It is becoming a game within a game, to the point where only winning the Six Nations title offers fleeting immunity. Welcome to the increasingly febrile world of international rugby coaching. At the start of the tournament, no fewer than three of the teams had new men at the helm. By the end of this weekend there could easily be another vacancy, possibly two. "In this business at the moment it seems like you're one loss away from being under pressure for your job," complained the Ireland coach, Eddie O'Sullivan, at the weekend. "It's easy to sit on one side of a laptop and demand somebody's head on a plate."
Some would say it's even simpler to sit on the other side of a desk and blame the media for your team's inadequacies. There are those in Ireland who reckon O'Sullivan is already a goner, with defeat at Twickenham this Saturday possibly sealing the deal. Brian Ashton, in turn, will come under even more intense fire if England's performances do not improve appreciably. Scotland's Frank Hadden chose to use his triumphant post-match press conference to complain about "all the negativity swirling around" in the build-up to the Calcutta Cup weekend. He even ordered all the newspapers to be removed from his team's hotel, always the hallmark of a coach who is feeling the heat.
Ashton says he doesn't read the papers either. Strange, then, that he generally seems to know precisely what people are saying about him. It was the same with Sir Clive Woodward, who was addicted to the daily photocopied batch of media cuttings which the Rugby Football Union put together. These days there are also blogs, podcasts and video link-ups to be monitored. If someone wants to be rude about a rugby coach, there have never been so many outlets happy to provide the platform. This week it has been the turn of Woodward and Matt Dawson, both previously close colleagues of Ashton, to stick the knife in. Once things turn that personal, the victim needs a thick skin and unshakeable confidence in his ability to survive.
So are the stresses of the job becoming intolerable? Not for Warren Gatland they aren't. He might not want to invite every member of the Welsh press corps around to his house for coffee each morning but he knows the way the world works. Win and you're a national hero, lose and they'll burn effigies of you from Monmouth to Merthyr Tydfil. After more than six years in the Ireland job, O'Sullivan should realise that by now. One defeat may not constitute a crisis but anything less than a 50% return in the championship assuredly is. Home defeats are doubly damaging; going down to Wales at Croke Park is worse than finishing second to France in Paris. Even the lack of an obvious stand-out replacement - Munster's Declan Kidney has ruffled a fair few feathers in Dublin down the years - and the four-year contract he signed before the World Cup will not save Eddie's bacon should they lose badly to England as well.
Ashton's is a more complex case. Those of us who see him regularly have a lot of time for him. He is a mature antidote to the paranoid, monosyllabic breed of coach who sees only hostility in the media and behaves accordingly. He comes across poorly on television but he's more fun in person. The problem, however, is that the scale of the England job sometimes seems to dwarf him. His rugby knowledge and experience are both vast but his appetite for some of the job's fringe aspects is less apparent. He has ideas, firm ones, but somehow they keep getting lost in translation. England still don't have a team manager with any clout and the mix of coaching personnel remains uneasy. Someone in Ashton's position has to provide clarity or, alternatively, employ a second-in-command who does.
He is also being let down by some of his players, not necessarily the other way around. Either way, something is clearly not right. Ashton is more akin to a gifted university lecturer than a go-getting chief executive. That's fine if those under his command need only occasional guidance. Sadly, there seem to be insufficient natural leaders in this England squad capable of working problems out for themselves. Having sat on England's bench without winning a cap, Ashton also struggles to comprehend how international players could be as flat as they looked in Edinburgh. Perhaps they are caught between two stools, keen to attack but unsure whether to risk it given their recent lack of fluency. Ashton knows what is supposed to be happening but he is sitting helplessly up in the stands.
As a result, the final week of the Six Nations feels increasingly like something out of No Country For Old Men. Even when it goes quiet for an hour or two, the sheriff knows in his bones there will be another corpse lying out there in the scrub soon enough. Ashton and O'Sullivan could yet survive into 2009 but the chances of them leading their respective countries to the 2011 World Cup are increasingly remote. The shelf life of an international rugby union coach is getting shorter all the time.
Let me entertain you
An England player asked me recently whether I was bored of writing about sport. "Don't you ever sit there and struggle to think of anything to write?" he asked innocently. Frequently, I said, but it's amazing how a deadline concentrates the mind. There are only two unforgiveable sins in journalism: 1) being dull or repetitive and 2) failing to file. Avoid those calamitous pot-holes and it is possible to scrape some sort of livelihood. One or two cautionary tales are worth heeding: Private Eye once unmasked a hack who phoned over exactly the same 'mood' piece he'd filed from a previous Cup final, the only difference being the clubs' names and the colours of the supporters' scarves. I thought of him as I sat down to write my Scotland v England report and tried to make it subtly different from Murrayfield 2000 and 2006, Croke Park 2007, Cardiff 2005 and 2007, and Paris 2006 and 2007. I'm not bored of writing about rugby but you do suffer endless attacks of deja vu.
Desert storm in a teacup
It's not just England who are struggling for consistency. Particular thanks to the kind correspondent in New Zealand who made the effort to trawl back into cyberspace to dig up a couple of sentences written by some bloke called Kitson last September. The allegation seemed to be that my scepticism in this blog last week about staging 'proper' Test matches in Dubai ran contrary to something I'd posted during the World Cup. Full marks for detective work but let me defend myself. I've never expressed any objections to making inter-hemisphere tours in June and November more meaningful. Yes, I did say that staging the FINAL of a potential new world series-style tournament in a neutral venue like Dubai would be a tempting financial option. To my mind, however, that's very different to Ireland playing South Africa somewhere in the deserts of Arabia in a one-off Test match this European autumn. By all means classify it as an exhibition match but don't try to pretend it's the real thing. It would be like drinking warm Guinness out of a bottle as opposed to sinking a cool pint of the genuine stuff in Dublin. Hope that clears up any misunderstanding.
