James Coughlan: 'It’s been a mental few weeks but really exciting'

It’s been quite the sprint in recent weeks for James Coughlan, the new director of rugby at the freshly taken over Biarritz. The 2024/25 Pro D2 season gets going next weekend, with Olympique pencilled in for a Friday night home clash versus Valence Romans, and getting organised has been a rush at the second-tier strugglers hoping for an uptick in fortunes now that the troubled Louis-Vincent Gave era has ended and fresh blood is in control.

Former Biarritz players Shaun Hegarty, Flip van der Merwe and Marc Baget are the public face of the secretive investor group who have quietly done its business in the background since securing the deeds in May.

Last season was an ordeal fraught with relegation fears. In the end, the Basque club that basked in winning three Top 14 titles in five seasons (2002, 2005 and 2006) and competing in two European Cup finals (2006 and 2010) just about escaped falling into the third-tier Nationale.

They finished five points clear of the automatically relegated Rouen and just two above Montauban, who squeezed by Narbonne in a nerve-shredding play-off to preserve their status. Phew.

Coughlan, who ironically had done a top-of-the-year club audit at the behest of the now surplus Biarritz rugby boss Matthew Clarkin, was officially named sporting director on June 7 with Boris Bouhraoua installed as head coach.

Eleven weeks later, how’s it all going? “It’s just been a mental few weeks trying to get everything ready, but all really exciting,” enthused the Irishman to RugbyPass over a breakfast time call. “It’s been a stressful few weeks but getting there now.”

The last time the 43-year-old former Munster and Pau No8 was in our orbit he was helping Toulon as defence coach to their May 2023 EPCR Challenge Cup final win over Glasgow in Dublin. He quit the following month and re-emerged a year later in charge of the whole shooting match elsewhere in France. What gives?

“It was the right time to take a break,” he explained. “I needed to get my head out of rugby for a while because it was 24 years in a row I hadn’t stopped. I was in contact with Setanta during the year and started the masters in performance coaching and management.

“It just gave me a year of looking at other things, looking at genetics and just re-energising myself because I’d never jumped off the wheel since the day I went in at Munster to the day I finished in Toulon. Basically, I hadn’t stopped. I just needed to lift up the handbrake for a little bit and just get myself back.

“I’d put on weight, wasn’t looking well, wasn’t right. I just needed to get myself back into normal life for a little while, bring the small man to school, do the normal things that other dads got to do that I didn’t. During that time we moved to Biarritz. My missus got a job down here and I was basically a stay-at-home dad for the year doing the masters.

“During the year, I did an audit for Matthew Clarkin, the old Biarritz head guy. So basically when I met Shaun Hegarty and Flip van der Merwe, I had a document ready to go for them because I’d done the work, I already had an insight, so it went from there and it went very quickly. We met on a Friday, went to a match together, met the following Monday, Tuesday and the following Thursday it was done. It was really quick.”

Having shadowed Clarkin for the audit, Coughlan’s sporting director involvement is nuanced differently. “I’m not on the pitch; there’s too big a job. One of the things I saw with Matthew was there was no separation of roles and no clarity between who was doing what within the players.

“So just to have clear roles, I've even moved my office away. Matthew had his office in the same area as the coaching staff; I’ve moved mine away on purpose so there is a physical change of space for players if they come to meet. They know it is something else, it’s not to do with what they are doing on the pitch.

“It was too big a role to be in a position where you are on a pitch putting down cones and organising training sessions as well as trying to plan projects to develop the club, to develop the financial capacity, develop the links with all the clubs in the area, the other federations; it’s too big a role to also concentrate on the rugby.

“I watch a lot of the training sessions, so I speak to the manager myself. Privately we will just chat about rugby, who’s injured, who’s not, who’s performing, who isn’t, and I give my two cents from a distance but would never go in and say, ‘You have to do this!’ That’s not my job.

“You have to have confidence in the people you have around you. Boris is the head coach, he’s the manager, he is the day-to-day and he has a staff around him. Basically, I’m picking up the support and developing the club on a larger scale. It’s more of a global project than just weekend after weekend.

So definitely no team selection involvement? “I put the group around Boris, he picks the team. I’d be looking after recruitment, the contracts, all that kind of stuff. I’d be more of a what’s it called in English, I have it in French and I can’t think of it; squad development. So the age profile, the minutes, how many matches, how many years pro and then putting a mixed group together.

“Pro D2 is made of three fellas: Young players coming through CDFs (development centres) and need game time from the Top 14. You have your Pro D2 players who have had careers in Pro D2. And then you have older players, a bit like myself when I came to France first, who have experienced a higher level and, to add on a few years at the end of their career, will play a couple of years in Pro D2 because there is this natural pause in the season.

“It’s trying to find a balance between all that and then trying to work with the CDF to make sure Biarritz have got a lot of young fellas coming through. That’s a form of economics as well, the indemnities for the players coming through. Who do we keep, who do we look at selling on because the Top 14 is basically using the Pro D2 as a recruitment pool, so we need to be on top of that.

“You get a much greater insight into the business side, how it works with the agents, how it works with the other clubs in relation to the CDFs, in relation to the academy, how clubs use the academies. It’s a completely different insight into the professional game. You are aware of maybe a third of that stuff when you are coaching than when you are actually sitting in the office for the day, it’s a different gig completely. It’s as exciting but in a different way.”

Coughlan insisted the new owners are legit and have provided all the necessary financial guarantees to ensure the long-term future of Biarritz. “There were a couple of sleepless nights for everybody when trying to get everything ready because the rules are strict,” he admitted. “But we got there and we are secure in the league – we just need the results. There is a positive vibe around the club now, so we just need to keep that going.”

It was 2014 when Biarritz – the 2012 Challenge Cup winners – exited the Top 14 and their one-season return in 2021/22 was disastrous as just five of 26 matches were won. They simply weren’t organised to capitalise on a promotion secured via a sudden death penalty kicking competition versus rivals Bayonne, and 11th and 14th place finishes have followed back in the second tier.

Coughlan hopes to stop the rot. “It was a fantastic achievement to get up, it means you have done something special. But sometimes that can be the beginning of the end because rather than concentrating on the club structure and foundations being solid, all your money goes to the pointy end of the pyramid, you go straight back down and have spent too much money in the wrong areas.”

He also gives special praise for the way Hegarty is repairing damaged relations with the local community. “He knows everybody and is doing brilliant work, a politician for want of a better word trying to create these relationships,” he said, adding that the legendary Serge Blanco is also helping to rekindle these lapsed connections.

“We just need to be competitive every week, that’s the objective. The project is three years to stabilise the club and make sure we are a good Pro D2 team and then the next two years after to really attack to get into the Top 14 and be a well-established team. It’s an eight-year plan with a proper infrastructure, a new training centre, a new centre of formation around it, but all that is dependent on week after week so you can’t get ahead of yourself either.

“There is no points (target) or anything like that this year. I’ve an idea in my head but in the last few years the club hasn’t been competitive week in week out. That’s the first thing we need to get right. We need to be horrible to play against and then we will see where we are at.”

Having coached at Provence, Brive and Toulon, getting stuck into a longer-term project has definitely re-energised Coughlan 10 years after he first touched down in France to play for Pau. He never imagined it becoming home but he hopes in time to even have a piece of home in France as an ambition is to somehow reprise the old Biarritz-Munster rivalry (they faced off in four memorable European knockout games in 10 years, including the 2006 decider in Cardiff).

“I only came over for two years, maybe three and see what happens – and that was 10 years ago. That was a jump into the unknown, especially when your last game for Munster is in the Velodrome in Marseille against Toulon and your first game for Pau is up in Massy with a running track around it, like an All-Ireland League stadium with 300 people and a dog watching.

“The jump was a bit of a difference but France is home now. There were times when you were thinking, ‘Will I go home, what will I do?’ I chatted with UCC and I was hemming and hawing but I’m now in a project where I know I’m going to be here for the next three or five years, at least three or five years and hopefully longer unless things go completely pear-shaped.

“The thing is to find a project where you can dig your teeth in and get after it. That’s what I have found here now with a really good staff. We’re young, ambitious men who want to create a special history with Biarritz and when you have that kind of environment, it’s exciting. It gives you a reason to get up in the morning and get in as early as you do.

“But to go back to what you said, did I think when I got on the plane 10 years ago would I still be here? No, I didn’t but life is funny sometimes the way things go. France is home now.”

Why so? “Look, the croissants, the bread, the lifestyle, the beaches, the sun is there. Apart from anything else you have 30 opportunities to work in professional rugby, you don’t have that opportunity in Ireland. You get one shot, one and a half shots if you are lucky with the provinces and there are only those four clubs, only those four jobs, so it’s the availability.

“I did a sort of tour de France after I retired from playing and I’m just looking forward now to spending some proper time in Biarritz, developing the club, instilling a mentality where the club is back to where it used to be, those big European and big Top 14 days. That’s the objective and that’s why I’m here. It’s brilliant.”