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O'Connor to return as Leicester coach
By Iain Strachan
Leicester Tigers have secured the return of Premiership-winning coach Matt O'Connor to Welford Road.
O'Connor, capped once by Australia, guided Leicester to the title in 2013 as head coach under director of rugby Richard Cockerill, having previously worked as both a backline and attack coach for the Tigers.
He won the Pro12 in 2014 after moving to Leinster but was sacked at the end of his second season in charge there, becoming a member of the Queensland Reds and Tonga coaching staff, including a period serving as interim head coach of the Super Rugby team.
The 46-year-old will now be returning to the Premiership, as the incumbent Leicester coach Aaron Mauger prepares to leave after this Saturday's match against Northampton Saints, Cockerill having been sacked in January.
Matt O'Connor is to return to Welford Road as head coach pic.twitter.com/qwZmL4jYx7
— Leicester Tigers (@LeicesterTigers) March 20, 2017
"We are delighted that Matt O'Connor has accepted an offer to return to Welford Road," Tigers chairman Peter Tom said in a statement.
"The club has conducted an exhaustive search to find who we feel is the right person to take the team forward and this brought up the names of a number of potentially very good coaches. One of the most significant factors in our deliberations was experience of the Premiership and what it takes to win the competition.
"Matt has that experience as head coach during a successful period which brought three league titles, an Anglo-Welsh Cup and the club's most recent appearance in the European Cup Final. The team also topped the try-scoring figures in the Premiership four times in that five-year period with Matt in charge of the attack."
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Latest Comments
Soccer on a rugby forum…
“Experience is strongly correlated with age, at least among the managers that I named”…
Slot and Arteta are among the youngest you named. They have the least experience as a manager (6 years each). Espírito Santo and Pep are the oldest and have the most (12 years + each). Pep is pushing 17 years experience, all at elite level. There are plenty around his age that won’t have the same level of experience. Plenty.
The younger breed you mentioned (Arteta in particular) may not coach at elite level beyond the next few years if they continue to not win trophies. Age and experience is not always a nice, steady gradient.
The only trend in English soccer is that managers don’t stay on as long with the same club. Due to the nature of the game and the assumed, immediate performance bounce of replacing them at the first sign of trouble. Knee-jerk style. Test rugby has no clear pattern of that.
Why would you dismiss a paradox? Contradictions are often revealing. Or is that too incoherent?
Go to commentsYou can’t compare the “quality”of competitions till they play against each other … what we do know is that nz teams filled with ABs and ABs can go at it with anyone in the world and these other teams and players are competing so would say the quality is high wouldn’t you? How are you determining that URC or top 14 is higher quality than Super I’m guessing you mean in the quality of players and execution ? Are you just assuming that it is because…. I would say it’s much of a muchness and the only indicator for that is international rugby and that is hella even
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