Let’s not rush to judgment over the attributes needed to make a good coach.
‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like” is the philistine’s manifesto, the smugly defiant catch-cry of the lowbrow who scorns modernist masterpieces because 
they’re “not in perspective”, they “don’t make sense” or they’re “too depressing – who’d want that hanging in their lounge?”
The same breezy refusal to allow ignorance to be an obstacle to strident certainty is evident in the constant disputes over who is and isn’t a good coach.
As former All Black Jeff Wilson put it in his autobiography: “I would doubt that any of the detractors of coaches such as John Hart and Laurie Mains had ever met either of them, had ever seen them coach a team at training, or ever heard them speak to players.”
As conjecture mounts over who will be All Blacks coach presumptive Steve Hansen’s assistants, candidates are damned or endorsed by assertion rather than analysis. This rush to judgment has two propellants, the first being results: good coaches win, bad coaches don’t; that’s all there is to it.
This method of evaluation is based on the manifestly silly assumption that coaches are like sailors in regattas in which the contestants sail identical yachts: on an equal footing in terms of resources and the talent at their disposal (or “cattle” as rugby coaches sometimes refer to their playing rosters; the movie director Alfred Hitchcock applied the same term to actors) and having to contend with the same conditions and opponents.
The second is playing records, the assumption here being that good players make good coaches.
The rise and fall of Martin Johnson should have put paid to this illusion once and for all. One of England’s greatest players and captains, Johnson was put in charge of his country’s national team despite not having coached a pub side, let alone a club. Among the misapprehensions that gave rise to this decision was that a famously taciturn leader by example could instantly acquire the man management and communication skills to organise, unify and motivate players whom he was sending, as opposed to leading, into battle.
New Zealanders should grasp more readily than most that playing and coaching are very different things. Of the last five All Blacks coaches, only Wayne Smith had a significant international career; Graham Henry, whom history seems likely to elevate above nearly all his predecessors, didn’t even play first-class rugby.
The examples of great players who have coached at a high level – the likes of Colin Meads, Graham Mourie and Wayne Shelford – tend to lead to the same conclusion from the opposite direction.
Of the current New Zealand Super 15 coaches, four are ex-All Blacks. The exception, the Chiefs’ Dave Rennie, has the most impressive record of achievement – notably three World under 20 championships – and is the only one following the Henry career path of working your way up from the grassroots, as opposed to being fast-tracked by the apparatchiks at the New Zealand Rugby Union.
Former Australian coach Alan Jones had no rugby background to speak of. Appointed on the basis of having coached a high school first XV and a Sydney club side for a season apiece (both won their respective competitions), he proceeded to guide the Wallabies to a grand slam in the UK and Ireland and a series win in New Zealand.
Since World War II only two touring teams have won full test series here: Jones’s 1986 Wallabies and the 1971 British Lions coached by Carwyn James. Jones and James had much in common: both were schoolteachers who became broadcasters; both were politically engaged to the point of standing for parliament, Jones in the conservative cause and James on behalf of Plaid Cymru, the left-wing Welsh nationalist party; both were widely thought to be gay.
Many pundits, particularly in the UK, regard James, who died in somewhat mysterious circumstances in an Amsterdam hotel in 1983 aged 53, as the game’s greatest coach. One suspects, however, that the blowhards who claim to know who can and who can’t coach would regard his political and alleged sexual orientation as compelling disqualifications.