Springboks coach ‘headhunted’ by Rassie Erasmus could hold the key to Greatest Rivalry victory over All Blacks
Springboks defence coach Jerry Flannery praised by ex-Harlequins colleague Adam Jones.
A former Arsenal coach who once persuaded Lukas Podolski, Mesut Ožul and Santi Cazorla to dress in full Munster rugby kit could hold the key to the outcome of the Greatest Rivalry series.
Jerry Flannery is the Springboks defence coach Rassie Erasmus credited with last week’s narrow win over Argentina; the ex-Ireland hooker is so dedicated to his craft he wrote the thesis for his Master’s degree on the science of lineout throwing.
On Saturday week the 47-year-old faces his toughest test to date when South Africa and New Zealand lock horns at Ellis Park. Flannery is tasked with neutralising the attacking threat posed by the tourists.
Early life
We know Flannery was born in Galway, started rugby life at Connacht before moving to his beloved Munster, where he made his name, winning two European Cups and 41 Ireland caps. Wikipedia tells us all that.
But what of the man behind the public figure? What drives Flannery and what is it about him that convinces Erasmus he has the wherewithal to shut down a Kiwi team fresh from putting 74 points on Ireland and France in the Nations Championship?
“Let me tell you a little about Fla,” says Adam ‘Bomb’ Jones, the Wales and Lions prop who coached alongside Flannery at Harlequins, steering the Londoners to Gallagher Premiership glory in 2021.
“The first thing he ever said to me was in a weights session. Literally, his opening gambit was that he always thought the Welsh boys were really strong in the gym, but we weren’t actually as strong as Gats [Warren Gatland] made out.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I thought.
“Some time later he and his partner (now wife), Katy, invited us round to his for an Indian takeaway. We had been there a while and were waiting to eat and he was still on his laptop, looking through lineouts.
“That’s Fla. Once he has an idea he is like a dog with a bone. His work ethic is unreal. He’ll leave no stone unturned, complete attention to detail around the smallest bits and bobs.
“He’d spend crazy hours working. We ended up coming up with a codeword whenever it was becoming too much. It was his idea – ‘whenever I start to talk s**t’ – just a heads-up that he was carrying on too much. I’d say this word and he’d look at me and stop.”
Flannery retired from playing in March 2012 having been injured playing for Ireland at the World Cup in New Zealand the previous autumn.
He started a Master’s degree in sports performance at the University of Limerick and in July 2013 joined Arsenal on a work placement as an academy strength and conditioning coach.
“Rugby and football are very different sports,” he told arsenal.com at the time. “The skill element is so much harder in football that the physical development probably hasn’t been as strong in the past, whereas in rugby it’s much stronger.
“You can’t take what fits in rugby and take it to football. You can apply certain aspects of that. Some of the structures that have been put together in rugby work well and it’s about trying to get those and taking the players at a young age, making sure they are functionally confident and developing all the way through to ensure they are the best athletes they can be.
“Any player that comes in here is of a certain skill level already if he’s good enough to be at Arsenal Football Club. We just want to make them robust and keep them on the field.”
It was around this time that Flannery, comparing his own footballing ability to “kind of like a (fellow Munsterman) Roy Keane”, persuaded three of Arsenal’s biggest stars to dress in the colours of his beloved province and pose with the good luck message ‘G’wan Munster’.
Not surprisingly, Flannery’s next stop was Thomond Park, where he spent six years first as scrum, then forwards coach. It was there he came across Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber, who joined in 2016 as director of rugby and defence coach respectively.
When Erasmus returned home a year later to become South Africa’s director of rugby he had seen enough of Flannery to know that one day he wanted their paths to cross again.
He kept close tabs on him as he moved to England in 2020 and joined Harlequins during lockdown; admiring the way Flannery took hold of a struggling team and within half a season helped transform it into Premiership champions.
“To be honest, he came across as I would expect, given the way Paul O’Connell and Ronan O’Gara did it,” says Jones, who is still at the club. “In all three of them you can still clearly see that Munster DNA: the hard work, attention to detail, technical excellence.
“Fla was doing the lineouts and when Gussie left in January of that season he took over the defence system, doubling his workload. He’d be there every night, until eight or nine o’clock.
“How driven was he? Well, I remember we were drawn to play Munster in the Champions Cup in Fla’s first season. It was obviously a big game for him, going back to Thomond.
Marchant view
“Joe Marchant had been given the weekend off to go to a wedding. Fla couldn’t get his head around this. It was completely alien to him, because Munster is all about the European Cup and we were giving March a weekend off.
“Comfortably three weeks before, he was constantly saying, ‘we need to pick Marchant’. In the end Gussie had enough, told him he was doing his head in and would he please just stop talking!”
Jones smiles as he remembers some of Flannery’s team talks and team meetings which, he says, have gone down in Quins history.
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“He won’t mind me saying that he’s got these little beady eyes which sink into his head a bit when he gets emotional!” the Welshman laughs. “That, and his strong Limerick accent, adds to the impact.
“Every now and again, there’d be a few grumblings from the senior players, because Fla was very headstrong with his opinion.
“But the fact the guy was headhunted by Rassie, one of the greatest rugby coaches ever, says it all. He knows his stuff.”
