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'If you want security you'd never be a rugby coach' - Chris Boyd opens up about 'ruthless' northern hemisphere
By Online Editors
Northampton head coach Chris Boyd has shed light into the ruthless nature of coaching in the northern hemisphere.
The man who lead the Hurricanes to their maiden Super Rugby title in 2016 referenced Australian coach Matt O'Connor, who was sacked by Leicester just one match into the 2018 Premiership.
"I can't understand how a board can have an opinion of somebody and then after one week it changes significantly enough that they need to act," Boyd told Liam Napier from The New Zealand Herald. "With due respect to Matt, he was probably a dead man walking. They were probably just waiting to get the opportunity.
"If they felt like that, I don't understand why they didn't act like that in the offseason."
The demand for instant results in Europe offers a different dynamic to coaching elsewhere.
"It's a ruthless place," Boyd said. "If you get it right it's great, and if you don't then you go and that's how it is.
"I 100 per cent agree with it - that's the nature of the beast. There's a demand here for performance. We're employed by our clubs which are often owned by private individuals where often in New Zealand we're employed by NZ Rugby."
Boyd is aware that seeing out his three-year contract with Northampton isn't guaranteed.
"If I'm spectacularly unsuccessful here and I go that's because I haven't got the results that I was employed to get and I understand that so be it.
"A contract protects you from things you can't control around the whims of boards and owners.
"If you want security you'd never be a rugby coach."
Boyd's Saints are currently 10th on the Premiership table with just three wins from their nine league fixtures. Boyd began coaching in 2003 and and joined Northampton in 2018 after three years at the helm of the Hurricanes.
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That's really stupidly pedantic. Let's say the gods had smiled on us, and we were playing Ireland in Belfast on this trip. Then you'd be happy to accept it as a tour of the UK. But they're not going to Australia, or Peru, or the Philippines, they're going to the UK. If they had a match in Paris it would be fair to call it the "end-of-year European tour". I think your issue has less to do with the definition of the United Kingdom, and is more about what is meant by the word "tour". By your definition of the word, a road trip starting in Marseilles, tootling through the Massif Central and cruising down to pop in at La Rochelle, then heading north to Cherbourg, moving along the coast to imagine what it was like on the beach at Dunkirk, cutting east to Strasbourg and ending in Lyon cannot be called a "tour of France" because there's no visit to St. Tropez, or the Louvre, or Martinique in the Caribbean.
Go to commentsJust thought for a moment you might have gathered some commonsense from a southerner or a NZer and shut up. But no, idiots aren't smart enough to realise they are idiots.
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