The Super Coach On His Way To Help Japan Get Over Eddie Jones

Jamie Joseph is leaving the Highlanders at the end of the year to coach Japan's Brave Blossoms. He has huge boots to fill, taking over from the team's inspirational former leader Eddie Jones. As Scotty Stevenson reports, he's up for the challenge.

He takes up a lot of space, Jamie Joseph, he absorbs the light. It’s his persona more than his physical size, though there's a relationship between the two. Once upon a time he was the enforcer of the All Blacks loose forward trio. Today he is the no-nonsense coach of the Highlanders. He stands tall, shoulders back, chin up, but there's nothing overtly threatening about his demeanour. He’s just a proud man, with the laid back confidence of a bloke not to be screwed around with.

It is the Highlanders’ annual awards evening. He is suited, booted, at ease in a room full of players and partners and coaches and sponsors. In two days his team will meet the Chiefs at Forsyth Barr Stadium - the glass house, the green house, or the toast rack, depending on who you talk to - with the New Zealand Super Rugby conference title on the line. Most of the players are standing around sucking back on a beer or two, which is entirely acceptable behaviour. It is Dunedin after all, the home of Speight’s, the land of “Good on ya mate.”

They’re a good bunch, the Highlanders, as frat house as a professional rugby team gets these days. They may have won the Super Rugby title last year but success has not altered their outlook on life. They enjoy each other’s company, share the same off-piste southern humour, rip the piss out of everyone. And have a beer. They also work hard, for their coach and for the team. There are no dull boys here. They work, and they play.

Assistant coach Tony Brown, who next year will step into the head coaching role, has a saying: “Beers taste better when you win.” This is a man who, famously, once had a Super Rugby final named for him - ‘The Party at Tony Brown’s Place’, they called it. The Crusaders crashed that party.

That was a long time ago now, last century even. It’s a different era now, a different game, but the hallmarks of those late-90’s Highlanders teams - chaotic collections of cult heroes and hard grafters, augmented by a handful of genuine rugby superstars - remain. The difference today is that, under Jamie Joseph, the Highlanders have found away to bottle the lightning.

It’s been six seasons since Jamie Joseph was appointed Highlanders coach. He walked into an organisation back in 2011 that had an awful lot of heart but very little soul. The team had been the whipping boys of Super Rugby for years. Good men, copping a beating. They worked out of a derelict gymnasium next to the University Oval and they felt like an afterthought.

Press conferences at the Highlanders were small affairs; a couple of local Newspaper men (well-worn, struggling for an angle) and, very occasionally, a network television crew would be about it. Their results matched the interest level from fans. Sporadic, would be one word to use. There were even calls to cut them from the competition.

Jamie Joseph walked into that environment. Marched in, really. He had told New Zealand Rugby that if they thought he was the best man for the job they should just appoint him rather than piss about with interview processes. He got the job. Then, almost immediately, he set about thrashing the living daylights out of his team. Within weeks of the new season, every story emanating from within the Highlanders camp was one of horror and pain and endless fitness sessions. There was a new sheriff in town. He wasn’t universally popular either.

Players who had been coached by Joseph in Wellington and who had heard the rumours about the new regime in Dunedin (the New Zealand player grapevine is nothing if not efficient) laughed among themselves - giggly, chuckling, evil, "could have warned you" laughs, too. Those who bore the brunt of Joseph’s new methods weren’t laughing. He said at the time that he needed the team to be fit. “You can’t win this competition unless you are conditioned to win the competition,” he told me once, many years ago.

It should not have come as a surprise that Joseph was demanding. He had been coached by Laurie Mains, the former All Black and All Blacks coach whose pre-Rugby World Cup training camp in 1995 is still spoken about with a mix of horror and awe by the men who were forced to endure it. They would train until they were near knackered and then came the three words none of them wanted to hear: “On the line.”

There was Mains, and there was Gordon Hunter, the one-eyed Dunedin detective who may be the most adored coach in Otago history, and there was Tony Gilbert, too. These are the men who turned Jamie Joseph into a player, made him “an Otago man” as he likes to call himself. These are the men upon whose foundations Jamie Joseph has built his own Highlanders empire.

There were hard lessons along the way. In 2013, his third season in charge, he ostensibly tried to buy a title. Andrew Hore returned home after falling out with Hurricanes coach Mark Hammett and with Hore came fellow All Blacks front-rower Tony Woodcock. Ma’a Nonu arrived, he too falling foul of Hammett’s Hurricanes clean out. All of a sudden the Highlanders were stacked with big name players.

I sat with Jamie Joseph at the start of that season, at a team building day at a rifle range (of course) and he said to me, “if we don’t make the playoffs, I will be very disappointed.” He would finish the season very disappointed, indeed. The move to bring in the big guns backfired spectacularly, but in a sense it did lay the ground work for what would become Joseph’s greatest contribution to the Highlanders: the transitioning from a team overly-reliant on home grown traditionalism to one that openly courted players from all over the country.

In 2014, with the open arms approach in action, there were signs the Highlanders were on the rise. Aaron Smith and Ben Smith had positioned themselves as the pillars of the side while others, such as Nasi Manu and Elliot Dixon, John Hardie and Joe Wheeler, were beginning to impose themselves on games. It was as if a little bit of Jamie Joseph has begun to rub off on the pack, which had always been willing but which was now becoming increasingly uncompromising.

The Highlanders began to get the results, finishing the regular season sixth and claiming the play off spot Joseph had wanted the year before. They travelled to Durban where they were defeated by the Sharks, 31-27. It wasn’t the fairy tale, but it was a long way from the nightmare. There was belief in the side borne of the fact that the Highlanders had been dubbed the ‘mongrel’ team of Super Rugby, a bagful of off-cuts and discards from other regions who had been drawn to Dunedin and who prided themselves on the "battler" tag.

“We don’t talk about battlers around here anymore,” Jamie Joseph told me the following season. “That’s not who we are.” We were sitting in the stands, under the roof of Forsyth Barr Stadium with the opening game of the 2015 season just one week away. Ox Eathorne, the erstwhile groundskeeper, was busy mowing the field. By the end of the season, the Highlanders would have been beaten on that field just twice, and would go on to defeat the Chiefs, Waratahs and Hurricanes in the finals series.

After the final in Wellington, after Elliot Dixon had scored a try by somehow running through the Hurricanes forward pack, after Marty Banks casually slotted a late dropped goal, after Nasi Manu (“Nacho Nacho Man” they sung in his honour) had lifted the trophy, Jamie Joseph sat quietly in an armchair on the mezzanine floor of the Intercontinental Hotel in Wellington while the team celebrations reverberated around the room. He sipped on a glass of champagne, and stabbed a fork at pieces of plump orange kina in a punnet on the coffee table in front of him.

A year later, Jamie Joseph is standing in front of his team presenting a giant claymore sword to hooker Ash Dixon who has just been named “Highlander Man”. It is the club’s highest honour, and goes, says Jamie, “not necessarily to the best player in the team, but to the player who best personifies the values of the team.” That’s the whole thing about the Highlanders under Jamie Joseph - they have the world’s best halfback, and arguably the world’s best fullback, and all the awards are instead won by a veteran hooker who has had limited starts, and an unfashionable Otago utility back called Matt Faddes who is playing his debut season.

Faddes is the latest in a long line of unfashionable Highlanders backs - a line that can be traced back through the Richard Buckmans and Phil Burleighs to the Boof Laneys and Tony Browns. Somehow the Highlanders is that one team where these players get to shine.

“They’re a great bunch of boys aren’t they Sumo,” Jamie says to me after the formalities are over, and after he has said what will be the first of a lot of long goodbyes. It’s a statement of fact rather than a question. They are a great bunch of boys. I ask him if he will miss them when he leaves at the end of the season to take the Japan national team job.

“I’ll be back mate,” is his response. “Dunedin is home now.”

Japan is a home away from home, though. Joseph first played in Japan in 1995, a willing participant in the first real wave of New Zealand players - Richard Turner and Kevin Schuler were notable others  — to take professional contracts in Japanese Corporate Rugby. Joseph never lost his connection with Japan and has been back every year to fulfil obligations to the Sanix Blues club. he knows it will be challenging.

“I like the challenge though,” he says. “I loved the challenge of coming here [to the Highlanders] when I did, and there will be similar challenges in Japan. It is a different way of doing business there but there will have to be changes, and I’m keen to make them.”

The Highlanders will head back to the playoffs next week for the third straight season. Their final regular season game against the Chiefs is a sell out. It is the club’s second regular season sell out of the year. It is the first time that has ever happened. Under Jamie Joseph’s stewardship, the Highlanders have won a title, promoted six players to the national side, and become one of the most admired teams in Super Rugby. How does that happen?

Roger Clark, the club CEO, has the answer. “A while back, when various candidates for assistant coaching roles were put before Jamie, he looked at one and immediately said no,” says Clark.

“I asked him why not and he said, ‘There is only room for one bull in this china shop, and that bull is me.’”