England great: ‘Who ultimately wins a royal rumble between the international head coaches’ and the ‘flip chart plan’ that challenged the haka
Ben Youngs has imagined a Test rugby royal rumble featuring Ireland boss Andy Farrell and also investigated the England response, inset, to last month's All Blacks haka at Twickenham
Ex-England scrum-half Ben Youngs has named the Test rugby coaches he believes could fight it to the death if they were all thrown together in a ring for a wrestling-style royal rumble.
The English record caps holder this week co-hosted his For The Love Of Rugby show with Dan Cole in the company of Anthony Watson and Shaunagh Brown, the ex-women’s team player.
Reflecting on the show’s highlights from 2025 during a 50-minute review, a snippet from an interview with Ireland and British and Irish Lions boss Andy Farrell ignited a discussion about who the hardest Test rugby coaches are.
There was also a look back on the most popular interview of the year, Youngs and Cole speaking with George Ford on the day after England defeated the All Blacks in November. It was a chat where the out-half explained the logic behind England’s abrasive response to the New Zealand haka.
“I’ll kick the s*** out of him…”
More of that confrontation anon, but first the idea of a rugby royal rumble between the coaches and who might triumph. Here is the conversation between Youngs and Farrell that sparked the idea.
Youngs: Has it actually dawned on you, Faz, that Owen is probably destined to go and coach and at one point you may go and coach against each other?
Farrell: Oh yeah, and I’ll kick the s*** out of him 100 per cent.
Youngs: Do you reckon you’d work out each other’s tactics quite quickly?
Farrell: Just from knowing him, I’d tell him a load of bulls*** so he gets it all wrong.
After the clip ended, this was the chat that unfolded in the FTLOR studio.
Watson: What a legend.
Youngs: Those two are definitely going to coach against each other, 100 per cent.
Brown: He just said he would kick the shit out of him, full stop, end of sentence, nothing more to add. Next question.
Cole: If you were to have all the head coaches in there and scrap, he [Farrell] would probably come out on top, wouldn’t he?
Watson: Eddie (Jones) would be up there. Apparently, he was a scrapper at Randwick. Cheiks [Michael Cheika] played with him.
Youngs: If you had a battle of the coaches right now, Shaun Edwards is definitely in there. He’s not getting out of that ring. That guy is there to the death. Big Faz, 100 per cent. Mad Mitch [John Mitchell], he’s mad for it. Heavy fatigue would get Cheik. I can see him holding onto the top rope. I reckon Razor [Scott Robertson] is coming in breakdancing and someone would just grab him and swing him out of top rope.
Cole: What about Rassie (Erasmus)?
Youngs: Out of respect, no one is touching Rassie.
Watson: Rassie would come in for the last two minutes.
Youngs: Who else? Les Kiss taking over Australia; he is going through top rope straight away. Off you go, Les. Steve (Borthwick)?
Cole: He’s staying; he’d find a way.
Youngs: He’d love it, just mauling and brawling. I don’t see Gregor Townsend lasting particularly long, to be honest, I reckon Gregor is getting dropped kicked out of the ring quite early. Fabien Galthie?
Watson: Galthie is getting cooked as well.
Youngs: Yeah, you can’t mess up them glasses. He’s actually just hopping over the rope and is opting out. Felipe Contepomi, judging by what happened in the Autumn Nations Series and losing his head, that guy is losing his head in that ring.
Brown: You’re weirdly enjoying this conversation.
Youngs: Who is the winner? Who ultimately wins a royal rumble between the international head coaches? Who honestly wins that fight? Cheik is getting amongst it, but the big guy can’t hold it in there too long, but he loves it. Shaun Edwards, John Mitchell. Biz Faz, he is a big piece of kit as well… maybe in the January special, we will do who wins.
Later in the Christmas week show, Youngs referenced how England out-half Ford was, according to FTLOR fans, by far the year’s most popular guest. They then went on to show the clip where Ford discussed the hatching of their plan for the haka and how it played out.
Youngs: It looked similar to 2019 (at the Rugby World Cup). Whose idea? What were the thoughts?
Ford: Jamie (George), Maro (Itoje) and myself got together and discussed it. Primarily, the idea was Jamie’s and he thinks about things pretty deeply. He was, ‘We need to accept the challenge and we need to send a bit of a message here ourselves as we did in 2019’. We didn’t really want to copy and paste, and it was a little bit different.
The whole thing of walking towards it was a message to us as a team, it was a message to the Twickenham fans that we are accepting this challenge, and we are going to walk towards it.
Comment: England don’t lack talent. They are learning belief, but the real test still lies ahead
Part of the plan all week was ‘we are going after you’ and it was just a bit of a statement of intent from the haka perspective that as soon as you walk towards it and you try and surround it, it was right, the game is on and we are going to come after you.
We were up here the night before the game with a flip chart, ‘Right lads, you are going to start in a straight line, Jamie on one side, (Henry) Pollock in the other’.
Pollock was absolutely buzzing. I’ve watched the (pre-match) clips back, and he is there licking his lips. There was a bit of intent. We wanted the oldest and the youngest member of the squad on the ends to say, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter whether you are the oldest or the most inexperienced, we are in this together’.
