Why Jacques Nienaber believes club rugby is ‘years ahead of international rugby’ and his World Cup prediction on Andy Farrell’s Ireland
Jacques Nienaber at work with Leinster and, inset, signing off at the Springboks with Siya Kolisi after the 2023 Rugby World Cup final win
Ex-Springboks boss Jacques Nienaber has explained why he believes club rugby is way ahead of international level when it comes to new developments in the game.
After working in the Test arena from 2018 to 2023, helping South Africa win back-to-back Rugby World Cups, Nienaber is heading into his fourth season as Leinster senior coach.
Before flying out to South Africa for the club’s upcoming two United Rugby Championship matches versus the Lions in Johannesburg on September 26 and the Sharks in Durban on October 3, Nienaber has spoken about the enduring attractions of his work in the club game compared to what he experienced at Test level.
Outlining his current preference for club scene employment rather than an international job, he told the Bank of Ireland Roadshow Series with Off The Ball that aside from the schedule better suiting his family life, he also reckoned that the club game was way ahead of international rugby in terms of its innovation.
“It sounds crazy…”
“When I came over here (to Dublin), it was (because) I wanted to spend more time with my family,” he began, explaining why he put club ahead of country after the 2023 finals in France. “It sounds crazy because you come to a club environment where you have a lot more games than international games.
“But with the Springboks you are on average between 150 and 170 nights not in your bed because they don’t have a home base, so they travel a lot. With Leinster, we are probably 50 days not in our own beds. You do a lot of travelling but you are home a lot, so that was nice.
“Working with Munster (from 2016-2018), I mean, what’s not attractive of Leinster? So it was a no-brainer for me to come over here. Look, it’s lovely. To come back to the club (scene), what is not to like? You work with unbelievable players.
“I was always nervous that if I left (the Springboks), I wanted to go back to club rugby because I feel club rugby is probably about two years or three years ahead of international rugby, just purely because you can be a little bit more creative.
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“There’s only 13 Test matches in an international calendar where you play 30 without the warm-up games in club games. So, if you want to design new systems, new plans, new stuff, you get tested a lot more at club level and club coaches are a lot bolder.
“When you play an international Test, the country loses and it’s written in history. Every game is important for Leinster but if you play a game in the pool stages, only when you get to knockouts is it becoming part of history.
“So yeah, that was the beauty and you get everything at Leinster; you get international players. I was always nervous that if I go back to club, you don’t get the demands of international players. They demand perfection, they demand good delivery, they demand good plans, so the demands on coaches are quite high, but Leinster gives that too.
“You get to coach club, you get to work with great people, you get challenged by players in a good way, you get challenged by Leinster; I didn’t know the demand for performance is not less than if you coach a country. The demands are quite high, which is brilliant.”
Asked for examples of why the club game is ahead of the international curve, Nienaber added: “I would probably say a lot of stuff you are seeing is probably about six months, seven months in club rugby in the kicking game; that’s busy integrating or finding its way into club rugby. The kicking game especially, the contestable kicking game and finding ways and means to get around that. So that’s one of the few things.
“Quick tap plays are something that is becoming more common where teams won’t necessarily kick to and take a lineout. So that’s becoming more common in international level. If you go back to the previous World Cup, yes, you may find five in a whole World Cup where it’s something that’s more and more common now.”
The Springboks, Nienaber’s former team, last weekend consolidated their favouritism to win next year’s World Cup by completing a 3-1 series victory over the All Blacks in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry.
The consensus is that those two countries are now well clear of the other countries, but Nienaber offered hope that the third-ranked Ireland can still be a genuine contender to win the World Cup despite last season’s heavy losses to South Africa and New Zealand.
“When I came to Munster in 2016, Andy Farrell had just become the (Irish) defence coach and Joe Schmidt sent a group of people who interviewed me and Rassie (Erasmus) on the state of what we think.
“It was about six or eight weeks after we arrived in Ireland and we were blown away by the skill levels and the amount of information that players can consume here and absorb, and how transferable the lecture room can become to what you do on the pitch. It was different to what we were used to.
“The last thing that I did for South Africa before then was I coached the series against Ireland in South Africa when Ireland won their first game on South African soil in 2016. I don’t know what the ranking was of Ireland back then, but we couldn’t see why Ireland couldn’t be consistently one of the top three teams in the world with what we saw – and it’s still the same.
“Ireland’s still number three in the world, and it’s so close. I looked at the world rankings before I came here (to do this interview) because I thought somebody would ask me about it, but they are number three in the world and things can change.
“When Rassie and I left here in 2018, South Africa was ranked eighth in the world before the 2019 World Cup. So yes, a lot of things can happen. I don’t think people must read too much into where teams are now. A lot of things are going to happen until the World Cup still.”
