mind. The former Scotland coach is currently touring these isles top to tail, flogging the book hard, like some double glazing salesman. Although it's a perfectly good read there are no killer revelations and, of course, the publishers could have done with a series win against South Africa in the summer just to cement McGeechan's reputation, such as it is.

That is the abiding mystery of the man; that someone revered as a rugby genius abroad and especially in England, the land of his birth, should be widely dismissed in Scotland as someone who is only half the coach without Jim Telfer at his side, the ying to his yang. This is the key talking point about McGeechan and he, of course, ignores it altogether.

Instead the coach concentrates on his early years growing up in Yorkshire, bowling at Geoff Boycott in the cricket nets and playing rugby for Headingley before touring with the Lions as a player where we get the usual stories of Slats, Willie John, Mighty Mouse and the whole cast of characters. McGeechan seems to have been something of a goody two shoes in his playing days but, even if there are few revelations, it's all good, entertaining stuff and the author offers a rare moment of self-deprecation when he admits that, following the infamous "99" call in South Africa (when the Lions were supposed to retaliate en masse to Springbok violence], he "offered as much verbal encouragement to the forwards as possible".

McGeechan is equally good on his early years as a coach and again the 1989, 1993 and 1997 Lions tours are all explained in some depth. His tactic against the Wallabies in his first ever trip as Lions coach was to stop their classy scrum-half Nick Farr-Jones from playing: "Hit him early, hit him late, but just hit him" is the money quote. The book even carries a photograph of Farr-Jones' face, which has been hit both early and late by the looks of it.

Test match rugby is a brutal business but, after looking at Farr-Jones, it is a tad hypocritical for McGeechan to whine as he does about some of the punishment meted out in South Africa last summer.

In looking back at the most recent Lions tour McGeechan is at his self-serving worst, admitting to exactly one fault, not picking Simon Shaw earlier than he did. McGeechan's record in Test rugby speaks for itself, there is no need to dress it up, and a little more candour and a little less hyperbole would have been welcome.

On the final quarter of the second Test, when his team gave up a 19-8 lead and the series ran away from him, McGeechan has this to say: "Nothing worse has ever happened in terms of bad luck and disastrous fortune than what occurred in the second half at Pretoria". What, nothing? In the whole of history? Really!

McGeechan says little about his time as Scotland coach although understandably he talks a lot more about his first stint (1988-1993, success rate 60 per cent) than his second (2000-2003, success rate 43 per cent). He says nothing about parachuting Brendan Laney into the national team after exactly 11 days in Scotland, he declines to talk about handing Chris Paterson the fly-half shirt for the first time in a Test for the must-win match against Fiji in the 2003 Rugby World Cup and then claiming, with a straight face, that everything he had done hitherto had been leading up to that moment. He does not mention his role in selecting the disastrous Matt Williams as national coach and he deftly sidesteps the shambolic, winking, drinking 2003 World Cup campaign altogether.

These are the reasons that McGeechan's stock is considerably lower at home than elsewhere. He made a pig's ear of coaching the national squad the second time round and he made an equal hash of things when promoted, uncontested, to director of rugby. He was in that post when the old general committee decided to oust David Mackay as chairman because they didn't like the changes brought about by his chief executive Phil Anderton. McGeechan is good in the book about the "self-interest, self-serving, lack of professionalism" of the old committee but at the time, when his opinion might have made a difference, his silence was deafening.

On the same subject the coach notes, "the closer you get to a rugby field the more honest people are". McGeechan is not currently involved in rugby and he probably won't even recognise the irony of his own statement

This article was posted on 19-Oct-2009, 12:06 by Hugh Barrow.