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Former Scotland international joins Bristol coaching team
By Online Editors
Former Scotland international Alasdair Dickinson has joined Bristol Bears as the club's new scrum coach. Dickinson joins Pat Lam's coaching team on a three-year deal.
Dickinson, who was capped 58 times for Scotland and played in three Rugby World Cups, has worked as a scrum coach with Scotland Women, Scotland U20s and the Scottish Rugby Academies since retiring in 2018.
Dickinson, 36, represented Edinburgh, Gloucester and Sale during a 15-year professional career, making his Scotland debut against New Zealand in 2007.
Bristol's Director of Rugby Pat Lam said: "After a lengthy and thorough process, we’re delighted to bring Alasdair onboard as the standout candidate for the scrum coach role.
"Alasdair is a young coach with huge ability and a hunger to develop himself into a world class scrum coach. He’s played at the very highest level and has a detailed understanding of the set piece and how it can be a destructive weapon for the team.
"We’re proud of the progress we have made with our set piece and our ambition is to have the most dominant scrum in the Gallagher Premiership."
Dickinson said: "The opportunity to join a club like Bristol is massive for me and I’m grateful to Pat for putting his faith in me.
"I’ve been impressed by the environment and vision of the Bears and clearly everything is in place for the club to push forward over the next few years.
"I have ambitions to be world class in my field and have already learned so much during my time coaching with Scotland.
"The quality of the Bears forward unit – with a blend of experience and really exciting young players – is outstanding and I’m looking forward to working with the group, continuing to develop that pack mentality and helping to take Bears to the next level."
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Latest Comments
Yeah me too. I think the Welsh have it in them to make it a contest in the first half. Give the boks' second stringers a headache. Disrupting lineouts is one area the welsh could cause problems. Bok lineouts have been subpar.
And then fronting up in the collisions and at the rucks. If the boks get the ascendancy there too early, it could be a hiding. Jaden hendrikse had a tough game against the Scots - who were very good at disrupting the boks flow. The welsh would have taken note of this i'm sure.
But the bok bench will finish the welsh off i'm afraid.
Go to commentsYes, certainly. As an AB fan happy to be included in that top 3 of "matches that are routinely decided by one score" now, we were well outside that for a few years.
They have not had enough games yet. You can't undo so many poor years just like that. Asking for miracles like SA losing is not the way to get back to number 1.
They might get there as those bad years filter out of the rankings but it's guarenteed to be great fun going back and forth with SA once that happens.
Admittedly Foster only really had one bad year (21/22 season), but that's more likely because COVID stopped a lot of tough games from being played, and effected the other countries they did play far more than themselves.
A real shame we both don't get to see it unfold first with our regions teams in SR!
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