Sunday Herald - reports

Hawks coach David Wilson is happy to be the old head on young shoulders at Scotland’s most dynamic club,

Thursday evening, a little before six o’clock, and the scenes around the Anniesland pavilion are no different from any you might find around thousands of other rugby clubs the length and breadth of Britain. Players haul their kit bags from ageing hatchbacks and stroll towards the changing rooms; officials sort out strips and discuss last weekend’s game; someone scribbles a few notes on a whiteboard in the foyer. Just the same, you would easily conclude, as everywhere else.
Except, of course, that sameness is the last thing on the Glasgow Hawks agenda. For the moment, they have the distinction of calling them selves Scotland’s champion club, but their very existence is an unequivocal statement that they like to do things their own way. Since their formation in 1997, through the inspired amalgamation of the first-team squads of Glasgow Accies and GHK, the Hawks have been beacons of excellence and original thinking, but even that brief incarnation has been characterised by a theme of perpetual renewal.

Yet, while their followers and admirers had grown accustomed to the annual talent exodus which saw the Hawks’ best and brightest plucked away by Scotland’s professional sides, and might even have become relaxed about the entire process, prepar ations for this season had a noticeably uncertain air as a consequence of the departure of Peter Wright, he of the convict’s closest crop and the trooper’s bluest vocabulary, to take full-time charge of the Scotland under-19 side.

The interest of every amb itious young coach would have been aroused by the vacancy Wright’s going crea ted, but it was entirely typical of the Hawks that they should turn instead to David Wilson, a coach whose most recent achievement had been to guide GHA down the releg ation staircase from the BT Premiership’s first division into the second.

In his defence, Wilson had spent the previous few seasons leading GHA on their heady rise to the top flight, and they surrendered that status only after crippling injury problems and other assorted difficulties forced them to field a side last season that had a distinctly youthful look. Yet the 41-year-old Kelvinside Academy PE teacher accepts that others might look askance at a situation in which he appears to have been rewarded for a pattern of stewardship at GHA that is rarely considered as career-enhancing.

“Sure, I’d understand if some of the players here looked at what happened at GHA last season and asked why I was brought here,” shrugged Wilson when he sat down to talk. “But I hope they buy into what I’m doing and the kind of rugby I want played. From my own point of view, I’ve now got a very experienced side, not a bunch of boys, so there can be no excuses from me.

“In Peter and Rob Ackerman, I had two British Lions as my predecessors, and they were very successful here. Peter, in particular, brought the focus and intensity the side needed. If I can build on what he did and take it forward then hopefully we can continue to be a force.

“But I’ve already made it clear to the lads that we’re really going to have to work for it. There’s a lot of pressure because there’s a burden of expectation and the bar has been set pretty high, but I told them before last week’s game that there would be no talk of winning championships around the team. What they’ve done in the past is great, but it’s history.”

Famously, history is a commodity that is not particularly plentiful around the eight-year-old Hawks. For the most part, they have made a virtue of that shortcoming, evident in the freshness and willingness to innovate that pervades the culture of the club, but the drawback is that they lack the well of experience that provides a sense of continuity and a supply of ready labour to more established sides. Wilson, however, is one of that rare breed of individuals who are entitled to call themselves old boys around the club.

Granted, he might have been overshadowed by such more prominent figures as Glenn Metcalfe, Tommy Hayes and Derek Stark in the Hawks’ early years, but the club’s coaches of that time still had enough faith in Wilson’s talent to name the stocky centre as captain for two of the three seasons he played for them.

Having just been rejected as too long in the tooth by Currie, where he had spent the seven previous seasons, Wilson’s rejuvenation at the Hawks was a remarkable Indian summer for a career that was only ended when an arm injury finally persuaded him to hang up his boots five years ago.

It is easy to sense that he would take just as much satisfaction from silencing other doubters over the weeks and months ahead, so it was a significant dugout debut for Wilson that his first game in charge was a 47-17 victory over Melrose at the Greenyards, a ground where they have struggled in the past.

Yet at the risk of mixing avian metaphors, there will be no counting chickens by the Hawks on the basis of that one win, for Wilson was anxious to place a large asterisk against the result.

“Without insulting Melrose, they weren’t very good against us,” he explained. “I know that better sides could have given us a few problems. Still it was good to go down there and get a win because it’s a place that has caused them a few problems in other seasons.”

Having witnessed the galvanising effect of the Wright regime, Wilson is determined that the Hawks should retain their hard-nosed aspect. Yet he still has the heart of a back, so his instinctive wish is to see more movement and fluidity in their play.

“I think sometimes they’ve been a bit restrained on that front,” he said. “But we’re not going to go out and throw the ball about willy-nilly. It’s more about creating a balance in the team and a more holistic approach to how we play rugby. You don’t do that by just giving the ball to the backs all the time, you do it by improving the decision- making of the side.”

Wilson is clearly a strong-willed individual, but perhaps the most surprising aspect of him is that he is also, in many senses, a rugby traditionalist. While working for the club that has generally been seen as representing the Scottish club game’s cutting edge, he is scathing about rival sides whose recipes for success involve nothing more than recruitment drives in the southern hemisphere.

“Watsonians have been bringing in players, so have Currie and Stirling County,” he said with obvious contempt. “Long term, what’s the benefit of that?”

And at a club that others might dismiss as a transit camp, on the basis that it primarily serves the interests of the individual who is seeking the shop window that might earn a professional contract, Wilson is keen to proclaim the value of those who also serve, that core of Hawks players who are satisfied that playing for the side is an end in itself and not a stepping stone to somewhere else.

“I think those guys are important, really important,” he said. “You get a guy like [loose forward] Neil McKenzie, who’s been here a few seasons now, knocking his pan in week after week. Blokes like that aren’t doing it because they’ve got high professional amb itions, but because they want to be the best they can be at the amateur level.”

The Hawks have been that for the past two seasons. Under Wilson’s guidance, the early indications are that their reign could be set to continue. More of the same, in other words.

This article was posted on 4-Sep-2005, 08:18 by Hugh Barrow.